"Dragonflight" Looking Very Likely to Be the Next World of Warcraft Expansion

 So, some genuine leaks (not like "I got this from my roommate who works at Blizzard" but "this was found in the code of a Blizzard website") have turned up regarding World of Warcraft, and it looks like the next expansion will be Dragonflight.

The leak seems legitimate. Most players have been speculating that the next expansion would finally have us visit the Dragon Isles, a location that has been teased since vanilla, though ironically the original depiction was more Old God related than Dragon-themed.

But these things can change.

We literally just have one word to go on, but it's a fairly evocative one. Dragonflight refers to the "families" of dragons - Bronze, Red, Green, Blue, and Black. Dragons are, naturally, the quintessential fantasy monster, but WoW has always had a kind of unusual relationship with them, in that its dragons were all originally good. Thus, for us to have evil dragons to fight, there have been contrivances to "corrupt" them - the Black Dragonflight was tainted by the Old Gods, the Bronze Dragonflight are hounded by their own future selves (also seemingly driven insane by the Old Gods, though in a more time-paradox-y way). The Green Dragons are susceptible to the corruption of the Emerald Nightmare (again, Old Gods) and thus we sometimes have to put them down when they go crazy. The Blue Dragons are interesting in that their brief turn to villainy did not involve any sort of magical corruption - Malygos just woke up from a 10,000-year catatonic stupor and decided that mortals using magic was no longer sustainable, and he'd forcibly hunt down any magic users, and got his Dragonflight to serve this cause.

Among the Red Dragons, I think the only times we've fought them has been when individuals are magically enslaved and not in control of their actions.

Cataclysm, which released 12 years ago, was theoretically the big "dragon" expansion, though in practice I'd say it had more to do with elementals and Old Gods. It ended with the four other aspects (Kalecgos stepping in for the recently dead Malygos) to ensure that Deathwing's defeat and destruction was utter and absolute. This fight also led to the disempowering of the dragonflights, making them mortal (and also supposedly infertile?)

There were some dangling threads though: one that I've always obsessed over is that Murozond - the future, corrupted version of Nozdormu (who also confirmed what we had suspected about the Infinite Dragonflight - that they were future versions of the Bronzes) was killed in the End Time dungeon, but I think it's pretty noteworthy that he died in a future that no longer exists - and also, we have no idea how much he had done before that moment in his own timeframe. For all we know, the Murozond we fought there had already accomplished all he had intended to before traveling to that time. Indeed, perhaps by having us kill him there, somehow he "locked" his fate so that we can't actually kill him in his "past," which remains our future.

Basically, I think Murozond would be a pretty good big bad for a dragon-themed expansion.

We'll be getting the official announcement later this month, but this looks pretty legit.