BlizzCon 2013 started today, and Blizzard has kicked off the massive event with a massive announcement. The MMORPG juggernaut’s fifth expansion, World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, will take players to the world of Draenor to battle alongside legendary Warcraft heroes. The expansion is set to take players back in time to face the likes of Grommash Hellscream, Blackhand, and Ner’zhul when they were at their most fearsome. More than just the setting, World of Warcraft‘s fifth expansion will, of course, come with all of the trappings of an expansion including new dungeons, raids, a new level cap, and much more. Perhaps the most interesting addition is that of the Garrison, which will be a personal base of operations for players to explore and expand throughout the expansion.
The level cap has come quite a way from the level 60 cap of vanilla WoW. And reaching the new level 100 from level 1 can be quite a daunting task, so Blizzard has added the option to instantly boost one character to level 90. The expansion will also add questing improvements designed to encourage exploration. This is presumably done to make the quests less linear. Another element to the expansion will be fully revamped player character models and animations for many of the older races, so that the vanilla races such as humans and orcs will be on par visually with the newer races from previous expansions.
BlizzCon attendees are currently able to play the expansion on the show floor, though there’s no official word on when the expansion will be released. But BlizzCon will continue through tomorrow, so there will surely be plenty of new announcements regarding Blizzard’s future projects.
