World of Warcraft Will Allow Horde and Alliance Players to Play Together at Last

ign.com:

After 18 years, World of Warcraft is finally relaxing its deep, historical faction divide between Alliance and Horde players, and letting them play together at last.

As Blizzard announced today, an update is currently in the works that will allow Alliance and Horde players to form parties together for dungeons, raids, and rated PvP. Though not available yet, the change is planned for release as part of an eventual 9.2.5 update sometime after the upcoming major patch, Eternity's End.

The shift is, by necessity, somewhat limited in scope. It has to be. World of Warcraft has always followed its Warcraft heritage in dividing the Alliance and Horde into warring factions — in fact, the majority of the game is built on and around that divide. It has historically pursued storylines that set the two groups at odds, pit the two against one another in PvP, and separated out the groups completely for social structures like guilds, parties, and even communication out in the world. One of its more recent expansions, Battle for Azeroth, explicitly centered around that faction conflict, though its resolution ended in a tenuous truce.

So at the moment, Blizzard is keeping things simple… well, relatively. Players will be able to directly invite members of the opposing faction to parties if they are already friends via BattleTag or RealID, or if they are members of an existing cross-faction community. When making pre-made groups in the Group Finder tool, they can open applications up to members of both factions, or just their own faction. They'll be able to communicate through party chat while in a party, and trade items, fight together, and earn achievements while inside instances.

Meanwhile, guilds and all random matchmaking activities will