Thursday, October 2, 2014

WoW and Blizzcon '14

Blizzard has plenty of other big franchises that I'm sure will be getting announcements at Blizzcon in about a month (I'd be surprised if we don't see a trailer or something for Legacy of the Void, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a new Diablo III expansion announced.) But WoW is in kind of a funny place. Blizzcon will be happening in early November, and Warlords of Draenor will be coming in the middle of the month.

Much discussion has been had about the intentions for Warlords of Draenor. A couple months ago, Blizzard dropped a potential bombshell, saying that Warlords might only have two raid tiers. Now, of course, out of context, this would be dreadful news. If two raid tiers were all we got in the expansion, and Warlords were to last as long as the other expansions have, then we'd be seeing two Siege of Orgrimmar-length content droughts in a row.

However, their stated notion here is that they would do only two raid tiers only if they were able to get the next expansion out at a faster rate - their perennial goal being an expansion every year.

Expansion announcements have worked out pretty well with the two-year expansion cycle. Every fall (more or less - BC came out in the winter) you either get an expansion, or you find out about the next one, and that alternates back and forth.

Let's be optimistic and say they do manage to get expansion six out with the ideal haste. What that leaves us with is actually a kind of tough call on how to announce it.

Make no mistake - expansion announcements are a huge part of the marketing for the game. Yes, most WoW players will get the new expansion seeing as they more or less have to in order to continue playing the game, but while their strategy has shifted somewhat from going for new players to attracting lapsed veterans, they're still trying to get people excited about the game. Excitement leads people to play, which means Blizzard profits.

Marketing is a really, really big deal, even if you don't think of yourself as someone who can be swayed by it. First off - you're just one person counted against a multitude. And second off - marketers use a lot of different techniques to get people interested, casting a wide net, so even if traditional advertising doesn't peak your interest, something else probably will. With a game with such an enormous profile as WoW, an announcement of a new expansion is going to get a lot of people talking. Yes, WoW sites like WoW Insider and MMO-Champion are going to post news about every last tweak to Thrall's beard, but a new announcement will get people talking at major gaming publications, and even sometimes mainstream news services like the New York Times.

That coverage is part of the advertisement, though it's one that they have to struggle to control as much as they can. That said, sending the right message is not an exact science. Things can backfire.

Blizzard almost certainly knows what the next expansion is going to be after Warlords (scratch that - not almost certainly, but certainly.) That said, there are a couple factors that come into play regarding whether they want to announce it yet.

The first is whether they have anything to show. While I don't remember quite what they were able to show off when they announced BC, Wrath, or Cataclysm, they had people playing early stuff from Mists and Warlords later during the same Blizzcon. A lot of this stuff winds up changing profoundly, but being able to let people get their hands on the new content is a big deal. Just having enough art assets to show off a trailer is a pretty big deal (if I recall correctly, pretty much everything in the Wrath announcement trailer was in Howling Fjord, but it worked! Oh man, that Death Knight reveal. So awesome.)

The second is how they think it will affect the release of Warlords of Draenor. And this, I think, is the really tricky part. On one hand, the negative hand, it could steal the wind from behind Warlords' sails. If expansion six looks way cooler than Warlords, or even just feels cooler because it's new, it could potentially make people less excited about Warlords - making it feel like the old stuff before it's even made it to live. On the more optimistic hand, getting people pumped for whatever's coming might make players decide to pick up the game again, and hey - there's this new stuff coming in a week as well!

I'm sure that if they announce expansion six, you'll get a little of column A and a little of column B. The question, though, is which column would be bigger, and I'm no marketing executive, but even if I was, I don't think I'd have an ironclad answer.

If they don't announce next month, though, that means that they'll have to figure out a way to announce later, but still before Blizzcon '15, because if they do manage to get it out a year after Warlords, or even a year and a half, next year's Blizzcon will be too late for an announcement.

The one potential middle-ground solution I could imagine is a true teaser trailer. In the past, most expansions have had really big, quite detailed trailers (with a series of captions at the end that lists new features,) immediately followed by several panels with developers going into detail about the ideas they want to bring with the expansions.

However, imagine if instead we got something cryptic. To go to my well of hopeful expansion ideas, it could be some shot of twisted, Fel-blackened earth and someone picking up a War Glaive. Or perhaps a shot of an Alliance ship sailing over dark waters, as we see a giant shadow grow underneath it. Something to imply something Warcraft-related was coming, but keeping it vague enough that it couldn't really overshadow Warlords. This could just fizzle, though, as being cryptic might lead to expectations you can't match, or might be so vague that people don't really care enough to make anything of them.

At any rate, if Blizzard does really want to commit to these faster expansion releases, they'll need to figure out how to do the unveilings of them differently, though if they do announce this year, I'm sure they will be very closely monitoring what effect it has on Warlords.

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