Nobody saw World of Warcraft's new update coming: a 60-player pirate MMO battle royale with its own servers and optional PvP

World of Warcraft players are finally getting the pirate-themed content they've been craving for months, but it's arriving as a 60-player battle royale mode.

Blizzard has announced Plunderstorm, a brand new pirate-themed event for all WoW players with a subscription. The event is slated to go live in the MMO later today, March 19, with standalone servers and characters, and the headline feature is undoubtedly the fascinating new 60-player battle royale mode. 

Take a look at the responses to the announcement above, and you'll see that basically no one could've predicted this. "No data mining spoiling they’re just releasing it themselves let’s goooo," reads one tweet, while another adds, "You gotta be kidding us, subscribing back!" A lot of people are genuinely surprised this didn't leak ahead of the announcement.

Speaking of, Blizzard's lead developers delve further into Plunderstorm in the video below. Firstly, yes, this is WoW's development team getting experimental, and letting you customize your character between every match, so you're also effectively experimenting with an attack-focused build and class. Since you're on your own against 59 other players, that makes perfect sense.

Plunderstorm has the familiar closing circle staple of the battle royale games we're used to. It also lets you unlock and equip new abilities by killing other players and NPC demons, so there's a lot to discover and unlock in the mode itself. It's immediately accessible to anyone with a subscription - there aren't any prerequisite unlock requirements whatsoever. 

In fact, the core of the mode is actually plundering, so much so that you could call the opening few minutes of the mode a PvE scenario rather than a PvP one, because you'll be primarily killing demons to unlock new abilities. You don't even have to be the last person standing to earn rewards - just dropping in and completing "starter quests" will net you event-specific loot.

This has been a very long time coming for WoW players, and it all began from a simple roadmap annotation. Let's rewind back to September 2023: WoW players were speculating that pirates could be coming to the MMO, because of a book found in The Forbidden Reach zone which declared "the Nightsquall has returned" and he's building the "biggest fleet the world has ever known."

WoW players were understandably expecting pirates to come to the MMO, but Blizzard's then-president shot it down with a simple two-word tweet: "No pirates." Fast forward three months to December 2023, and WoW's updated roadmap had a curious skull and bones symbol positioned in between Seeds of Renewal and Season 4, which only revived the pirate speculation.

Today's reveal of Plunderstorm has brought the entire thing full-circle, with pirates finally, at long last, surfacing in World of Warcraft later today. Blizzard's developers make sure to mention in the video above that they're keen to "iterate" on Plunderstorm's battle royale mode, so they're definitely looking to make any improvements they can for the future.

8 years after leveling their World of Warcraft character from 1 to 100 using only DDR mats, this MMO fan is trying to repeat the trick in WoW Classic Hardcore.