World of Warcraft'll be getting its next major update—patch 11.1—early next year, as announced during the Warcraft 30 year celebration stream. Dubbed Undermine(d), this update will take you to, well, Undermine—the centre of the goblins' OSHA-violating trade empire, deep underground.
"We'll learn more about goblin culture than ever before … beyond the humour and the explosions," states Ion Hazzikostas, game director for World of Warcraft. "Though to be clear, there's gonna be a lot of explosions." Phew.
The city will feature all the major goblin enterprises, with Steamwheedle, Blackwater, Bilgewater, and The Venture Co. all making an appearance. Each will have faction goodies to earn from the company store of your choosing, given they've all been pitted against each other. But who cares about goblin politics (actually, writing that out, maybe I do): World of Warcraft's getting drifting, baby!
An expansion on the dragonriding/skyriding tech developed in Dragonflight, the patch, Undermine(d), will feature a new customisable ground mount. It is a car. One you can tinker with a bunch of paint jobs, as well as actually being able to control its grip, drift, and acceleration characteristics.
Talking to PC Gamer's Tyler Colp, assistant lead quest designer Mark Kelada explains: "It moves at base, I think, roughly four to five times faster than your standard ground mount. So when people hear 'no skyriding', I would say yes, just wait until you get into this car."
As far as the specifics go, the design team's still playing in the space, but "right now, we're playing with the mechanic of the longer you can hold the drift, the more boost you can get." Sick. Kelada adds you'll be able to "change the turbo/boost … do you want it to be high efficiency so it uses less metre, do you want it to be high-speed, so you press that button and you're just gone?" He also states there might be an option for an NPC passenger who can lend a hand.
In terms of what you can do with it, well—tearing through Undermine's streets, for one, which are built with cars in mind. But there'll also be timed quests, and the driving equivalent of skyriding races: "I think the moment I started seeing the concepts coming out for Undermine," Kelada adds, talking about the fact you'll be able to Tokyo drift in freakin' World of Warcraft, "it all made a lot of sense. It was like 'oh, we can have fuel and explosions and just go crazy on this, and it really sort of fits the vibe' … it was just like a slam dunk."
Oh, right—there are other features in this patch. Undermine(d) will also include a new dungeon, Operation Floodgate, which'll see you and your party racing to stop the goblins from blowing up a dam, which is an appropriately Saturday morning cartoon-tier evil villain plot for these little maniacs. It'll also be hucked into the season's Mythic+ rotation, alongside 4 dungeons from the war within, and the usual dash of legacy dungeons—including, obviously, Battle for Azeroth's goblin brawl, The Motherlode.
The zone will also have two new delves, and an 8-boss raid called the Liberation of Undermine, which takes you through the streets, then into a massive mansion "brimming with colour and extravagance—that also hides the dark secrets of its owner, the one and only Gallywix." Looks like we might be throwing hands with the trade prince. PvPers will get a new arena map, too.
Ion Hazzikostas tells PC Gamer that "Undermine existed as an idea before Hallowfall, or Ringing Deeps, or many other places. When we set out to say that we were going to make an underground expansion, two plus years ago, one of the first questions we naturally ask is: All right, what are the known locations that this gives us a chance to visit? … It was like, 'okay, before this story's over, we need to go there.'"
Blizzard also revealed its new roadmap for the season—shown above. Before we get Undermine(d), we'll be stomping around The Siren Isle, an in-between patch in the same vein as Dragonflight's Forbidden Reach that's already on the PTR and will be arriving fully-formed December 10. As for Undermine(d), the roadmap states it'll be out before Spring 2025.
