The Craziness of Time

Time can be a strange thing.

We are on the cusp of World of Warcraft's third expansion. It is going to happen this year. For Blizzcon next year, we can expect the official announcement of the fourth expansion.

For Cataclysm, we are going back to Azeroth (I predict an upcoming Machinima spoof of "Going Back to Cali"). Chances are very good that the fourth expansion will take us away from Azeroth (at least the one that we know) once again. The designers do not want to keep us in one place for too long. They want to keep us moving.

The crazy thing is that they have already been working on the fourth expansion for at least six months. Maybe even longer. They will have all of this year and likely all of next year to flesh it out and finalize it. The team that is on Cataclysm will probably be sent onto the fifth expansion.

Somewhere around this time (this year or the next) Blizzard will officially announce their next MMO. I predict it will happen this year at Blizzcon 2010.

Seems like a lot to have on your platter but really, any successful game developer will have several projects in development at once.

It's just a funny thing though. We live in the here and now. Lich King is complete. They are giving us one more random raid encounter, then it is onto Cataclysm. But for them, they are living at least six months, or a year or more in the future. For them, Cataclysm is all but launched. There will be a team on hand to work out the three major content patches for the expansion, but there is also already a team on the fourth expansion...it's crazy.