Peace has finally come to Azeroth. World of Warcraft will finally allow players to party together across the two factions. Now players from the Alliance can form a group with Horde players to take down dungeons and raids together. The cross-faction instanced content will be put on the public test server soon for update 9.2.5.
Since the beginning of World of Warcraft, two factions have dominated the fantasy world of Azeroth, the Alliance and the Horde. The opposing factions have been, more or less, in open conflict with each other for almost twenty years. Player versus player content has almost exclusively revolved around this premise, until now.
In a Development Preview post, Game Director Ion Hazzikosta went into detail about how cross-faction cooperation will take place. Players from both the Alliance and the Horde will have the option to play with each other in specific instanced content if they are on each other’s friends list or in a cross-faction community. Dungeons, Raids, and rated PvP will allow premade parties from both factions, but players can still be hostile towards each other outside of these cases.
Not all instanced content will be available for cross-faction play. Certain dungeons with faction animosity narratives like the Trials of the Crusader and the Battle of Dazar’alor cannot be played with both factions in the same party.
This announcement has come during a whirlwind time for Activision Blizzard. Earlier last year lawsuits were filed against the company for workplace discrimination, as well as multiple senior employees walking away. Last month Microsoft announced that it is in the process of acquiring Activision-Blizzard for almost $70 billion.
The cross-faction partying will be available on the 9.2.5 PTR server for players to test out soon.
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