Well, we’re about a week away from Blizzcon. Next Wednesday your’s truley will be landing in California with the Spooncraft crew and we’re laying siege to the Holiday Inn near the Anaheim Convention Center.
Elgar sent me a message through my contact form asking me basically, what is the next big announcement that Blizzard is going to drop on us for this event? There are rumors going crazy all over, but out of all the chaos only a precious few stand out. So here they are WARNING THERE BE SOME SPIOLERS AHEAD:
Could be nothing at all.
That’s right it could be nothing. There might not be any special announcement at all. We already had the major announcement this year in Paris at the Worldwide Invitational about Diablo III. That might be it for us at this time.
Starcraft II Launch Date
With all the buzz about Wrath of the Lich King and Diablo III, Starcraft 2 has somewhat fallen to the wayside for most big newsy sites. I check it every once in a while as with the Diablo 3 site and aside from new artwork there hasn’t been anything completely jaw dropping to mention.
The next World of Warcraft expansion
Now this is pretty unlikely to be honest, I mean they’re about to release Wrath of the Lich King and it’s still not finished yet in the grand scheme of things, however.
With the cinematic and truly EPIC quest event involving opening the Wrath Gate in the Dragonblight where Highlord Bolvar and Saurfang the Younger meet their fate; there’s a very dark and climactic end! Essentially the King of Stormwind declares all out war between the Horde and the Alliance, so we’re staring at Warcraft 4! The next expansion (or even a new GAME) will be centered around the mounting war between the Horde and the Alliance.
Another possible option as always is the Maelstrom where the city of Nazjatar and other very notable countries/areas can be found. Fighting old gods and Queen Azshara herself, there’s even the very basic conceptual designs of a giant temple city deal on top of a giant squid type nautalus creature that’s very close in lore to the underwater realm of the Naga; and then there’s the broken isles where sargeras’ tomb remains. Or we can finally delve into the Emerald Dream since there’s already a quest in Northrend (Icecrown) where you end up having to enter the dream for some medicine. There’s also existing art all over the place since original vanilla WoW.
So there you have it. Any other ideas?
Blizzard did say that have a MMO they have been working on that isn’t WoW. It could be it. from Blizzards Entertainment Employment page “Unannounced” “Next-Gen MMO”
Yeah, they might be announcing that, but I doubt it. They’ve already got Wrath of the Lich King, Diablo 3 AND Starcraft 2 on their plate, and even after Wrath releases, it won’t be finished – they still will have to add things like Icecrown Citadel and keep making tweaks to it. TBC at release and TBC now are completely different because they kept working on it – I guarantee you they won’t be finished with Wrath at release.
They won’t be announcing anything about their new MMO until they’ve pretty much milked all the money they could out of WoW, and it still has a LOT of juice left in it.
Thanks for the information Spooner. I thought that the next Xpac would be unlikely, but they did say they had planned to release one Xpac a year, the timing would be on target for a Nov. release each year since they did announce LK last Blizzcon.
Though I have to agree that the big cinematic does lend itself to the lead of WC4. Which would be great as well! I’m always up for more expanding lore. WC3 had NE and Scourge factions though…now that the forsaken have joined up with the Horde and the NE with the Alliance any thoughts on what other playable factions their might be??
i have been seeing alot about blizzard wanting to start working on the graphics engines, and other mechanics to brin WoW up to speed with the quality and technology of other games currently coming out and make the platform able to sustain another 5 years of gaming.
That being said the Emerald Dream would be a great start for this. With the lore and visuals possible for ED would really be the ideal time to roll out the new platform and game engines. Also looking back to TBC (being a druid my self with epic flight form) the devs are giving more and more tastes of the ED through quest lines and even raids (Nordrassil in Hyjal) . Then again I could only be biased but the 2 seems to be very likely possibilities.
don’t think they will announce a new expansion but possibly tell us they are looking at the future of how we play WOW.
World of Starcraft.
No, the next-gen MMO they’re working on is NOT based off of any of their current franchises Jared, that much they’ve stated explicitly. Whatever it is, it’s a brand-new franchise. They might announce the title and nature of what they’re wokring on at Blizzcon, but I think that if they do, they’ll make it clear that it’s on the back-burner to WotLK, SC2 and D3.
Something entirely new, eh? I wonder what will make it next-gen, should be exciting. I can’t imagine that they’d announce it so soon, there’s so much going on as it is. Who knows, maybe they’ll just blow our minds and announce it anyway.
Well you’ll hear it first here from my own mouth on video in about oh, 9 days?