Well well well. Blizzard completely surprised me and i’m sure everyone else with the news that they’re unveiling the new expansion on Thursday. I didn’t expect to see this when i got home from work. Hell, i didn’t expect anything of this sort for a long while, with the way the current patches have been rolling out. That’s not to say i’ve always felt this way.

When Blizzard spoke of increasing their content and expansion cycle, i was of course ecstatic. I started playing the game when patch 5.4 went live and as everyone remembers, that bastard lasted way too damn long. I was on the increased content patch train up until a month or so ago. I still wanted to see it happen but i lost faith that it actually would with all the delays and missing content from launch. I didn’t think they’d hit their desired goals. It would appear that may not be the case. At least that’s what i hope anyway.

There are of course inherent flaws with a rushed timeline like this. I worry that they haven’t had enough time to flesh out all the terrible features of WoD and build on the ones that worked. If the rumors are true, and they would appear to be, then this new expansion began it’s life before the current one released. That could possibly mean more garrison related passive facebook game nonsense. I worry the overwhelming negative reaction to garrisons came too late in the process which could mean more of the same. I really hope i’m wrong but my gut tells me otherwise.

I hate to sound negative, but it may be another expansion after this one before we see improvements on building up the game world again. Taking the players out of their own personal instances and back into cities. That alone is depressing if we actually think about for a second. There was a time when players complained too many people were hanging out in cities instead of the game world. Now we’d love to have them back in them where we can actually see them again. Bring back the world exploration and give us a reason to travel the world you’ve built Blizz. Ben and Wulfgang would be shaking their heads.