World of Warcraft: Shadowlands now available with ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and multi-threaded performance improvements

After spending a rather long time in development, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is finally available. The previous expansion, namely Battle for Azeroth, arrived two years after its predecessor. Shadowlands needed three additional months for everything to be ready, and now there is a lot of content waiting to be discovered and experienced by the players.

In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, players get to explore 8 new dungeons — 4 leveling dungeons and 4 max-level ones, forge new legendary gear, quest through four new zones ruled by ancient, powerful Covenants, and much more. This new expansion also includes "hundreds of new additions with thousands of new combinations" in the character customization department, an all-new starting experience available for both newbies and seasoned players, as well as the first raid experience — Castle Nathria, scheduled to go live December 8.

In addition to the above, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands takes the visual experience to a whole new level, thanks to ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion support, while some system configurations should benefit from a solid performance boost thanks to the optimized multi-threading.

Lastly, but not least, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands comes with the first "level squish" in this title's long history. Level 120 characters now go all the way down to level 50, and the new cap is set at 60. Some might love this, some might hate it, others will probably just enjoy the game as-it-is. If you have any thoughts regarding Shadowlands, feel free to hit the comments section.