New World of Warcraft Expansion Announcement April 19th

 We've been speculating for a while about when we'd actually hear about the next WoW expansion, and now we have a date: April 19th.

Given that 9.2 is already out, this is a bit farther down the line than I think some of us had expected, but I believe this will be the date that the last LFR wing for the Sepulcher of the First Ones comes out, so that might be judged as the moment Shadowlands, as an expansion, is truly "done."

Shadowlands is an expansion that I have profoundly mixed feelings about. It started off very strong - I think 9.0 was among, if not the best expansion-launching patch we've ever had. But the expansion suffered from a slow rollout of content, not to mention the meta-narrative problems involving the scandals at Blizzard. I don't know how much that affected the average gamer's experience of the expansion, but it definitely did for me.

I don't know exactly to what degree the expansion's shortened patch list was the result of the pandemic and how much was planned this way, but I did truly think that after the disastrous Warlords of Draenor that Blizzard would never again make an expansion with only three raids (to be fair, Castle Nathria felt more like a full raid than an "intro raid" like Highmaul, and that distinction has been somewhat fuzzier in recent years - but the number of raids in Shadowlands does remain the same as that of Warlords).

But, setting aside critiques and disappointments (see, I was never really on board for Warlords of Draenor, but I really wanted Shadowlands to be as amazing as the premise promised) let's talk about what comes next.

Unlike Legion and BFA, I don't think there's been a really strong hint moving forward about what's coming next. Legion was awash in various implications that the Old Gods, and N'zoth in particular, might be up to something, and BFA was filled with a theme of death and death magic. Shadowlands has mostly, it seems, been focused on its own themes and objectives, and expanding out the cosmic story of World of Warcraft.

But I doubt that they'd follow this up with another Planescape-like journey into metaphysical planes. It seems like we need to have a return to the grounded reality of Azeroth.

So, practically everyone has unanimously concluded that we'll be getting the long-speculated Dragon Isles expansion. It's been twelve years since Cataclysm launched, which was the last time that dragons were really front-and-center (and, frankly, I think Cataclysm's "elementals in chaos" theme was actually the bigger vibe of that expansion - Deathwing was the first of the failures to repeat the success of Arthas as a villain) so I think the game could re-visit that. There's no clear big bad for such an expansion (unless Galakrond were somehow brought back) but, then, there wasn't for Shadowlands (though I hope that if it's a new character they avoid the beefy dude-bro feel that undermined how cool the Jailer could have been).

I also know that WoW has a lot of classes to balance, but we haven't had a really great incentive to create a new character since Legion - apologies to those who love the allied races. I do think a new class is more practical than new specs for each class - the latter would seem to mean less work until you consider that that'd mean four times as many new specs.

We'll know come April 19th!