Wednesday, August 5, 2015

One Day Out and Still No Solid Leads on Expansion Six

While rumors, some fairly convincing, some far from it, are floating around out there, for the first time in several expansions, maybe even since Burning Crusade (if that, even) we haven't gotten a clear record of a copyright for the title of the new expansion. Titles are usually the most solid hints, and they can help lend a great deal of credibility to more detailed rumors. But this time around, unless someone finds something later today, we really only have the rumors, and not the titles.

The most convincing of these rumors I've seen is one that involves Azshara, Demon Hunters, and a large role for Sylvanas, but the first two are perennial "this is totally coming next" concepts and the latter is something people have been speculating about since Cataclysm.

I will say that one expansion concept, the "Ogre Continent" on Draenor, seems unlikely. Blizzard might make some odd decisions (like following two expansions of Orc fatigue with the Orc-iest expansion to ever Orc) but I do think that they ultimately don't want to have us more or less do the same thing twice in a row. The Ogre Continent wasn't even ever really talked about during Warlords, and it's already hard enough to justify adventuring in Draenor when it's in a different time, on a different planet, in a different universe.

Azshara/South Seas seems the default setting of the next expansion due to the fact that it would contain locations that we know exist but cannot yet be visited in-game. But Blizzard has made the last two expansions, or arguably the last three, doing very unexpected things. People were surprised by Mists of Pandaria because before it was announced, it wasn't even clear if the Pandaren were strictly canon (though you could find Chen's Empty Keg in the Barrens.) Warlords of Draenor was rather surprising because it took us back to zones we had been before, but rather than going the Cataclysm route of replacing those zones with updated versions for lower-level characters, they just made a new "continent" and rebuilt it from the ground up.

Such a thing could be done for a future expansion set in, for example, the Eastern Kingdoms (likely either the Kingdom of Stromwind section or the Lordaeron subcontinent,) either to put us in the past to see the various human kingdoms or, more radically, to show us how things have progressed since Cataclysm. But that's a weird enough idea, and so similar to the current expansion that it seems like Blizzard might want to avoid it, at least for now.

There's also certainly the idea of planet-hopping - taking the fight to Argus or Xoroth or K'aresh. But again, I think that straying too far from Azeroth is something they don't want to do two expansions in a row.

The big advantage of a South Seas expansion is that there's plenty of presence of existing playable races, and so the story can tie itself closely to what is already established in-lore. And given how it looks like Warlords will have a nearly negligible impact on the overall Warcraft story (except maybe Gul'dan B,) I could imagine Blizzard wanting to bring the focus back onto the playable factions - not necessarily re-igniting the Alliance/Horde war, but allowing us to build on what already exists rather than ask us to get invested in a ton of new stuff.

But again, none of it is confirmed. For all we know, the reasons the South Seas expansion looks so likely is simply the same set of reasons it has always looked likely. But Blizzard has several times now gone with other concepts even when we all seemed convinced that Azshara would have to be next. We might simply get another iteration of that tomorrow.

Well, yes or no, I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

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