Blizzard has revealed the release date for the next patch for World of Warcraft and shared details of another patch. The latter will allow Horde and Alliance players to unite under the same guild banner for the first time in Azeroth's history, adding a much-requested cross-faction feature.

Last year, a minor patch for Shadowlands began blurring the lines between factions (open in new tab), allowing players on opposing sides to team up for certain types of group content. With this update, the in-game community can now also turn on the cross-faction feature. Guilds were still completely locked down, but this will change with the newly announced (opens in new tab) Embers of Neltharion update.

"World of Warcraft" is built on the Horde/Alliance conflict, and while the storylines of many expansions have seen the two factions unite to temporarily set aside their conflict for the greater good, when it comes to actual gameplay, the opposing factions have always very separate.

"We try to be really considerate about changes [across factions] and watch carefully where we step in when we make changes. The Alliance and Horde factions are a big part of World of Warcraft. Even if you could play with people from other factions, the weight they have on the story [...] is tremendous. tremendous weight is something that will never go away in World of Warcraft."

There are no real details on what the cross-faction guilds will look like or if there will be any restrictions. Nevertheless, it is certainly exciting news and opens up a lot of possibilities with regard to character selection.

As well as the expected cross-faction guilds, "Neltharion's Eternal Fire" will kick off Dragonflight Season 2 with a new zone and a new raid, "Abelas, the Crucible of Shadows." There will also be new dungeons in Mythic+ Dungeon Pool. These have been confirmed as follows:

As well as the announcement of "The Flames of Nelsarion," Blizzard has revealed that patch 10.0.7, "Return to the Forbidden Reach," will be released later this month, on March 21.

WoW Dragonflight patch 10.1, Embers of Neltharion, currently has no release date, but is expected to appear in the PTR (Public Test Realm) on March 9.