I was not as much of a WoW-news junkie when Wrath of the Lich King was announced. I remember seeing the in-game graphic trailer and getting insanely excited about the Death Knight (and they were everything I hoped for... *satisfied sigh,*) but I wasn't following every bit of news about patches and such. It was in the fall of '08 that I started reading WoW Insider's "Ask a Beta Tester" which later became "The Queue," and I started following the cycle of WoW's expansions and patches fairly closely.
During both Wrath and Cataclysm, the final patches brought in the last big raid tier. In both cases, the patches were previewed during that year's Blizzcon, and in both cases, that preview was a sort of side-show next to the big news about the subsequent expansion.
In fact, the original trailer for Cataclysm, with its old Worgen models, began with a quick little sneak peak at Icecrown Citadel. So, in fact, we were already anticipating Deathwing before we had ever killed Lord Marrowgar. Similarly, before we did our first LFR runs and battled up to Wyrmrest Temple through a siege of elementals, we had already discovered that there would be Pandaren and Monks running around.
Not so this time around. Siege of Orgrimmar is coming out on September 10th, and while they have said there will be a pre-expansion patch (hopefully with an event like the first three expansions,) we will still not know what is coming next by the time we mount our charge against the Kor'kron forces.
We have heard nothing out of Blizzard of expansion five. Given the trademark leaks of Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, I am inclined to believe that the next expansion will be called "The Dark Below," but as I've explored in previous articles, that's still not a lot to go on, given that it could imply anything from Azshara and her Naga to the Burning Legion. But that's even assuming that we got the name right (again, I am leaning toward yes on TDB, which would surely be abbreviated that way.) Notice that Blizzard has never come out and denied it? Not proof, but that certainly maintains the possibility.
This raises some interesting questions regarding how long it will take for the expansion to drop. Now, Blizzard has obviously been working on expansion 5 for a long time now. In fact, they claim that they're always working on the next expansion and the one after that. Still, a lot of that initial work has to go through tons of iterations.
Given the response to Cataclysm, I think we can make the assumption that this will, once again, have a connected continent of zones. It appears that we're going up to level 100, which I've argued means we're going to see both a bigger continent (more on the order of Northrend, rather than Pandaria, which is a bit smaller) and potentially deal with a bigger enemy (which is my main reason for not believing it's about Azshara.)
But a big continent means more work for the world designers. If we have more quests to do, that also means more work (though I think it's more likely they'll just make each level require fewer XP. Wrath and BC had zones in which you spent more than one level - so did Cataclysm, actually)
Of course, the big rebuttal to all of this is that the preview of an expansion does not necessarily have to come at a particular point in its development cycle. It took more than a year for Cataclysm to come out after it was first announced, but that was largely due to the fact that they (and they have admitted to this) did not realize how much time the old-world revamp would take. Initially, they seemed to think it would involve just adding a few quests here and there, but when you look at zones like Hillsbrad or Stonetalon Mountains, you can see that this was an enormous project.
Thankfully, Mists has shown that without the burden of an old-world revamp they can focus more of their resources on the new stuff (Isle of Thunder feels more like a full zone than Quel'danas or the Molten Front ever did. Let's see how the Timeless Isle works out.)
But the question on everyone's mind is, of course, when the next expansion will drop. Wrath and Cataclysm both suffered from an extremely long period without a patch. Wrath added in the Ruby Sanctum as a kind of prologue to Cataclysm, but in both cases, it took roughly a year before any new raid tier came out. While this was great for Altoholics like me, giving us the time to gear up, it also meant that people got bored with what were supposed to be the most exciting raids.
We have yet to hear one detail about the new expansion. Do we get playable Naga? Demon Hunters? Who knows? Do we want to spend a year besieging Orgrimmar? While the raid looks amazing (with 14 bosses, it's tied for second largest raid ever - though it cheats because the Vale of Eternal Sorrows part of it probably makes sense as its own raid) I still have to imagine that, especially in the era of LFR, we're going to be pretty much done with it in less than a year.
Blizzcon is in November, so we will know at least the nature of the expansion by then, but if I were Blizzard, I would definitely want it to launch in the first half of 2014.
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