I've generally taken the attitude that expecting a WoW expansion announcement at Blizzcon this week is unwise, and will result in disappointment. There's no WoW: What's Next panel, and you wouldn't think they'd be so coy in leaving a big gap in the schedule in order to announce an expansion for a ten-year-old game. Hell, there's even a chance, albeit a low one, that that gap will have something totally different - an auction, dance contest, or just more Metallica.
Warlords is coming out literally next week - less than a week after Blizzcon. Would announcing 7.0 totally undercut the new expansion? Would it imply that we shouldn't really get invested in Draenor as a setting, as we'll only be leaving it a year from now?
Possibly. But I think the truth is that no one really knows.
Warlords of Draenor was supposed to come out sooner - no one contests that, including Blizzard. The reason the patch cycle of Mists of Pandaria was so quick was that they were expecting to speed up the releases of expansions. Unfortunately, that left us with over a year of 5.4 while we were waiting for Warlords to get put together.
Blizzard thinks long-term, especially about WoW, which, despite being down to a little over half its peak subscription numbers, is still a freaking cash cow that is several times as popular as the next subscription-based MMO. Blizzard representatives have said they fully expect to continue supporting the game for another ten years, which granted could be just some company-message-supporting-boastfulness, but is not totally unthinkable.
Blizzard was almost certainly already working on expansion six during Mists, or likely even before it. "Working" could have of course been on a pure conceptual level, but they've probably had an idea of its subject matter and its placement in the schedule for a long time (look at how Marvel has movies lined up for the next decade or so.)
So the plan might have always been to announce expansion six at this Blizzcon. The delays to Warlords make the timing a little odd, but if you consider that, in an ideal world, Warlords would have been out months ago, it's not that strange to imagine they'd let us know what the next big thing will be.
And there's another factor at play here: Let's look at the initial premise: that announcing expansion six right before Warlords would kill excitement for Draenor. It could, in fact, have a totally opposite effect. World of Warcraft always exists in its current expansion - you don't see hardcore raiders running Black Temple or ICC anymore. Essentially, the true game is World of Warcraft, and whatever expansion is current is simply the latest incarnation thereof. The Daleks don't care whether the Doctor is Tom Baker or Peter Capaldi, and to players, WoW is simply there, in whatever form is current.
And what would be healthiest not for Warlords of Draenor, but for World of Warcraft itself?
Well, Mists of Pandaria's biggest flaw was that we went for about fourteen months without any new content. We didn't even know what the next expansion would be until we had been in Siege of Orgrimmar for about two months. The timing of that announcement, and the subsequent long, long wait for an Alpha or Beta, meant that the players were starving for something new for a huge span of time.
Blizzard is known for sort of overcompensating (look at how dungeons difficulty swings from super hard in BC to easy in Wrath to hard in Cataclysm and to super-easy in Mists,) and if Warlords took too long to be both announced and released, then perhaps they're going to work on getting expansion six announced and released super soon.
And that would do a huge deal to reassure players that they can expect new content soon. If we know where we're going post-Draenor before we even get there, we know that Blizzard has a road map, and they don't want us sitting around running whatever the Grommash raid is for over a year. Indeed, the fact that there's a potential downside - that Warlords would be over too soon for it to make a lasting impact - almost makes it even more believable!
Don't expect a new expansion announcement, because at the very best, you'll simply be correct. But please, join me in my pessimism, imagining that we'll just learn a bit about the Warcraft movie and watch as Starcraft and Diablo get cool new stuff while we wait wistfully for Demon Hunters and Azshara. Because when pessimists are wrong, something wonderful has happened.
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