World of Warcraft Sixth Expansion Already in Development!!

[Deleted]

If they are released faster then I'm not so bothered, but if we have to wait ages for these "not so much" content expansions then meh.

[Deleted]

I hope we will see in the 6th xpac the emerald dream and the south seas, kul'tiras, undermine, etc, etc....

[vaccine]

Are you seriously complaining that they are going to release content too fast? There's no pleasing this fanbase :P

Seems to be on these forums especially. Going from a few other gaming forums I read to this is like running into a wall of hatred. Doesn't even matter the game, jump into the HotS forum and there are an overwhelming majority of negative posts.

Honestly I'd love 18 month expansions. They're the best time in the game, the excitement of a huge amount of new content, the levelling up with friends and working on heroic achievement meta whilst gearing for raiding. Making a bomb off of the auction house using the new profession changes. So personally I would love faster and faster expansions.

[Aqua]

Are you seriously complaining that they are going to release content too fast? There's no pleasing this fanbase :P

A fanbase is made up of individuals. Each with their own opinions. I've no complaints at faster content, but I have a condition for that complacency. I better not see a dip in the quality of expansions nor in their time played by the community. Cataclysm suffered some absurd end game stagnation because of poor time constraints and use of said time and as a result you can see it's not a favored experience by the majority of the playerbase, despite offering up a strong start. Great for starting players, however neglecting the 12million that were playing at the time and exhausting them with difficulties that masked the misuse of the expansion to further the new player experience (Which I was infavor of doing but should have been a side project I remember saying at the time, do one zone for a patch or something)

This might be a good thing to start off on, I'm happy with the expansion starting off with several strong core ideas and then using the time the expansion is active to shower the new stuff on and develop it more and more.

20man raids is great, now the encounter design team can spend less time worrying about balance and just put out some awesome hard encounters. Excellent.

Garrisons has a potential to be a fantastic feature with RTS elements if let loose to expand and develop (I'm holding out for separate racial architecture in the long run, I want my silvermoon type town dammit) and might scratch the itch of a few people wanting such features.

Player models... ugnrghngh as an artist I was heavily bias in favor of this feature I'll tell you now. I cannot wait. I have a feeling some might be let down for it, but I spend a great deal of time admiring all the graphical work in WoW, and this feature will simply ramp up my immersion 10fold as all of the models finally feel like flowing, well animated characters. And that includes the NPC's.


If Draenor ends up being a beautiful, well told, wonderful experience ontop of all this it's the cherry on the sundae.

[Toiran]

It's been the same throughout WoW's history.

Everything is planned far in advance and worked on far in advance, subject to changes minor or major, they know exactly what's going down the next 3 years at least, I'd imagine it's closer to a five year plan that's generally set in stone with a very loose 10 year plan.

It's very basic business practice.

They have also always said they wanted an annual expansion/content out faster, they have just never been able to deliver on it.

More/Quicker released content does not reflect on the quality of said content at all, 40% increase in staff for WoD being an example of this, allowing them to create more content/better content faster in the future, it's all a ongoing drip effect.

[Deleted]

We also have to start looking further down the road and planning further out. We've already started working on the expansion after this one [Warlords of Draenor]. We've never done that in the past. We've been doing one expansion at a time, sort of a very linear content creation model, and we've looked at ways that we can parallelize that. So that while we're working on this expansion we're looking at the new one."

How can that be true? They said that they've been working on Cataclysm even since before WotLK.

[ReleaseDay]

I doubt they'd release expansions every year. This isn't Call of Duty where they churn out the same crap every year.

In blizzards defense, they have never "churn out the same crap every year" each expansion has been very different from the other.

[Imnick]

How can that be true? They said that they've been working on Cataclysm even since before WotLK.

I'm assuming he's talking about different magnitudes of "working on"
They were probably drafting concepts of what was going to happen in Cataclysm before Wrath, but maybe he means they are actually starting to make content for the next expansion already (things like rough but playable maps with no new assets, the kind of thing you can do without distracting the main team much)

[Kraenen]

Are you seriously complaining that they are going to release content too fast? There's no pleasing this fanbase :P

50 bucks for garrisons isn't exactly what i'd call content.

[Sabi]

It's been the same throughout WoW's history.

Everything is planned far in advance and worked on far in advance, subject to changes minor or major, they know exactly what's going down the next 3 years at least, I'd imagine it's closer to a five year plan that's generally set in stone with a very loose 10 year plan.

It's very basic business practice.

They have also always said they wanted an annual expansion/content out faster, they have just never been able to deliver on it.

More/Quicker released content does not reflect on the quality of said content at all, 40% increase in staff for WoD being an example of this, allowing them to create more content/better content faster in the future, it's all a ongoing drip effect.

exactly, I swear they even mentioned they work at least 2 xpacs ahead multiple times. Why this is breaking new...or IGN is the source...nevermind.

[Chirri]

I've always been under the impression that they've got work started on Expansion 3 before they've released Expansion 2. Not so much that they're already working on in game terrain and models, so much as smashing story ideas around and working with how it'll all fit together - but there's only so much they can do when E2's story line hasn't quite been polished off, as indicated by some of the responses I heard during the Con.

I hope they ARE churning out new content on an annual basis, to an extent (I'd like a 1.5 year cycle, after the pace they've set during MoP, but slower would work alright as well if they'd just hold back on the damn patches rather than burying players under patches and then making us wait more than 8 months for the expansion that comes afterward). I hope the expansions actually contain an expansion's amount of content, rather than simply being a slightly bigger patch with a special name.

[Cute Chen]

WoD already feels like an Everquest exansion. 40 New Quests! New Items! New Monsters!

[Deleted]

They are always working on the next 2. Zone and art wise at least.

[DeadmanWalking]

This does not surprise me as they have been working on WoD since MoP dropped. The first team creates the leveling content, world, art assets and major themes and then once the expansion drops they go to work on the next expansion while other sets of teams step in and creates raiding content, scenarios, mid-raid content (barrens in 5.3) and the like. Then the next expansion drops and they do it all over again.