When World of Warcraft's Next Expansion Will Be Available

Blizzard is gearing up for the release of their next big expansion for World of Warcraft. For a while the release date for expansion was kept under wraps... until now. Gamers can look to purchase Legion for the MMORPG starting August 30 later this year.

Game Informer is reporting that the Legion expansion will come in various forms, including a boxed physical release. The standard version of the game will be available for $49.99 while the digital deluxe edition will be available for $69.99. In the digital deluxe edition there are some special items bundled in, including a Illidari Felstalker mount, a Helm transmog and wings for Diablo III, a Felstalker mount for Heroes of the Storm and two character portraits for StarCraft II.

Finally, there's a collector's edition for the World of Worldcraft expansion that clocks in at $89.99. The collector's edition will arrive in a physical package with two-disc Blu-ray making of set, a CD soundtrack, a mouse pad and a hardcover art-book containing concept and full illustrations of the characters and environments featured throughout Legion.

Another returning feature for this new expansion is the ability to boost characters instantly to level 100. I remember hearing some chatter and a bit of discomfort about this feature from long-time players because they felt it took a lot of the challenge and adventure out of leveling a character to 100. The feature is returning for those who pre-order the World of Warcraft expansion, enabling players to instantly boost a single character to level 100.

The feature is supposedly returning due to a level cap increase of 110. The boost to 100 is so that player characters will be instantly ready to jump into the new zones and quests that they have littered throughout Legion. The quests will take players to the Broken Isles, a brand new dark setting where adventurers will venture through elven cities, forests and mountains while unearthing new items and taking on new quests amongst the epicenter of the demon invasion.

The new quests will be accompanied by the new character class, the Demon Hunter, who has the ability to transform into a demon form to unleash additional damage on foes. The Demon Hunter can also double jump to reach new places and utilize a special ability to highlight enemies to compensate for their blindness.

The new expansion for World of Warcraft comes at an interesting time in the game's history where some portions of the community appear to be rebelling due to lack of Blizzard considering community feedback. This spawned from a vanilla private server that was recently shut down that had more than 800,000 registered players and 150,000 active members at any single time. A petition was spawned to either allow vanilla private servers to have some place in the World of Warcraft community, or at least bring an official vanilla server to the standard World of Warcraft offerings.

For now, it appears as if gamers will just have to be without a quality vanilla server, but Blizzard is hoping that gamers will jump into the new Legion expansion in droves come August.