Total: 42-60 months ~ 3½-5 years World Soul Saga length.
3 expansions. 12 minor patches. 3 major patches. 6 Seasons.
The War Within: 4 new zones, 8 dungeons, 1 raid.
Midnight: 3-4 revamped zones, 8 dungeons (some revamped), 1 raid.
The Last Titan: 3-4 revamped zones, 8 dungeons (some revamped), 1 raid.
Some thoughts on this:
If Blizzard sticks with their current roadmap approach, whilst still wanting faster expansions, then the only way of doing it (whilst still accounting for testing) is to cut the second major patch so that the length of the expansion is shortened and it more quickly transitions into Beta testing for the next one.
I suspect Blizzard finds it possible to do Beta testing slightly faster, because their approach for Midnight and The Last Titan seems to revolve around using existing zones and hubs in Quel’Thalas and Northrend respectively. As we saw in the N’zoth patch with Uldum and The Vale of Eternal Blossoms, then this allows for much faster development than making entirely new zones from scratch.
And whilst The War Within launches with 8 brand new dungeons, I suspect the subsequent Saga expansions will launch with more dungeons like Uldaman or Scholomance, where Blizzard uses an existing dungeon and makes tweaks and changes to it. Again, it speeds up development. And Dragonflight has shown that players don’t really object to getting these kinds of quickly-made dungeons (The Nokhud Offensive, Uldaman, etc.).
Internally they’ll probably aim for a speedy development of 3 years with bonus payouts for that, and a worst-case-scenario being 5 years due to unforeseen reasons. Realistically it’ll probably be somewhere in-between the two then.
I’m not sure why people expect shorter expansions.
I think they’re going to release those as the exact same pace they do now. They just let us know where we’re going.
I remember when expansions had 3 major patches.
Then it became 2.
And I suspect it’ll be 1 going forward.
Why? Because business.
Making a major patch like 10.2 which comes out in a few days, is not very good business. It’s a major zone and a raid that comes at the tail-end of an expansion. This is when the fewest players are playing WoW. So Blizzard don’t actually earn a whole lot of subscription money on it that they wouldn’t earn anyway – because those who are still playing would be playing anyway!
It makes more business-sense to front-load the WoW development, because Blizzard actually gets money for their expansion product. And when an expansion releases is when Blizzard sees the highest surge of popularity for WoW, so you want to repeat that loop as often as possible.
So obviously: Expansions sell, patches don’t. Ergo you want to focus your business around producing expansions and not patches. And the patches you do need to produce you should seek to make as production-light as possible (revamped events, systems changes, and story additions), and then move most of the production-heavy development onto the expansions themselves (zones, dungeons, raids, features).
Chris Metzen did say in his presentation that they will be delivering this saga faster than we are used to.
Personally, i think they will continue the current formula with two major patches and some minor patches inbetween, but will skip the 4th season, or the fated season as it has come to be known as, and jump right to the next expansion after the final raid tier of the expansions.
When was this announced? All i can find is a quote from Metzen saying “We want to ensure that players aren’t completing this saga in 2030” suggesting that they will wrap it up before 2030, not in 2030. Before 2030 could be anywhere between 2025 and 2029 for all we know.
I think you misinterpreted what was said there.
For reference:
Chris Metzen suggested that the Worldsoul Saga would be coming in quicker than players have been used to? What does that timeline look like?
We can’t get into specifics, but yes it will be faster. We want to ensure that players aren’t completing this saga in 2030. Teams have been restructured to be able to create this whole saga.
So what they’re saying there is not that it’ll be wrapped up in 2030, but that it won’t take until 2030.
It’ll be done before Hell freezes over, is effectively what they’re saying, i.e. they’re trying to communicate that even though this is 3 expansions, then it won’t take as long as 3 expansions traditionally take. Ergo it will be faster. How much faster? Well if the first expansion comes out in 2024 and they want it all wrapped up before 2030, then surely 5 years is the longest it’ll take. Which is what I predict. And like any company in the world, then they’ll have ambitious targets to chase that get the product out the door quicker than in 5 years. I estimate the quickest to be 3½ years. So again, realistically between the best and worst case, it’ll probably be somewhere in-between, i.e. ~4 years.
