Blizzard lets Alliance and Horde play together for the first time in World of Warcraft

Since the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, there has always been a strict dividing line between the Horde and Alliance factions. Blizzard will test in a next update whether they can let the two groups play together more in dungeons, raids and pvp.

In a post on the mmorpg’s website, game director Ion Hazikostas explains what players can expect from the Horde and Alliance interplay. Players of the two factions will soon be able to do dungeons, raids, rated arenas and rated battlegrounds together. Blizzard wants to implement the functionalities in update 9.2.5.

If players are friends with someone in the game who is playing for the other faction, they can invite them to a group via Battlenet. In addition, members of a cross-faction Community may also form a group together to do dungeons, raids or pvp. Furthermore, a group can also be put together via the group finder. The leader of the party can choose to only allow members of his own faction. The function in the groupfinder that places you in a random group will remain faction-bound for the time being. There, players only end up in groups with players from their own faction.

Horde and Alliance players can only help each other in battle once they are in the locked instance. As they roam in the open world, interaction between the two factions will be limited, as it is now. Nothing will change about guilds either, they will remain faction-bound for the time being, writes Hazzikostas.

The game director returns in his message to the statements made at BlizzCon 2019, in which the team further stated that “the division between Alliance and Horde is the foundation of what makes Warcraft, Warcraft”. Hazikostas now comes back to these words and now that he looks back on it, he calls this statement very “short-sighted”. Instead, it is “the identities of the Horde and Alliance that are fundamental to Warcraft”.

Update 9.2 is currently being prepared for release, although Blizzard has not yet announced a release date. When 9.2. live, the team wants to start making 9.2.5 available on the test servers. There, players can test the new functionalities.