Blizzard Discovers Battle Royale with the WoW Plunderstorm Event

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There was a bit of speculation about the pirate flag entry on the World of Warcraft 2024 roadmap.  It had no details, just “10.2.6” which was assumed (correctly) to be the patch number.  But what it might actually mean… nobody outside of Blizzard knew… or if they did, they weren’t talking.

World of Warcraft retail 2024 roadmap

We started getting some hints and finally a date for it last week.  And, yesterday morning the patch update went live.  I did not land at 5:50am (that would be ten to six, or 10.2.6), the update took well into the afternoon Pacific time, but news of it’s arrival was all over the various sites by the time I was awake and settled into another full day of staring at screens.

And there it was, Plunderstorm, a WoW based battle royale game with pirates.

With the release of the 10.2.6 content update, players can get swept away in the Plunderstorm— a fun, new, limited-time, pirate-themed event of prodigious proportions lasting the next several weeks. Scour the map and try to be the last pirate standing while dashing across the Arathi Highlands to find abilities, upgrades, and loot to plunder just to survive!

You need to have a WoW subscription to play and you need to have the WoW retail client installed, as that is where it lives.

WoW retail contains WoW Plunderstorm

This is NOT yet another retail battleground.  Instead, it is a stand alone event that you have to roll up a fresh, pre-made character in order to participate.

  1. Select Plunderstorm from the World of Warcraft game menu to get into the action.
  2. Create a new, ready-to-play character—player characters are unique to this event. You don’t need previous knowledge of races and classes to chart your course for mayhem.
  3. Choose between Solo or—to play with your Battle.net friends—make a group from the Plunderstorm character screen and select Duo. If queued for a Duo without a partner, you’ll be automatically matched with one. You can also access chat, customize characters, and see the queue from the Character Select Screen.

On the one hand, cynical old me sees this as a cheap way to try and generate some interest using a game mode that is just one Lord British endorsement from being completely past relevance.  Is there some shooter that HASN’T tried to integrate this play mode yet?

Even Fortnite, the game that has made so much money for Epic, has been busy trying to find some new twist to keep its model fresh.  Plus, was this another Holly idea?  I mean, she did come from Daybreak, which for a brief moment was on top of the battle royale world with H1Z1… until is screwed it all up and became a footnote, irrelevant to the current meta of the genre.

On the other hand, who am I to say what is fun and what is not?  And yes, if it wasn’t cheap, it certainly was no more expensive than another battleground to add in Plunderstorm.  Why not throw something else against the wall.  It isn’t like Blizz has a lot of other things in its pipeline for retail between now and The War Within.  I am sure some will find it fun and, if it is popular enough then it seems likely that the unstated limits of the event’s duration will be extended.

And it offers prizes that you can take back to retail WoW and WoW Classic.

They even got Carbot Animations back in the fold with a launch day video.

So plunder away I guess.

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