WoW and Expansion Release Cadence – Does The Blizzcon News Mean More Frequent Expansions?

At Blizzcon this last weekend, Blizzard announced not one, not two, but three new WoW expansions, the next three in sequence to follow Dragonflight. That’s pretty cool, even if it is also an overstatement of what one means when we consider a Blizzard announcement. Lost in the shuffle and left sort of ambiguous, however, is the timeline. We know that The War Within, the next expansion, is coming in the fall of 2024, in the spot most of us would assume it would rightfully launch and in time to commemorate WoW’s 20th anniversary.

Why is this even a question? Well, for literal ages at the start of WoW’s lifetime, Blizzard insisted the goal they had in mind was to hit a yearly release cadence – to consistently drop new content via expansions with each calendar year. They never once hit the mark, and eventually gave up on saying it. In announcing 3 consecutive expansions all in simultaneous development, however, Blizzard has opened the box of curiousity once more, because with this much content in the works, theoretically they could just release annually, right?

Blizzcon weekend had one press member ask the question in an interview and get the vague answer (which I used to shape my timeline in my initial post on the news) that the Worldsoul Saga of these 3 expansions would be concluded “by 2030.” Not in 2030, but by it. Under current expansion release math, that tracks to the existing schedule – The War Within in 2024, Midnight in 2026, The Last Titan in 2028, final patches for that in 2030 in time for whatever 14.0 is in late 2030. That tracks and feels intuitively correct, but is it?

One of the things that is consistently pointed out by my contemporaries in the MMO blogging space, rightly so, is that WoW (and FFXIV for that matter) is slow to release expansions. Even games with far smaller player counts often release annual expansions, or multiple expansions in the time it takes Blizzard to deliver one. There’s an interesting debate to be had about the viability of those more-frequent expansions and the size of the offering when compared to WoW’s expansion model, but it doesn’t make that big of a difference if you can buy two expansions that offer about the same amount of content as one WoW expansion and for a similar or cheaper price. WoW’s model has been focused on the content patches, releasing regular big drops of content during an expansion such that an expansion is never just what it launches as – it is instead the composite product of the launch experience and 2-4 patches over the course of the two year lifecycle each expansion has, with the next expansion offering a full reset and basically starting the treadmill fresh again for everyone to hop back on, no matter if they stayed on for the whole prior cycle or not.

Why would Blizzard want annual expansions? Well, I mean the obvious first implication is money – being publicly traded means that having regular cashflow is key and if Blizzard could take the existing playerbase pattern (expansion launches bring spikes of players which tapers off over time), then having that cycle every year instead of every two years is a boon. Secondly, I think that Blizzard only stands to benefit if they reduce or even remove the existence of the post-patch lull between expansions – a big part of their current cycle hits a problem when every final content patch launches and then hangs in the air for months or even nearly a full year as the only thing worth doing in the game. Some of that is a problem specific to WoW and its design (only current content matters and nothing that came before is ever worth doing outside of cosmetic reward), but some of it is down to development cycle – those lulls exist because the team is still working to create what comes next.

Thirdly, and what I think deserves some analysis, is that Blizzard has been setting up this path for a minute now, with patch content marking an obvious point where you can see them considering it.

In Shadowlands, we got two major patches coupled with minor story in the final minor patches of the expansion. To keep the lull at bay, Blizzard put together Season 4, scaling up the Shadowlands raids, creating a bespoke dungeon season and minor tweaks to raid mechanics to keep players invested and playing over just kind of letting them decide what to clean up in the expansion content that was already there. Dragonflight is about to be in the same boat, with two major patches (although, admittedly, much better minor patches and added content through those), but earlier into its lifespan, and Blizzcon interviews carried the news that there would indeed be a Season 4 of Dragonflight in the same way there was in Shadowlands – perhaps with some changes, but the general spirit of the thing is the same. While we can’t say with a lot of certainty what was truly planned for either Shadowlands or Dragonflight, it seems fairly apparent that both expansions, but especially Shadowlands, got a bit of a hair cut in development. Shadowlands’ culminating raid, Sepulcher of the First Ones, was fairly obviously two raid concepts smushed together in the middle to make a single raid and done in a way that hurt the emotional impact and interest of the Anduin story (which is now foundational to the story to come starting in The War Within) and also shortchanged the Jailer, giving no real time to expand his story and making him into one of the worst-built villains ever to appear in WoW. Dragonflight likewise appears to be ending, given what we know about tomorrow’s Guardians of the Dream patch story, without a resolution to the story of the Incarnates and with only a flimsy connection to future events through the silhouette of Xal’atath, who we know now will be in TWW and will be the central villian that the story revolves, largely, around.

So why bring this up? Well, we have two expansions in a row now where the final major patch was x.2, compared to the WoW-traditional x.3 or even the way Mists of Pandaria spoiled us with 4 major patches. It has become a trend that Blizzard has been releasing fewer patches and an overall smaller amount of content per expansion, padding the time at the end with a cobbled-together season of repeated content (to their credit, it is better than nothing and I actually do like the concept), and then keeping to their existing release schedule. But what if that was a preparation step to move to faster expansions?

Releasing two major patches only feels bad because of the historical precedent that WoW has set alongside the large time gap that has to then be filled by Season 4, which does fine enough but it’s not new content and so it kind of falls down in that regard because it cannot keep interest that long. But what if you didn’t need a season 4, because the next big thing comes out fast enough after the final major patch that it doesn’t matter? That might change perspectives.

But then I guess the last question I have is this – how would it be received by players? On the one hand, more frequent expansions sounds kind of cool, right? You get frequent bursts of new content, less lag time, and there’s always something new on the horizon, some new reason to come back and play WoW, to keep your social groups adhered tightly and give you that stability for those groups. There’s less a feeling of falling behind if there’s a reset every year alongside existing catch-up mechanics per patch, and so the falling trend of player count as an expansion winds on could, theoretically, be reduced, maybe even sharply.

On the other hand, however, there are questions that emerge around more frequent expansions. Would we see even less content out of a temptation to save it for the next expansion? How much would expansions even cost in this model – are they still $40-$50 for a regular edition, or do they go down (or, god forbid, up)? Will the temptation be that any time is a good time to jump in or will it be worth it to wait it out for the next expansion for those transient players who fade in and out with expansion launches?

To me personally, while I get the appeal to some of yearly expansions, I don’t find it particularly to be a good idea for WoW. I think WoW has persisted for a long time on the once-every-two-years model, and I think that gives them a chance to be more experimental with gameplay features and new modes of play that take time to develop. On top of that, I also find it quite unlikely that Blizzard actually cuts the prices on expansions or delivers the same amount of content on an annual cadence, and so I don’t like the idea of spending 2x the cost for what I suspect would be 1.25x the content, if that. Also, I think logistically, that while you can get to a yearly cadence with a solid plan and a lot of stuff in the pipeline, it just takes a small series of goofs to snowball into falling off that track, and getting onto it at all is something Blizzard has, as of yet, not done, even when they would publicly say they intended to do it!

Today, as it stands, we don’t know what the release cadence actually looks like or how the future of Warcraft will play out. But there is a lot of interesting possibility there waiting to be tapped into.