It’s either the best news or the worst news: Blizzard unveiled its latest World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom on Thursday, titled Legion. Get ready to re-up those subscriptions again.
Legion is essentially Burning Crusade 2.0, thanks to the time travel aspects of last year’s Warlords of Draenor. Gul’dan has gone off and found longtime Warcraft badass Illidan Stormrage (as far as we can tell from a short CG video Blizzard showed). And then, demons.
“We stand once more upon the brink of destruction,” says the trailer, and it’s a pretty apropos description for the expansion. Once more, the Burning Legion is invading poor little Azeroth. Once more, Azeroth needs to band together and save the world.
In addition to the standard level cap raise—this time to 110—Legion will also add an entirely new continent, the Broken Isles. The Broken Isles have never been explored before, but were important to the lore of Warcraft III and Burning Crusade. In Legion, you’ll explore to try and uncover the Pillars of Creation and stop the Burning Legion.
And as you’d expect, a new continent comes with a new set of dungeons and raids. Some of it will make hardcore World of Warcraft fans happy—like an excursion into the Emerald Dream.
The other big announcement? A shiny new hero class, the Demon Hunter. “We must wield the power of the enemy against them,” says the trailer, before showing off a handful of Illidan-alikes with those awesome pieces of cloth tied across their eyes.
And then there are a handful of smaller changes, including artifact weapons (customized legendary weapons), class order halls (private hangouts for each class), and a new player-versus-player honor system.
No release date has been announced yet, though if Blizzard follows its standard two-year release cycle we’ll see Legion in November of 2016. Blizzard did announce that a beta is coming later this year.
We’ll undoubtedly hear more about Legion during BlizzCon in November.