World of Warcraft’s Horde and Alliance will soon be able to raid together

polygon.com:

World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment once said that the separation between the Horde and the Alliance was “a pillar of what makes Warcraft, Warcraft,” but now things are changing. Blizzard announced Monday that it will begin testing “cross-faction instances” soon on the public test realm.

When the 9.2.5 update goes live on the PTR, players will be able to create premade parties between Horde and Alliance players for “dungeons, raids, and rated PvP,” Blizzard said.

“There have been two decades’ worth of code and content crafted with the assumption that parties can only have players of a single faction, and while we want to make this feature available as soon as possible, the extent of the change means that it couldn’t be ready in time for the upcoming Eternity’s End content update,” World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas wrote in a development preview blog.

Guilds will remain open only to single factions, as will Heroic dungeons, Skirmishes, and Random Battlegrounds. But players can invite opposite faction players to parties or through premade groups in Group Finder for “Mythic dungeons, raids, or rated arena/RBGs,” — though group leaders can opt to keep their party within the same faction. Blizzard said opposing-faction players will stay designated as “unfriendly” or hostile in the regular world, but will be able to use party chat. In dungeons, players — regardless of faction — will be friendlies, as if you were the same faction.

Certain legacy instances won’t be available: “Battle of Dazar’alor, Trial of the Crusader, Icecrown Citadel, and a handful of others that similarly have extensive faction-specific components that will have to be reworked to support cross-faction parties,” Blizzard said.

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