Nobody saw World of Warcraft's new update coming: a 60-player pirate MMO battle royale with its own servers and optional PvP

Mar. 19, 2024

This has been seven months in the making for WoW players

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World of Warcraft players are finally getting the pirate-themed content they’ve been craving for months, but it’s arriving as a 60-player battle royale mode.

Take a look at the responses to the announcement above, and you’ll see that basically no one could’ve predicted this. “No data mining spoiling they’re just releasing it themselves let’s goooo,” reads one tweet, while another adds, “You gotta be kidding us, subscribing back!” A lot of people are genuinely surprised this didn’t leak ahead of the announcement.

Speaking of, Blizzard’s lead developers delve further into Plunderstorm in the video below. Firstly, yes, this is WoW’s development team getting experimental, and letting you customize your character between every match, so you’re also effectively experimenting with an attack-focused build and class. Since you’re on your own against 59 other players, that makes perfect sense.

In fact, the core of the mode is actually plundering, so much so that you could call the opening few minutes of the mode a PvE scenario rather than a PvP one, because you’ll be primarily killing demons to unlock new abilities. You don’t even have to be the last person standing to earn rewards - just dropping in and completing “starter quests” will net you event-specific loot.

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Today’s reveal of Plunderstorm has brought the entire thing full-circle, with pirates finally, at long last, surfacing in World of Warcraft later today. Blizzard’s developers make sure to mention in the video above that they’re keen to “iterate” on Plunderstorm’s battle royale mode, so they’re definitely looking to make any improvements they can for the future.

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