Blizzard Confirms New World of Warcraft Expansion to be Announced August 6th at Gamescon

Well! In an refreshingly up-front manner, Blizzard has... if you read the title of the article... new expansion...

Blizzard will be announcing the next expansion to World of Warcraft at Gamescon on August 6th.

This ends months of speculation about whether Blizzard would ever dare announce an expansion not at Blizzcon with resounding: Hell yes they'd dare.

Given the shorter nature of Warlords of Draenor - an expansion that had only one major content patch (no, 6.1 don't count) - Blizzard would seemingly need to bump up the expansion-release schedule. In the past, expansions have always gone about two years, with each year having an expansion release in the fall, or an expansion announcement in the fall (or thereabouts.) However, in order to get the process going and allow them to do the kind of testing that you really only want to do after there have been announcements earlier, you'll need an earlier announcement.

I highly suspect that this will be a similar reveal to the Mists of Pandaria expansion - we'll get a short trailer that will detail the major features like where it's taking place, what the new level cap will be, and if we'll be getting new races or classes, as well as the usual "new dungeons, new zones, new raids, new battleground" froo-fra. We'll hear a bit more during a panel, but I'd expect that we'll be waiting for Blizzcon to get details like the names of the various dungeons, zones and raids, and clarifications on things like any major class mechanic changes or the mechanics of any new classes that come about.

Still, knowing where we're going next will be very nice. And hopefully we'll see the expansion release proportionately sooner.