'World Of Warcraft' Is Suffering A Zombie Plague On Its Test Servers

The world of World Of Warcraft is (sort of) being overrun by flesh-hungry ghouls and it's turning Azeroth into an apocalyptic wasteland, devoid of life.

In the run up to the World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion coming later this year, a pre-expansion live event is in full flow on the game's test servers. A plague of undead are being turned loose on the unsuspecting citizens and NPCs of Azeroth, turning its major cities into brutal battlegrounds.

Any NPC can (and probably will) succumb to the hordes of the undead, even those who are designated quest givers, which is putting the willies up Alliance and Horde players alike. Those players themselves, can also become infected. Once infected, players will have some special abilities, including the chance to infect other players and spread the disease even further.

If this all sounds a bit much, don't fear, the event is only active in the public test servers at the moment, so you won't have to deal with it whilst going about your daily business. Your exploits in other servers will remain unaffected. It's also been confirmed by WoW game designer Jeremy Feasel on Twitter (via PCGamer) that the zombie-dodging fun will only run for a few hours a day once live, with infected NPCs and players presumably resetting their status after a little while.

Also under test in the servers is the new max level cap of 50 (with players being able to then attain a 60 cap when the expansion releases in earnest) and other user experience upgrades. As and when the zombies are unleashed onto the unsuspecting player-base... it's going to get interesting. If the clips and images of what's going on in the test servers are anything to go by, it's going to need a serious amount of balancing before being pushed live.

Other things to do in the Shadowlands pre-launch event include travelling to Northrend to fight some big-bad bosses and attaining high-level loot, but the Scourge Invasion is by far the coolest thing going on.

Players wanting to check it out for themselves will simply need a World Of Warcraft account capable of accessing the PTR servers, which can be set up via this link right here.

The event feels somewhat reminiscent of the infamous Corrupted Blood incident, which saw millions of World Of Warcraft players infecting each other with an accidental pandemic which ravaged the player-base before eventually being patched out.

Fingers crossed Blizzard will have a better hold on this one - we've got enough pandemic going around in the real world right now, without having to worry about the world of World Of Warcraft, too.

Topics: Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard, World of Warcraft