14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard is currently preparing for the release of the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion for their massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, due out sometime at the end of the year and set to introduce massive content changes to the game.
For now, Warlords of Draenor is in alpha testing, a fact announced on April 4, right when The Elder Scrolls Online came out in what many view as more than merely a coincidence. The alpha debut means that some lucky players are enjoying the new content right now, even though the participation is currently limited to "friends and family" and features a very early stage of development.
"The expansion content available during this first phase will be quite limited—many of the expansion's major features, such as Garrisons, won't be available until a later point in the testing process. This early phase of testing will help us ramp up for our larger beta phase later on, when we'll be inviting more players," Blizzard said after unveiling the alpha.
The upcoming expansion brings many changes in content, but it will also bring a lot of changes in infrastructure as well, one of the major back-end alterations being the change in file format utilized for storing all the game data, from the age-old MoPaQ to CASC, a change which Blizzard expects to roll out in a patch sometime before the launch of Warlords of Draenor.
The new format should streamline some of the internal processes and prevent errors during installation as well as increased game performance, easier and quicker patching, improved client hotfixing, better streaming data support and a whole lot of other such improvements.
The entire Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes have been published on Battle.net, and those interested in taking a quick look should be interested in knowing that the amount of text is equivalent to the length of a certain hairy-footed short individual's adventures carrying a ring to a volcano.
The patch notes outline all the changes, from character stats and the way attack power works to all the changes made to the in-game classes, stat squishing and even system changes, with a "patch notes are preliminary and not final" warning tacked on and a nifty TL;DR summary on the introduction page.
Players interested in taking part in the Warlords of Draenor beta test, when it becomes available, can create a World of Warcraft beta profile from their Battle.net account.