WoW: Shadowlands New Release Date Announced After Delay

If you keep up with all the various happenings in regards to World of Warcraft, you’re likely painfully aware that its eighth expansion pack was originally scheduled to release on October 26th, 2020. If you’re disappointed by the fact that things didn’t work out that way, I’m right there with you. In fact, you may have picked up on my slight heartbreak in my initial report on Shadowlands’ delay earlier this month. However, there has since been a new development as to when the expansion might see the light of day.

According to a blog post published by John Hight, the man tasked with publicly announcing Blizzard’s decision to delay Shadowlands in the first place, the expansion has apparently been polished enough to be presented to the masses. The expansion is now reportedly scheduled to release on Monday, November 23rd, 2020 on North American servers based on Blizzard’s “global release” schedule.

This schedule was implemented to ensure that everyone gets to experience the new content at roughly the same time no matter where on the globe they call home. The expansion will release at around 3pm Pacific time on November 23rd in North America, which roughly equates to the stroke of midnight CET on November 24th in Europe. You can see several more scheduled release times in the Blizzard-provided image below.

Having said all that, I can’t help but strongly emphasize that until the expansion is actually out, there’s always the chance that Shadowlands could be delayed again. My good friend and colleague, Mike, recently spoke at some length about the delaying of prominent games as of late. I hate to say this, but considering the number of times Cyberpunk 2077 and titles like it have been delayed thus far, I can see no guarantees that the same won’t happen with World of Warcraft’s newest expansion.

To conclude this article with a bit of a fun fact, those of you keeping score at home may notice that the date November 23rd sounds familiar in this context. That’s because, provided there are no further hiccups in this new expansion pack’s development, Shadowlands will release on the sixteenth anniversary of the day the original World of Warcraft reached store shelves. I should also mention that the Scourge invasion and everything that’s planned to come alongside it will begin on Tuesday, November 10th, 2020. This will presumably happen after scheduled maintenance concludes for that day.