Blizzard Entertainment developers made the shocking announcement of the next three expansions for World of Warcraft at the BlizzCon 2023 convention last weekend. But the game’s director told us that while those expansions may release more quickly, they will still contain just as much content.
In an interview with Forbes, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas said the next three expansions–The War Within, Midnight and The Last Titan–will be about the same size as Dragonflight, Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth were before them.
They’ll include four zones, eight dungeons and a similar number of raid tiers. While the company hopes to release on a slightly swifter cadence, because teams are developing the new expansions simultaneously with current content, it shouldn’t result in less content, he said.
“I will say very clearly this is not a shrinkflation ploy. There are not fewer chips in the bag,” Hazzikostas said. “An expansion is an expansion. War Within has four zones, eight dungeons, a raid, new levels, et cetera.
“We’re not going to talk in detail about Midnight or Last Titan, but I can tell you Midnight has four zones, eight dungeons, right? That’s what an expansion is, and that’s not something we’re trying to redefine here.”
If anything, the team is just trying to squeeze more content into slightly less time, Hazzikostas said.
“I think our goal is to do this a bit faster,” he said. “We recognize if we use our slow plodding pace from past years, this story might take at the end of the decade to wrap up. And that’s longer than I think anyone is really willing to take on right now.”
It’s notable that Blizzard has repeatedly said over the years that it wanted to release expansions more quickly than its current two-years-plus schedule, and the company just never quite made those deadlines. Accordingly, the promises made on stage at the convention were just to have these three storylines wrap up by 2030.
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