I've heard some rumblings that the next expansion - to be clear, the one that will follow Warlords - will be announced at this year's Blizzcon. Some people feel very confident about this, and while I think that it would be awesome (it would be great to see playable demon hunters before I'm 30, which would really require them to hurry up with 7.0,) and it would certainly help with WoW's falling subscriptions (down to 6.8m, which is still more than any other MMO, but not the 12m that they had in late Wrath/early Cataclysm - and there's your strong evidence that Wrath was the best expansion) to have another expansion to look forward to and to be working on well before we hit Hellfire Citadel (which I assume is going to be the final raid) and wind up beating up Grommash or Gul'dan for a whole year.
Another expansion announcement is exciting, but I also think it's really optimistic - that is to say, naive.
I'm not ruling it out, but I just don't see it happening this year (next year, though, is a lock.)
WoW has always gone in two-year cycles. Sometimes it's off by a few months, but the general pattern holds. WoW Classic launched in November of 2004. Burning Crusade launched in January of 2007 (this is the release date that's the most off-schedule.) Wrath of the Lich King launched in November of 2008. Cataclysm launched in December of 2010. Mists of Pandaria launched in September of 2012. And Warlords of Draenor is going to launch some time in the fall of 2014.
Every expansion has taken, on average, about two years. Basically, we alternate - getting new expansions every even-numbered year and getting new ones announced in odd-numbered years (again, BC in this example is counted as coming out on Dec 38th of 2006.)
Blizzard always talks about how they'd like expansions to come out every year, but not once have they actually achieved that. The expectation most people had was that Warlords of Draenor would launch far earlier than other expansions had in their cycles. With no new class or big talent revamp, combined with the fact that Siege of Orgrimmar - the final patch of Mists - had already been out for two months when Warlords was announced, it seemed like it should be able to come out in the spring.
But we're not in Draenor yet, and fall is approaching swiftly.
Really, I think that (unless some one-time thing happened behind the scenes to delay this) Warlords seems to prove how rigid the two-year expansion cycle is.
In a way, it's a good thing. If expansions come out too fast, there's a risk that people will become demotivated to progress. Late in an expansion, I often get to a point where I'm not really worried about gearing up anymore, as I know that soon enough, I'll be replacing my epics with green quest gear. Moving to an expansion-a-year cycle would mean hitting that point pretty early, perhaps even before the final raid tier is out. But then again, that's just me.
The real worry I have is that if Blizzard keeps assuming that they can get the next expansion out in a year, but it keeps taking two years, we'll get more of these content draughts.
Every expansion since Wrath has had this long gap of nothing new. ICC lasted for about a year, Dragon Soul lasted for about a year, and Siege of Orgrimmar is almost certainly guaranteed to last for more than a year. Now granted, Wrath did get the Ruby Sanctum later on, but it was hardly the kind of content one hopes for in a big patch.
Mists of Pandaria had an accelerated patch cycle. Basically every time we got a new patch, the next one would go on the PTR. Granted, there were two in-betweener patches that did not contain raids, but still, the pace seemed very quick.
The problem, of course, is that while tier 14 and Throne of Thunder might have lasted a little longer without starting to stink, we instead got this vast expanse of time - the longest any single patch has been current in WoW's history - while we've waited for Warlords.
The sad thing is that I think that the accelerated patches were due to overconfidence. They, like we all did, presumably thought that Warlords would come out a lot sooner than it is going to.
But I think that if Blizzard committed to that 2-year cycle, we might get better-paced expansions in the future.
I played through all of BC, but I don't really remember all of the patches' release dates. And I started playing after Vanilla had had all of its major patches. But my recollection was that, for instance, Fury of the Sunwell - patch 2.4 - came out in the spring of 2008. That meant that the gap between the final content patch for BC and the release of Wrath was only about six months. So Sunwell Plateau never got as old and stale as some of the other final raids. (Granted, the pacing of BC was far from perfect. SWP was always meant as a kind of twist-ending to the expansion, but Blizzard front loaded most of the raid content, releasing tier 4 and 5 at launch and putting tier 6 - the "final" tier - in 2.1.)
It's fun to be optimistic and think that Blizzard will be able to start releasing expansions every year. Expansions bring really cool additions to the game - new classes, new races, new game mechanics - but I don't know. At this point I've learned some skepticism.
Still, if they announce a South Seas Azshara expansion where we resurrect Illidan to train a new generation of demon hunters and plunder the Tomb of Sargeras and get harbors for our new garrisons that give us access to ships so that we can sail the South Seas searching for pirates and treasure and Kul Tiras is there too... I will be very happy.
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