Release Date Release Date and Cinematic on August 14th

Well, I guess that means it's set in stone: The release date for Warlords of Draenor will be announced on August 14th.

Is that news? I guess it's kind of meta-news. I guess it means that they're in a place where they think that by the 14th they'll know how much more they need before they can go live.

Anyway, the bigger news is that the Warlords of Draenor cinematic will be unveiled then as well. The trend in cinematics has kind of evolved over time. Vanilla and BC focused mainly on unnamed characters - presumably meant to represent players (though it was revealed much, much later that the Draenei in the BC one was Maraad, but given that Maraad didn't show up in-game until Wrath - and he was just a cool-looking Draenei hanging out on the Skybreaker then - I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this was a retroactive decision.) Wrath of the Lich King had my favorite cinematic (yeah, I'm kind of a Wrath fanboy, but can you fault me?) but it made the change of not really involving any player characters, and focused on the villain. Cataclysm followed suit (though it unfortunately starred a much less interesting villain.) Mists of Pandaria then brought the focus back on the player factions, though somehow I got the impression that the Human and Orc in that cinematic were not so much representative of the players as they were of the factions.

I would guess that the next expansion is going to have a lot of Grom Hellscream - he'll probably be the one to narrate - and then perhaps show us glimpses of the various warlords and their respective clans, though perhaps with the player factions arriving to resist them by the end. Or we could have Velen narrate, or possibly Gul'dan.

Anyway, a bit of meta-news for the public. I'll give my reactions to both in ten days.