Blizzard will announce the next WoW expansion at Gamescom

"Join us Thursday, August 6 at 9 a.m. PDT for a special World of Warcraft event streamed live from gamescom 2015 in Cologne, Germany—where we’ll be unveiling the next chapter of the World of Warcraft saga. . . . Tune in again Sunday, August 9 at 8:00 a.m. PDT for a World of Warcraft developer chat before the show ends, and find out more about what’s in store."

This might add some steam into the expansion releasing as early as this year since they are not waiting till Blizzcon to announce it. The content for Warriors of Draenor, the current expansion, is all out, and it would be pretty bad for Blizzard to wait over a year for the next expansion like they did with Mists of Pandara.

I really doubt it would be out this year. I would expect more of a January-March date but who knows. WoD has been pretty disappointing so I'm excited to see what's next. Will it be Azshara? Burning Legion? Will we return to Northrend?

It's most likely how they're going to end out the expansion. While 6.2 is the last raid it is not the last patch.

@irvandus I can't remember who exactly it was, but one of the devs confirmed 6.2 was the last content patch for WoD.

how many damn expansions are they gonna make? It's getting out of hand.

@getz: Don't they need to keep putting out expansions in order for people to keep playing?

@getz: EverQuest has over 20 expansions. 6 spread out over a decade isn't much.

@redroach: Cory Stockton. I just reread his interview, I'll post a link.

I read it more as a no more raids or major stuff but there will be something inbetween this and the next expansion. Maybe I'm just hopefull because I feel even with 6.2, which is really well designed, Draenor is really sparse and I guarantee it's going to be a long gap between this and next xpac.

Although the more I think about it they could announce at gamescon and do a big in depth thing at blizzcon

Wowheads post of the Stockton interview: http://www.wowhead.com/news=248176/6-2-mamytwink-interview-hellfire-citadel-planned-as-last-warlords-raid-and-more

I don't think you can really compare Everquest expansions with WoW ones. Especially considering Blizzard puts out content updates that rival what those expansions were doing, and they do it for free.

I'm scared by this. Warlords took the game in such a weird direction, and was really lacking in content compared to previous expansions. Combine that with only one major content patch during WoD's life (6.1 was in no way a major patch), and 6.2 being the last big patch they do, a new expansion in no way interests me, and I played the game hardcore for 9 years.

I have no idea what they need to do in order to recapture the old magic of the game, or if that's even possible with the gaming landscape of today, but the game that Warlords became was far from WoW at it's core.

I think the old adage of "the only game that will kill WoW is WoW" is coming to pass. There has been some serious executive mismanagement of WoD (and arguably MoP). Players are now treated as a 'cyclical base', content is deliberately withheld - and don't even get me started on PvP.

My cynical view tells me this is all due to the money-men at the top. Everything about Draenor that hasn't been inexplicably removed due the nebulous excuse of 'scarce resources!' has been par excellence. The leveling, the raiding and the art direction is the best that WoW has ever seen.

It's unlikely Warcraft will keel over soon. But unless something is done about upper management and their policy of drastic cost-cutting, WoW will end up little more than a shallow reflection of itself.

Warlords of Draenor was a pile of garbage. Blizzard lost a lot of goodwill with wow players after this disaster of an expansion. I have little faith they can return the game to its former glory again.

My brother bought me draenor, had fun with it for a month; didn't resub. At the time people seemed to be happy but I guess everyone turned on it since then. The cross server raid pugging/LFG system was cool (LFR was a good time to afk on /follow by comparison).

Panda was shit, Warlords was shit. Whatever they make next will be shit. Wow has been dead to me for a long time.

It still amazes me that they are making more expansions to WoW and that they cancelled Titan. I wish I understood Blizzard.

"WoD" felt like the producers started going in one direction and the suddenly something happened to make them abandon it and release it immediately. This is why it feels very incomplete and slapped together.

@dixavd: I think it's more of a money thing than anything. It's gotta be cheaper to put out small expansions like Draenor than putting out a whole new game. They still make a ridiculous amount of money from wow expansions. I think they were at 10 million subs again at the release of Draenor.

Plus they have resources put towards heroes of the storm and that overwatch game. I think a new blizzard mmo is a long ways away if it ever happens.

Did the third starcraft 2 campaign ever come out?

Warlords was a major disappointment, but I still think WoW has some life in it yet. My hope is that WoD was designed to be a bit of filler while Blizzard's best people were working on a more substantial and better designed expansion to coincide with the Warcraft film's release next year. My worry is that Blizzard's best people have already left the company, their next-best people are focused on Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm, their next-next-best people are tasked on Hearthstone and Diablo 3, and WoW is solely the domain of the Blizzard 'D Team'.

@laserbolts: I know at some point it comes down to a bunch of spreadsheets and numbers, but it is disappointing to see a lot of their work come from the same fiction/ideas. I had hope they'd do something completely new thematically eventually (but that's very hard to do when staying with WoW). I can hold out hope that maybe Overwatch could be the source of that instead though.

And the second Starcraft 2 expansion (third campaign) is currently in Beta to be officially released later this year (or, more likely, early next year) but I'm not surprised you haven't noticed because they really dropped the ball with post-release of Heart of the Swarm.

zzZZzzzzzzz

Rumor has it that it's going to be focused on Vol'jin and Malfurion or something, in terms of the lore. I dunno man, every change they've made since the end of WotLK has made the game slower, it seems, just from a combat perspective. Snappy fast paced PvP is why I played WoW for years, and they've failed to capture that magic ever since the Cataclysm changes. Gone are the days of the lightning fast rogue duels that ended in about 10 seconds after a hundred different split-second decisions.

Wasn't the biggest feature of 6.2 Tanaan Jungle, a zone that was suppose to be available at launch? I see Blizzard is very quick to bury WoD in the sand, and for good reason.

@takayamasama The magic can not be brought back. Wows hayday from BC to WotLK culminated in them doing so much right. They were for the most part doing everything right. They had villians people cared about. They also followed up with logical conclusions to story arcs, villians from the expac didn't hang around until the next expansion. It is like the are so scared of altering the world that they don't want to kill anyone off so they bring in a shitty time travel plot so you can kill guys without consequence.

wow it doesn't seem that long since the last announcement?