The Future of World of Warcraft’s Dungeons

IGN has posted a quick rundown of the casual-friendly changes Blizzard will be making to dungeons in World of Warcraft with the release of its Cataclysm expansion pack. The info comes straight from this weekend’s BlizzCon 2010, so it’s fresh off the press, so to speak:

While it was known that the classic dungeons Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines would be redone for max level players, details of changes made to other dungeons were revealed. If you have a favorite dungeon from World of Warcraft, you might want to get as much time in there as you can right now, as changes will be wide-sweeping and in some cases drastic.

Most of the alterations are hitting the excessively long dungeons. Dungeons like Mauradon and Uldaman are being split into wings like the newer dungeons, while others like Wailing Caverns and Sunken Temple are simply having some of the larger (and frankly most frustrating) sections removed entirely. Only some of these changes will be available with the launch of Cataclysm, with the rest being rolled out in future patches.

One of the other changes, currently live on the beta servers, is likely to be far less contentious. Dungeon quests, regardless of whether they are part of a quest chain or not, will be available from characters in the entrance of the dungeon. Remember how many times you had to run Zul Farrak because the quests were in like eight different zones? Now they’re not!

Also changing is the location of graveyards for players who are unlucky enough to die in a dungeon. According to the developers, no graveyard will be more than a half minute’s run from the dungeon entrance, if it isn’t right outside.