A New Beta Version 8.0...etc Coming Up: Confirming What We Were Already Pretty Sure About

So, according to MMO-Champion, WoW's Beta build has been updated to an 8.0 number.

What does this mean?

Well, it means that Blizzard has an 8.0 in the works, which would mean expansion seven (obviously Vanilla WOW was 1.x.) That should not be a surprise, given that WoW is still a fairly popular game and we've gotten an expansion every two years, with an announcement about a year in advance.

As suggested on MMO-Champion, this Beta build probably has nothing to do with the actual closed beta that lucky players will be invited to test at home, but is probably going to allow players to do something at Blizzcon, which is of course in only a couple weeks.

We saw similar things at past expansion announcements: the Demon Hunter quests on Mardum were open at Gamescom in 2015, and some later nixed Shadowmoon Valley quests were available at Blizzcon in 2013, and I believe that you could play a low-level Pandaren Monk on the Wandering Isle at Blizzcon 2011 - so it stands to reason that players will have access to some of the new stuff at this year's Blizzcon.

While I would say this provides pretty strong confirmation that we're getting an expansion announcement at Blizzcon (aside from the strongest confirmation: that it's an odd-numbered year) the fact is that we don't really have any direct evidence of what that expansion would entail.

But even if the consensus on rumors/speculation are accurate (namely a South Seas/Void/Old God expansion) that still doesn't actually tell us much about the content that would be playable at Blizzcon.

Often these playable previews seem to involve what I call "new character incentives" like new races or classes. Warlords had neither, so they just had stuff in one of the two starter zones.

I think I'll probably write a whole other post about what kind of "NCIs" we might see in expansion seven, but the possibility of a playable preview at the 'con does not guarantee that such a thing will exist.

Still, even though the fact that Legion is getting ready for its final raid tier should all but guarantee that the next expansion gets announced soon, this really puts another nail in the coffin in the idea that they wouldn't.