Have you looked on the Warcraft forums recently? If you have you can’t fail to have noticed the amount of interest the next expansion is provoking. Hardly surprising given how good it currently looks.
But let’s forget the details for now, what about the chronology?
Cataclysm is probably a long way off. Blizzard has announced that there will be no major content updates after patch 3.3 The Icecrown Citadel. If you are a player with characters currently doing end game instances this should raise some concerns.
Let’s read that again. “No major content additions between now and Cataclysm”
Looking back over the history of Warcraft updates, it follows a pretty tight pattern. Major additions in the form of “on tenth” increment patches or expansions are released every four to five months. The longest wait so far was between 2.4 and 3.0 (i.e. not including the “one hundredth” increments, they aren’t generally content additions) March 2008 to October 2008. Just over five and a half months.
Looking at Amazon, Wal-Mart, EB, Game etc, I see place holder dates for Cataclysm of “November 2010″ and “Quarter 4 2010″. So the most optimistic of these has the next expansion almost 10 months after the last major patch. The average date is close to a year.
A whole year? I’m enjoying Icecrown as much as anyone. But a year?
I can assure you of one thing, not just progressive raiding guilds, but just about everyone and their donkey will have exhausted the Icecrown well before November 2010. Will we all be sitting twiddling our thumbs with BiS items for all our characters for months waiting for the next content?
What do Blizzard expect us to do in the mean time? Keep paying the subscription then sit back and twiddle our thumbs?
In short, no. Let’s be sensible Blizzard is well aware of the game mechanics and the need for constant progression. It is the absolute lifeblood of Warcraft both as players and for Blizzard financially.
There are two possibilities.
Patch 3.4. Possibly re-envisioning some Troll instances to bring their Lore back up to date. Also giving the Worg a bit of a nudge to get them kick started or…
The Cataclysm expansion will be released in early fall (autumn) no later than September.
Mentioning either of these in Warcraft forums will get you called all the names under the sun. But understand this. Blizzard will not let the game run out of content for high end players (i.e, most players) It just won’t happen. Running out of content would be a financial disaster for Blizzard, and they know this.