World of Warcraft to Allow Horde and Alliance to Play Together

By Tanner Dedmon

In a major development for the lore governing the stories of World of Warcraft, Blizzard announced this week that it'll soon let the Alliance and Horde players play with one another in dungeons, raids, and PvP modes. This big change is scheduled to release as part of the 9.2.5 update with guidelines and goals already laid out to govern how this will work.

Blizzard announced the World of Warcraft change with a lengthy blog post this week that provided more details. Once this feature rolls out, players will be able to team up with one another in select modes regardless of their chosen faction.

"I am pleased to announce that we are working on adding the ability for Alliance and Horde players to form premade parties together for dungeons, raids, and rated PvP," the announcement from Blizzard said. "There have been two decades' worth of code and content crafted with the assumption that parties can only have players of a single faction, and while we want to make this feature available as soon as possible, the extent of the change means that it couldn't be ready in time for the upcoming Eternity's End content update. Instead, we are planning to test and release it as part of a subsequent 9.2.5 update."

The two goals Blizzard highlighted for this feature were to focus on "organized instance gameplay" and to make it an opt-in feature where possible. To that end, Blizzard has come up with the following guidelines for this cross-faction multiplayer feature:

World of Warcraft Cross-Faction Instances

Players will be able to directly invite members of the opposite faction to a party if you have a BattleTag or Real ID friendship, or if you are members of a cross-faction WoW Community.

Premade Groups in the Group Finder listings for Mythic dungeons, raids, or rated arena/RBGs will be open to applicants of both factions, though the group leader may choose to restrict the listing to same-faction applicants if they so choose.

Guilds will remain single-faction, and random matchmade activities like Heroic dungeons, Skirmishes, or Random Battlegrounds will all remain same-faction (both because there is less faction-driven pressure around random groups, and to avoid compromising the opt-in nature of the feature by randomly placing a queuing orc in a group with a night elf).

For those concerned about the new feature breaking down the foundation of World of Warcraft's story, Blizzard said "the instances of cooperation in World of Warcraft itself are too numerous to count" and that it hopes this feature will allow players to act on more compelling choices.

"We're hopeful that these changes will serve to actually strengthen faction identity by allowing more players to play the faction whose values, aesthetic, and characters they find more compelling, rather than feeling forced to choose between their personal preference and the ability to play with friends," Blizzard said.  

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