World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth will be released this summer
Buying now grants level-110 boost and access to Allied Races quests.
Blizzard has said Battle for Azeroth, the seventh World of Warcraft expansion, will launch this summer - a date further clarified to mean on or before 21st September 2018.
Pre-purchasing the expansion - buying it outright ahead of time - comes with benefits. One of those is an immediately available free boost to the game's current level cap of 110; another is a head start on quests to unlock Allied Races in the full Battle for Azeroth expansion. It's not clear how much of the quests you can complete.
A more expensive Digital Deluxe Edition (£53) offers a Seabraid Stallion Alliance mount or Gilded Ravasaur Horde mount in World of Warcraft, and a cute baby Tortollan pet. There are also some voice lines, sprays and icons for Overwatch; a Hearthstone card back; a Heroes of the Storm Flamesaber mount; and Horde and Alliance StarCraft 2 sprays.
Battle for Azeroth is heavily inspired by Warcraft's real-time strategy past and aims to push the Horde and Alliance back into competing against each other. The game will encourage you to sail from your faction's new island kingdom home to complete quests on the other faction's home, for instance, and also send sets of champions from both factions to simultaneously complete replayable Island Expeditions.
There will even be a kind of RTS mode in the new Warfront instances. They are 20-player cooperative raids against an NPC commander and army, and the first of them will be an overhauled Stromgarde Keep in the forgotten vanilla WOW zone of Arathi Highlands.
In addition there are the new Allied Races to play as, a new Heart of Azeroth artifact which unlocks new powers in your equipment, and of loads of new content and associated rewards to keep you busy your way to the new level cap of 120.
Oh, and the levelling experience up to level 100 has been overhauled to scale to a greater range of levels, although there will be upper and lower boundaries to areas.