New World of Warcraft expansion has fans buzzing

The launch of a new World of Warcraft expansion has excited players, but things got off to a rocky start when the servers struggled

A new expansion for World of Warcraft, subtitled Dragonflight, has just arrived, with customisable dragons that can be ridden, and a brand-new race/class combo, but players have been poking fun at the expansion’s rocky launch.

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is one of the biggest expansions the game has ever seen, with an entire new continent for players to explore called the Dragon Isles. The Dragon Isles contains five zones, and developer Blizzard says that some of these are the largest by area in the history of the game.

Dragonflight also comes with a new feature called Dragonriding, which as the name suggests allows players to ride atop flying dragons as they explore the Dragon Isles, compete in time trials, and race against other players. There are four different dragons, called drakes in-game, to unlock throughout the expansion, and drakes can be customised with different colours and skills.

The new race/class combo, the dracthyr Evoker, is the first ranged damage class added to the game in 18 years. Picture: Blizzard Entertainment

The expansion also overhauls a bunch of different aspects of the experience, including a new talent tree system for players to pick abilities from, a redesigned user interface made for modern displays, and enhanced professions, which let players become a master crafter or gatherer.

Naturally, the World of Warcraft community is incredibly excited about all of the new content, with the game’s subreddit having been flooded with excited players in the lead-up to launch. Unfortunately that excitement turned a little bit sour once the expansion went live, as players discovered they couldn’t access the new content, and in some cases couldn’t access the game at all.

Fans on the game’s subreddit posted a number of frustrated posts claiming they couldn’t access the boat that would take them to the Dragon Isles as the game’s servers struggled with the load. That frustration quickly turned to humour, however, as the community found time to laugh and post memes about the issues.

The World of Warcraft subreddit might get frustrated from time to time, but they tend to meet their frustrations with humour. Picture: Reddit

Thankfully, the server issues seem to be sorted now, and players have been able to start exploring the massive new realm. The World of Warcraft subreddit is significantly quieter now, but that’s probably just because all of its users are too busy finally playing Dragonflight instead.

GLHF recently got the chance to interview the lead designer and lead combat systems designer for the expansion, and went over all the new features for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. Lead combat systems designer Brian Holinka said at the time that the team didn’t want to “mess with a good thing”, saying that all the changes to characters and gameplay were designed not to interfere with the core gameplay loop.

Players also recently discovered there was a game trick that earns Overwatch 2 skins faster, by playing World of Warcraft instead. Players found that they could earn Gold in World of Warcraft, and then trade them for “WoW Tokens”. These tokens can then be cashed out on the Battle.net store, where the resulting credit can be used on Overwatch 2 skins.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.