Blizzard still expects WoW: Shadowlands to be released this year, Ion Hazzikostas says

Blizzard’s development team has continued to use Twitch as a platform to tell fans about its plans for the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. And today, WoW’s lead dev, Ion Hazzikostas, took questions from French streamers Zoltan and Cinderys.

The compilation of questions touched on numerous topics, but the gist of Hazzikostas’ responses was that everything is going as planned. Among other things, Hazzikostas reaffirmed that the expansion will be coming out and said that we shouldn’t believe everything we see from data miners.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced employees to work from home, Hazzikostas told viewers that the company is still planning to release Shadowlands later this year. Though there was an adjustment period of about a week for the development team, working from home is now viable enough for them to maintain their original deadline for the game.

Meanwhile, as data-mining websites like wowhead.com continue to find character models and appearances for the upcoming expansion, Hazzikostas warned fans that not everything they see from data mining will be in the game.

He said that some of the character customization options, like blood elves with blue eyes, are simply a part of a template that the developers use to make characters and won’t be in the game.

This is particularly notable because of recent character models that were data mined earlier in the month showing traditionally light-skinned races, like blood elves, with black skin—something that doesn’t necessarily follow the traditional lore of WoW.

Additionally, Cinderys asked about some non-Shadowlands related news. After questionnaires surfaced earlier this month asking players for their opinions on a Classic edition of The Burning Crusade, the streamer was curious to know if Blizzard had anything it could confirm about a potential proliferation of legacy content.

Without saying anything definitive, Hazzikostas said that because of the success of Classic, it would be foolish of them to not at least entertain the idea of expanding into a Classic version of TBC. Though he didn’t confirm the project, he effectively told fans that in all likelihood we should be expecting one assuming Classic continues to do as well as it already has.

To watch the entire hour-long interview, you can go to Zoltan’s Twitch channel.