WoW Shadowlands assets are now being used in the installation of the World of Warcraft Beta Battle.net client.

　　Over the past few weeks, several encrypted World of Warcraft Shadowlands alpha builds were shipped by Blizzard and the Shadowlands 9.0 patch also made its way to Blizzard’s Vendor CDN. Unfortunately, due to all of these builds being encrypted, no additional info on the upcoming expansion has been datamined yet.

　　As noted by World of Warcraft info website Wowhead, however, Blizzard’s Battle.net client now also makes mention of the World of Warcraft Beta product and Shadowlands data is already part of the beta product installation. According to the website, the Shadowlands alpha is now also labeled as ‘internal’ – likely to indicate that the current build is only available for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team.

　　With Shadowlands assets now becoming available in the Battle.net client as part of the beta product, it seems that the Alpha for World of Warcraft’s next expansion might soon launch on the PTR.

　　World of Warcraft Shadowlands is slated for a release this year. Blizzard has yet to officially announced the expansion’s release date.

　　In Shadowlands, players will start at level 50 and the level cap will be, like as in vanilla World of Warcraft, level 60. According to Blizzard, this level squish is intended as a new standalone leveling experience.

　　“At the time of Cataclysm's development, it made sense to set the revamped Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones into the timeline of that expansion”,  World of Warcraft’s lead narrative designer, Steve Danuser, said in a recent interview. “In hindsight, having a level-up experience that was more agnostic to the expansion timeline would have been a benefit down the road.”

　　“The new player experience coming with Shadowlands is intended to be just that— a standalone moment in time that easily flows into Battle for Azeroth, as well as other expansions to come in the future.”