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World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Guide and Overview!
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World of Warcraft: Shadowlands was the game's eighth expansion, released on 23 November 2020. Three expansions have followed it since, so if you are reading this now the question is not what Shadowlands will bring, but whether it is still worth your time.
Short answer: yes, and it costs you nothing extra. Here is what it was, what it added, and where it sits in the game today.
What Shadowlands was about
The Shadowlands is the realm of the dead. Souls arrive, are judged by the Arbiter, and are assigned to a realm based on how they lived. It is one of the more striking settings the game has used, and a complete departure from Azeroth.
The story picks up from Battle for Azeroth. Sylvanas Windrunner shatters the Helm of Domination, tearing the barrier between the living world and the realm of death, and you follow her through to find out why.
Covenants
Shadowlands replaced the usual faction structure with four Covenants, each governing a different sort of soul and each granting its own abilities and cosmetics.
- Kyrian of Bastion take souls that led a life of service, and offer them ascension.
- Venthyr of Revendreth take the prideful, and decide whether they are worth redeeming.
- Necrolords of Maldraxxus take the battle-hardened, and put them to work.
- Night Fae of Ardenweald tend souls awaiting rebirth.
Choosing a Covenant was the defining decision of the expansion. It changed your abilities, your campaign, and where you spent your time.
Torghast, Tower of the Damned
A rogue-like dungeon in the heart of the Maw, rebuilt each time you enter it. You climb through randomised floors collecting Anima Powers that change how your character plays, sometimes dramatically.
It was the most experimental thing the expansion attempted, and opinion on it was divided from the start. Worth trying at least once for how different it feels to the rest of the game.
The level squish
Shadowlands introduced the first level squish in World of Warcraft's history. Characters at level 120 became level 50, and the new cap was 60.
The reasoning was that levelling had become meaningless. A hundred and twenty levels meant most of them gave you nothing, and a new player faced a wall. The squish made each level matter again, and it is the version of the levelling system still in use.
Is it worth playing now?
Shadowlands is no longer the current expansion. Dragonflight followed in 2022, The War Within in 2024, and Midnight arrived in March 2026.
What that means practically is that Shadowlands content is now included with the base game, so if you subscribe you already have it. There is nothing extra to buy.
It is worth playing if you want the story between Battle for Azeroth and Dragonflight, if you want to see the Covenant campaigns, or if you are levelling a character and fancy something other than the usual route. The zones are among the best-looking in the game, and Revendreth in particular still holds up.
It is not where the current game is happening. If you are returning after a long break and want to play with everyone else, head for Midnight instead.
Will your PC run it?
This is where things have changed most since Shadowlands launched, and it catches returning players out.
World of Warcraft used to run on almost anything. It does not any more. Since Midnight the minimum specification asks for a six-core processor, 8GB of memory and an SSD, and the SSD is a hard requirement rather than a recommendation. The recommended specification is considerably higher again.
So a machine that ran Shadowlands happily in 2020 may not start the game today. We have broken the current figures down in full in our guide to the World of Warcraft system requirements.
Worth knowing too that the parts of the game that stress a PC are the crowded ones. Questing alone asks very little. A twenty-player raid or a busy capital city asks a great deal, and it is the processor rather than the graphics card that decides how it holds up.
Where to go next
If you are coming back to the game and wondering whether your machine is up to it, see our World of Warcraft gaming PCs for what we recommend, or build your own with our online configurator.
