Shadowlands Closed Alpha Invites Coming This Week

It's happening!

Blizzard has announced that the closed Alpha for Shadowlands will be starting this week.

Invites are likely to be rare, and the build we'll be looking at will be far from complete. They've announced that the Alliance version of Bastion, the zone, will be available to test, as well as the Bastion level-up dungeon, the Necrotic Wake.

I'm very excited that we'll finally be able to start getting a look at Shadowlands, as it's an expansion I'm really looking forward to.

The early stages of these tests are always very rough, though, so while it'll be great to get a sense of story and something of the expansion's narrative, it's also important to take everything we get with a grain of salt.

This is an Alpha, rather than a Beta, which I think is meant to imply that it will be very rough (missing textures, holes in the world one can fall through, etc.) The Alpha is there to make sure that the new expansion doesn't immediately explode. They have forewarned us that when the Beta starts, they will wipe all existing characters.

That said, I'm hoping they will start testing new systems as soon as possible. I think one of the big reasons Azerite Armor turned out as poorly as it did was that they didn't actually get the system working until the last weeks of the Beta test.

I think it's likely we'll get the level-squish early on, possibly with the initial build (in fact, the first thing they test could be just how things work at the new level 50) especially because they might need to wipe characters to implement it (though obviously they can't do that on live).

I think it's crucial that they figure out the Covenant system and the associated Soulbinds figured out as quickly as they can, because if there are any big problems with it, they need to know about them while there's still time to fix them.

Torghast, I imagine, will take longer for them to get up and testing. While I hope they do make it work early, I also think this is a feature that they can sort of use as much or as little as they want as the expansion goes on, depending on how people like it. Warfronts were very cool when they came out, and frankly, I wish they'd done more iterations on them, but they also became pretty clearly optional content by BFA's later patches. I'm hoping Torghast turns out better than Warfronts and Island Expeditions, but if it doesn't, I think it's less central to the expansion than the Covenants, which really have to be good gameplay for Shadowlands to succeed.

One of the real enjoyable aspects of these testing builds is to watch MMO-Champion and WoWHead datamine them to discover all the cool new models, icons, items, and fragments of story. And given the subject matter of this expansion, it's a story I'm really keen to hear more about.

BFA might have told a story I wasn't really interested in (I'd have preferred it as a pure Old God expansion, and would have liked to see N'zoth, rather than the Jailor, manipulating us into bloodshed) but the story it had was told well (also, I could do an entire expansion in the tone of Drustvar, which I'm hoping Shadowlands sort of is). But even if we didn't get a Necromancer class, Shadowlands seems like an expansion made specifically for my tastes in Warcraft content, and if they nail it, it might even outdo Legion.