During WoW's first ten years, the folks at Blizzard constantly talked about wanting to release expansions on a faster schedule. The one-year-expansion was a goal that they were constantly chasing. But when they really leaned into that, shortening Warlords of Draenor's patch cycle (other than a kind of nothing 6.1 that gave us in-game voice chat - trying to solve issues that were typically handled via third-party programs) to just one major content patch, it still took just as long to get the follow-up, Legion, together.
While my nearly-40 brain still thinks of Legion as being fairly recent, I realize that younger players (such as there are) might not have even been playing during the shift from Warlords to Legion. Let me tell you this: it was enormous. Warlords was a profoundly anemic expansion, with minimal outdoor world content and one fewer raid than we were used to getting (though starting in Shadowlands, the "intro raid" kind of went away and hasn't come back, so technically there were just as many raids as we got in Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and War Within). Legion is remembered as among, if not the greatest of WoW expansions in large part due to the fact that there was just so much to do.
But I remember at the time, when they justified the limited scope of Warlords by stating their intent to release annual expansions, that I had the following reaction: what if we don't want annual expansions?
New expansions are exciting and fun, but they are also a reset. While you could argue that every major patch is a bit of a reset - gear of a certain quality goes from being the most elite, difficult-to-attain stuff to being trivially easy to grab from world quests, while the challenging content now awards higher item-level stuff than what was previously attainable, there are other factors at play - primarily things like secondary stats, which actually become less effective when we get to higher levels. You spend an entire expansion getting a higher and higher critical strike chance (which can have real notable changes to the feel of a spec like Fire Mages) and then it all goes down again.
But then there's also the monetary factor: expansions are just as expensive as a brand new video game (well, maybe not quite, now that games are going for like 70 bucks in some cases). We're already paying a monthly subscription for WoW, so if you think about it, a 50 dollar expansion every two years means an extra 25 bucks a year, which then doubles if we get more frequent releases.
While Blizzard seems to have thought that they were going to be able to follow up Warlords of Draenor with the next expansion in the fall of 2015, ultimately this proved erroneous - Legion didn't come out until 2016, which meant that we sat with Warlords' final patch for well over a year before we got anything new.
That, clearly, wasn't ideal. I remember that when Legion was announced at Gamescom in 2015, it got a very muted response from the crowd, who seemed skeptical in the wake of the disappointment of Warlords (to be fair, Gamescom is also in Germany, a country with a very different cultural vibe than America, so this muted response might have also just been a cultural thing).
In 2023, when War Within was announced, they took the unprecedented step of announcing the following two expansions, with these three making up the Worldsoul Saga. This strange thing about that is that we didn't really have a grand period of speculation this year about what could be coming after War Within - we already knew, and until the Last Titan comes out, we're on a known path.
In Shadowlands and Dragonflight, we've had a "season four," where all the content that had been released with the expansion rotates to be the new, current content. It's a relatively easy way to give players something to do while they wait for the extensive design, development, and playtesting of the next expansion. I was surprised to find that War Within would not have this.
And, it turns out, Midnight's pre-patch is expected to arrive in January - just two months from now (though toward the end of the month). Pre-patches tend to come only 3-4 weeks (there might have been one that was as much as 6) before the launch of an expansion, which means that we can pretty confidently expect Midnight to launch as early as February or maybe March of 2026.
That would put it far ahead of basically every expansion launch ever. Burning Crusade launched in January of 2007 (the only launch in an odd-numbered year, with Vanilla going through fall of 2004, then all of 2005 and 2006). Wrath came out in November of 2008. Cataclysm was December of 2010. Mists came out in September of 2012. Warlords was November of 2014. Legion was August of 2016. Battle for Azeroth was August of 2018. Shadowlands was November of 2020. Dragonflight was November of 2022. And War Within was August of 2024.
Rounding off to the nearest month (BC's January 16th release date is right on the border, so it's arguable whether January of 2007 ought to count for Vanilla or BC, especially considering how lengthy expansion launches/installations were back then,) I've determined how long each expansion has actually been "the current expansion." Oddly, Shadowlands is the most precisely two-year-long expansion (it was technically two years and five days, as it launched on Nov. 23rd of 2020 and Dragonflight was Nov. 28th of 2022).
Vanilla: 25 months
BC: 23 months
Wrath: 25 months
Cataclysm: 22 months
Mists: 25 months
Warlords: 22 months
Legion: 23 months
BFA: 26 months (to be fair, Shadowlands was delayed due to Covid)
Shadowlands: 24 months
Dragonflight: 23 months
War Within (assuming Midnight launches in late February): 18 months
But yes, this shows that, if Midnight truly launches in late February or early March, the War Within expansion will be the shortest expansion by four months, and down 5.8 months from the average of all previous expansions/vanilla. With typically biennial releases (the average prior is 23.8 months, which is pretty close to 24) we're going to have an expansion that was only a year and a half long.
Is this a bad thing or a good thing?
Well, to be fair, every expansion has had something of a long tail. 3.3's Fall of the Lich King came out in early December of 2009, a bit over a year after the expansion's launch, but then it would be almost exactly a year before the launch of Cataclysm (though Cata had a lengthy pre-patch, which included the old world revamp, so there was new stuff to do prior to the expansion's proper launch).
Ghosts of K'aresh came out in August, so that means that the content lull we usually get after the final major patch of an expansion is significantly shorter, which is probably a good thing (though it does put a little more time pressure on me to try to get an actual full set of hero-level gear and upgrade it to mythic appearances. My main has all but the belt and cloak, the latter of which I'm genuinely not sure how to get).
Now, what does this mean for Midnight and The Last Titan? Should we expect a kind of acceleration of expansion releases? Will we be playing The Last Titan as early as later summer or fall of 2027?
Furthermore, if Blizzard has finally gotten this efficient at putting out new expansions, would we prefer that they just make those expansions bigger instead?
Consider, for example, that in Mists of Pandaria, Legion, and Battle for Azeroth, we actually had four fairly substantial raids. BFA dropped class tier sets, so the actual distinction between Uldir and the later raids was kind of non-existent. But in Mists, Legion, and Warlords of Draenor, there was a kind of "intro raid" that didn't give us tier sets, and shared armor models with the first "major raid," but was still pretty substantive. Mogu'shan Vaults, Highmaul, and the Emerald Nightmare were serious raids that came out before we started getting tier pieces in places like The Heart of Fear/Terrace of Eternal Spring, Blackrock Foundry, or The Nighthold. Previously, we had also had four raid tiers in Wrath of the Lich King. Vanilla and BC were kind of messes in this regard, with lots of raids that didn't totally fit into these paradigms (officially, tier 1 was Molten Core, tier 2 was Blackwing Lair, and tier 3 was Naxxramas, but there were the two Ahn-Qiraj raids that came out I believe between BWL and Naxx that certainly seemed like pretty substantial raids).
Anyway, it's just kind of remarkable that War Within is going to wind up being so short compared to other expansions.
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