Blizzcon '15 Announced, Nov 6&7

Blizzcon 2015 has been announced, and it'll be on November 6th and 7th this year.

That's pretty much all the new information I have, but what does it mean for WoW and Blizzard's other games?

I think we could easily hear about a new Diablo expansion - Reaper of Souls came out last year and more or less fixed the game, but at this point Malthael is old-hat.

Hearthstone is seeing sort of lower-stakes expansions with less fanfare. I'd expect to see more of that, unless Blizzard decides to create a new class, like the Death Knight or Monk (Arthas and Chen Stormstout, I'd assume as the heroes.)

Starcraft likely won't have anything huge to announce, as the Legacy of the Void will be the next big thing for that franchise.

We could get a Heroes of the Storm official release date (though now that you can pay to be in the Beta... what's the difference between that and its being available? I don't understand you, MOBAs!

Overwatch will likely be more fleshed out. Given that it's a brand-new property I think we might be waiting a bit longer for an actual release, but I expect we'll see a whole lot more detail about it in the year that's passed.

And finally:

We are 99.99999% certain to get the announcement of WoW's next expansion. Really the only reason we wouldn't is if we already knew about it. And, ok, that's maybe a bit better than a .00001% chance, but I think we're going to see thing play out they have for the past five expansions - every year we alternate between announcement and release.

So if we assume that expansion 6 will not be announced until Blizzcon, what does that mean for scheduling and Warlords of Draenor?

After the long delay for Warlords - the expansion was announced two months after there was nothing left to implement in Mists of Pandaria, yet we still didn't get the thing until the usual Fall release - I dearly hope that Blizzard is aware of the effect of a content drought. To be fair, every expansion has had one (BC had it between patches though, as Black Temple came out way too early and people had to wait a long time for Sunwell.) Still, I think we're going to be in big trouble if, having predicted a faster cycle, Blizzard designed Warlords around two raid tiers, and then wound up with the same two-year expansion cycle.

So if they don't announce the new expansion before Blizzcon, they're going to need to bring the big guns. Announce the start of the Beta as something imminent, not something to be expected eight months later.

Anyway, Blizzcon doesn't strictly determine when expansions come out, though, so I'll remain cautiously optimistic and remind myself of the fact that I am actually enjoying the current expansion, and I'm eager to see what's in store for us in Tanaan Jungle, what with SPOILERS happening there.