It should be known by now that dataminers will go to any lengths and plumb any digital depths they can to discover what’s coming to a game before the devs are ready to announce it. This leads to the case of World of Warcraft and some discovered lines of code on the game’s website, which has data referencing prepurchases for an expansion known as Dragonflight. In addition, web certifications were discovered with a dragonflight.blizzard.com URL.
This code leak was further contextualized on Reddit, with one reply referencing a forum post on MMO Champion that named the expansion in February, along with rumors of features like player housing, a total of six zones – two of which are revamps – carpentry and logging professions, and Chromatus as the BBEG for the expansion among other things.
We hasten to note that all of this still falls squarely in the rumor category and so should be taken with lots of grains of salt until the company confirms it. It’s certainly possible that Blizzard planted fake clues specifically to mislead dataminers ahead of the big reveal later this month, and if so, it worked.
But then again, Blizzard accidentally spilling the beans itself is not without precedent: Readers will recall that the studio leaked Patch 9.1 thanks to press kit releases and the Shadowlands expansion was also leaked via an official art print on the merch store, so while the features of Dragonflight might still be nebulous, the expansion’s name could very well be legitimate considering the source.
