World of Warcraft’s next major expansion will be Battle for Azeroth, releasing on August 14th. One of the newest features it incorporates is Warfronts, a 20 player PvE mission that works a lot like an RTS. Speaking to Polygon, game director Ion Hazzikostas has offered some new information on how Warfronts work.

Essentially the activity takes inspiration from Warcraft 3 and sees players controlling characters that like heroes. The first proper Warfront is Stromgarde Keep in the Arathi Highlands, which many will recognize as a Vanilla WoW zone. Each faction will take turns holding the Warfront – at launch, it will be the Alliance and once the Horde had amassed enough resources, their Warfront is next. Once the Alliance gathers enough supplies, the process will repeat.

Warfronts will be available for one week at a time (with the zone moving back and forth between the factions) and unlike a PvP activity, there is no failure state – launching the activity is good enough. Essentially you would gather supplies and give them to specific buildings, which last for a few days and host different activities. Once a building is destroyed, it will take time to rebuild.

Interestingly, the rewards for Warfronts and holding the zone haven’t exactly been outlined. It could be that faction-only World Quests will be available in the zone during the time it’s held by a specific faction. What do you hope to see? Let us know in the comments.

World of Warcraft’s newest expansion was finally unveiled at BlizzCon 2017 and it’s called Battle of Azeroth. The opening cinematic was also revealed and showcased the battle between the Horde and Alliance. For hardcore WoW fans, Jaina Proudmoore also re-emerged in the features video, making her first appearance since the launch of Legion.

Battle of Azeroth will be a meaty expansion. Horde players will travel to the continent of Zandalar while the Alliance will head to Kul Tiras to garner allies. There will be new playable Allied Races each with their own unique abilities and they include Highmountain tauren, Dark Iron dwarves, Void elves and much more. There will also be new Island to explore which contain changing enemies and objectives. Players will fight as groups of three and compete against other teams to plunder resources.

A new resource called Azerite is also being added and players can combine it with the Heart of Azeroth to customize their armour with new traits and powers. If that weren’t enough, there’s a new level cap of 120, a new raid with eight bosses, dungeons, World Quests and a new cooperative 20 player mode called Warfront that calls to mind the old Warcraft games.

Though a release date wasn’t provided, you can expect the expansion to go into beta sometime soon. It’s safe to say that Battle of Azeroth is 2018-bound but we’ll have to wait for more information.