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Speculation: Expansion 6 Will Be Announced At gamescom 2015

by - 9 years ago

The expansion cycle for the game is evolving. Once upon a time, an expansion announcement heralded the end of the current expansion before that story was complete:

  • Before we took down Kael’thas and Kil’jaeden at Sunwell Plateau, we knew we were headed to Northrend.
  • Before we fought Arthas for the Frozen Throne, we knew that Deathwing was going to chestburst out of the planet.
  • Before we flushed Deathwing, we knew that we were headed for Pandaria.

This started to change in Mists of Pandaria: shortly after the expansion’s announcement, we were told that Garrosh Hellscream would be the final boss of the expansion. When Patch 5.4 came out, with Garrosh as the final boss of Siege of Orgrimmar, the third tier of raiding for the expansion, that seemed to close the story as expected. However, this all happened two months BEFORE BlizzCon 2013: no new expansion had been announced, no trademark had been leaked, and no one was certain what was going to happen. Then Warlords was announced in November, and all seemed right with the world once more.

Flash forward to the present: Patch 6.2 appears to close the book on the narrative of Warlords of Draenor, despite being the only major content patch of the expansion. We’re still four months away from BlizzCon 2015, and there’s been no credible hints as to what the next expansion will be at this point.

What if we didn’t have to wait that long to learn what the next expansion is going to be?

In just about a month, Blizzard will be in Cologne, Germany for gamescom 2015. Looking at their press release for their presence there gives us our first clue:

Blizzard will be returning to Cologne, Germany for gamescom 2015 from August 5-9! Come and hang out at our booth, where you’ll be able to play our latest titles, including Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft.

When you’re not gaming, you can watch or take part in one of our fun contests—including our world-famous dance and costume competitions—or just relax and enjoy some epic entertainment.

We look forward to seeing you there!

We’ve been reporting on the respective teaser-driven hype trains for Hearthstone and Overwatch, while Heroes of the Storm’s recent broad release and the new Eternal Conflict expansion have also been making waves lately. Legacy of the Void is in beta currently and is definitely in line to be released this year, and it wouldn’t be surprising to hear a release date announced for it. The Diablo team is conspicuously absent, but recall that two years ago, Reaper of Souls was announced at gamescom.

And World of Warcraft will be there. Chilton was there last year to continue hyping Warlords, after all.

But there’s nothing for them to hype this time. World of Warcraft will be playable on the gamescom floor, but why? There’s no new content in the pipeline since Patch 6.2 has been released, and everything that the devs have said recently is that they’ve got nothing to announce about any future content for Warlords. So why spend the resources to have game stations set up for a game that has no new content in sight… unless they’re going to be announcing new content?

So far, that’s really all we have to go on. Patch 6.2 isn’t even as meaty of a patch as 5.4 was two years ago, and yet somehow Blizzard was okay with us living there for over a year while they completed WoD. We can be absolutely certain that Blizzard will announce a new expansion this year, but the longer we have to wait, the longer we’re going to be marinating in the fel-tainted pools of Tanaan, and if the subscription losses this expansion’s already sustained are any indication, patience isn’t a virtue that the WoW community seems interested in practicing. It’s in Blizzard’s best interest to get a new expansion hype train on the rails as soon as possible, and a beta test out there as soon as possible after that. At this point, I don’t see Blizzard waiting until Q4 2016 to release a new expansion, because it flat-out has to come sooner than that. 

If we start seeing some other big teasers, as we’re seeing right now for Blizzard’s other games and which we saw for Reaper of Souls two years ago, then perhaps there’s hope for this. If any other evidence starts to show up, you’ll know about five minutes after we do. So stay tuned friends. The next few months are going to be pretty tense.


posted in Warcraft
JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Speculation: Expansion 6 Will Be Announced At gamescom 2015”

  1. Gustav Andreasson says:

    Interesting read.

    I would add:

    – Blizzard didn’t want us to stay in 5.4 for as long as we did. Warlords was scheduled to be released in the summer of 2014, as confirmed by Tom Chilton in one of his Gamescom interviews last year. So they aren’t “okay” with having long gaps between expansions at all.

    – Also at Gamescom last year, Chilton confirmed they already had zones in production for the next expansion. By now, the expansion should be very far into its development cycle.

    – During MoP, the community asked for a Patch 5.5 to provide some closure on MoP. “The Trial of Garrosh Hellscream” was instead put inside a novel, and Blizzard explained to us how additional patches would simply delay the next expansion. I think the same is true now, and see no reason why they would want to dwell on Warlords by giving us a 6.3 content patch.

    – In the past, they’ve roughly needed a year-or-so between announcement and expansion release. If they announce at Gamescom, the latest they will be able to release the next expansion is in the summer of 2016, which coincides well with the movie release.

    – Since we also know, however, that they are desperately trying to reduce the content gap between final patches and new expansions, and that the optimal lifespan of a raid tier is 4-9 months in their opinion, it is likely they will want to shorten this release cycle to have the new expansion out in the spring of 2016 – around 9 months after 6.2 was released.

    – While this might seem impossible, I don’t think it is. Granted, Warlords required a year between announcement and release, and it was a fairly brief expansion. But we musn’t forget that the team underwent drastic changes around that time, and that the development of WoD was simply not optimal. It is likely they announced it before they really had much to show, and needed the full year before release simply to finish everything in time. With a bigger and more prepared development team now in place, this situation shouldn’t arise again. Expansion 6 will probably be as short as Warlords of Draenor, but the time between announcement and release should be shorter.

    – I predict a Gamescom 2015 unveiling, and a Q1 (or early Q2) 2016 release of Expansion 6.