The good times will soon be among us, as we don’t have long to wait for a big angry green fella called Gurktug to be friends with just a regular average joe called Normalguy Everyman in World of Warcraft.
We’ve known for a few months now that Blizzard, after 17 long years of no cross-race bestiedom, is finally deciding to let Gnomeo & Juliet fight some fucked up lizard with, specifically, the Goblin from Frogger: The Great Quest.
Now, thanks to some content update notes from Blizzard Entertainment, we know that this friendship between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ will be possible from May 31st 2022, which is just next week! Wahoo!
Of course, the news doesn’t come without some exceptions. The patch notes detail the instances of cross-faction play as follows:
- Players are now able to directly invite members of the opposite faction to a party if you have a BattleTag or Real ID friendship, or if you are members of a cross-faction WoW Community.
- Premade Groups in the Group Finder listings for Mythic dungeons, raids, or rated arena/RBGs are now open to applicants of both factions, though the group leader may choose to restrict the listing to same-faction applicants if they so choose.
- WoW Communities now have the option to be cross-faction, while Guilds will remain single-faction.
- Random matchmade activities like Heroic dungeons, Skirmishes, or Random Battlegrounds will all remain same-faction.
- The following instances are not cross-faction:
- Trial of the Champion
- Trial of the Crusader
- Vault of Archavon
- Icecrown Citadel
- Baradin Hold
- Siege of Boralus
- Battle of Dazar’alor
- Darkmaul Citadel (Exile’s Reach dungeon)
So yeah, basically we can’t simply have it all. It’s hard to say concretely why they’re doing this now after not allowing for cross-faction play forever, but this and the whole ‘you can shift into How To Train Your Dragon mode now‘ makes me feel like they are throwing anything they can at the game to try and get people back into playing it.
That’s not to say that World of Warcraft is truly in its flop era, but the game has been going for almost 18 years now. Unless you truly go goblin mode and give people what they’ve been asking for for years, they’re going to throw up a deuces and bail.
The Shadowlands 9.2.5 content update will arrive for World of Warcraft on May 31st, 2022.
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