The World of Warcraft: Shadowlands pre-expansion patch has gone live across all regions, despite there still being no release date for the launch of the full game in sight after Blizzard announced a delay earlier this month.
Confirming the news in a blog post, the studio gave a brief overview of what you can expect from today's update, which addresses World of Warcraft's levelling and progression system in preparation for Azeroth's afterlife to open up.
Forget endgame, the most exciting shake-up in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands starts at level one
That means you can now enjoy the new character creation system, the new starter zone Exile's Reach, and even a limited time quest that paves the way for the arrival of Shadowlands later this year.
Better yet, given that World of Warcraft is now free-to-play up to Level 20, you can enjoy much of this new content without signing up to the game's subscription service, letting you sample and see if the game's incoming expansion is something you'd be interesting in pursuing further once the full expansion arrives.
The new World of Warcraft Companion App has also been heavily updated, and is ready to download on Apple and Android devices, allowing you to tinker with your character away from the PC screen, so check that out here if you're keen to see what it looks like.
You can download the update from your Battlenet account now, or read the full set of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands patch notes here.
To see where World of Warcraft ranks among the MMORPG hall of fame, you can head over to our best MMORPG games guide.
WoW veteran says the MMO's devs had to make "ten times the amount of quests" as originally planned to sate playtesters, and now the game has 38,000 of them
World of Warcraft devs used to joke about the MMO making $1 million per month - just months before it smashed through $15 million in monthly revenue
