The World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion officially moved into beta testing today following a post to the Blizzard forums by one of WoW’s community managers.
The transition from alpha to beta comes almost exactly one week after WoW developers said in a livestream video that beta testing would begin this week. At the time, though, Blizzard didn’t say exactly what day of the week beta testing would begin.
Some players and streamers were slightly ahead of Blizzard’s announcement this afternoon. While a post by Blizzard at 3:45pm CT said beta testing had started, some noticed that the “Shadowlands Alpha” tab in their Battle.net client had been changed to say “Shadowlands Beta.”
On his stream, Twitch’s top WoW content creator Asmongold showed his viewers that the alpha had been moved into beta before Blizzard’s announcement. But even though Asmon could log into the beta, he was quickly met with a screen showing that the servers were offline.
That didn’t last too long, though. At time of writing, the beta servers have started up and Asmongold has started to stream its new content.
In last week’s livestream, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas said that with the introduction of the beta, players will have a more complete testing experience. While the game is still far from ready, most of the game’s features should be playable. Prior to today, Blizzard was only testing a few specific elements of the game at a time in the alpha.