Isn’t that what I’ve outlined?
If it comes out in August and you assume 3 months between every PTR (not uncommon) and you want the same patch flow of minor → minor → major, then it does actually end in the second half of 2029 (and that’s being generous with a fast Beta of 4-5 months).
So where are you squeezing in this:
That’s 6-9 months of PTR testing right there. There’s no room for that in the timeframe they’ve outlined for 3 expansions.
I think they could easily do 2 big patches and just forgo the silly 4th season that’s just filler. An 18 month release schedule is completely viable then (assuming they can handle the workload).
Patches drive sub revenue. You can see the peaks and troughs as patches are released.
I personally don’t care how they do it but I’d like to see the cadence increased slightly. For the last couple of months wow has been dead, a new season 2 months ago would have worked for me.
I’m under the impression they’re planning a similar patch cadence to what we have had in Dragonflight. 8 weeks mini-patch cycle, which I seem to remember Holly Lonsdale saying they were committed to continuing.
I think they’ll just be planning on cutting out the awkward season 4/fated season. And just jump straight into a new expansion.
So I expect about an 18 months expansion length. Maybe shorter.
The problem with a 3 expansion story, is keeping people sticking around for 6 years to see it through.
So the quicker they get through it, the better for everyone. They just need to be cautious on delivering enough content for what people are paying for it.
I’ve said before on these forums, that the game would work better under shorter expansions. So it’s interesting to see how this will pan out.
That’s seems overly optimistic. That’s as tight a release schedule as ever. Only 2 months between every release with no room for error, and jumping into a 4 months Beta after only 1 minor patch at the end would also be unheard of.
Blizzard usually needs a transition period to shift development to the Beta, that’s why they have the Fated Season or the previously long content drought periods. Believing they can just not have that seems like wishful thinking. Ergo why it feels like the only way to achieve a faster expansion release is to simply cut the 2nd major patch. Then they can transition faster.
But we’ll see. If the above schedule happens, it would be heaven for WoW players. And permanent crunch time for Blizzard.
Not really.
The N’zoth patch and the Zereth Mortis patch didn’t really get players back in substantial numbers. But the following expansions, Shadowlands and Dragonflight, they did.
Blizzard simply sees way higher surges of popularity when releasing an expansion than when releasing a patch. And they get a lot more revenue out of it. So obviously they’ll want to move toward a schedule where they emphasize releasing expansions over patches. Why else would they adopt this new faster format if the patch-driven one they already have is the best?
Me too. But how? Blizzard have never ever gotten their release cadence below that which they had in Legion, which was 2 months between releases. And that only happened because they could front-load so much development by cutting Warlords of Draenor short.
What they’ve done in Dragonflight is to simplify the patch content so they actually can release patches faster. It’s hard to see how they can speed that up even more whilst still delivering more or less the same volume of patch content, and at the same time develop new expansions faster as well.
I don’t think we will see a .3 patch ever again, but I expect there to be .2.5 / .2.7 at the very least. Otherwise we are paying more, for less, more frequently, so unless they drop the price for an expansion if it is going to deliver less content, the consumer ends up getting screwed.
That being said, most of us just accept the constant excrement we are fed by Blizzard and thank them for it, so I won’t be surprised if they try it.
I find this hard to believe. It would be great, but it would also be the exact same format as we have with Dragonflight. And that doesn’t make for faster expansion releases (or a successful business model).
Blizzard can’t deliver faster expansion releases whilst keeping with the existing schedule. It’s wishful thinking that Blizzard can just “work harder”. We have to assume that even for Dragonflight they’re already working as hard as they can with the people they have.
I think that is the reality.
And the cynical business angle is of course that the existing WoW customers are so devoted and invested at this point that Blizzard can squeeze them for more money. Because they will pay.
It would be a business strategy where Blizzard foregoes trying to get a lot of new players (no newbie stuff in The War Within…) in favor of focusing on customer retention and profit maximization. That would be normal for a product with high customer loyalty.
Of course Blizzard’s spin isn’t that you’re getting less patches and paying for more expansions, but that you get new expansions with new cool content more often! Which is also true.
Fair points made, the only reason I expect it to stay as is with the .2.5 / .2.7 model is that we’re going to be left with this dead period of 9 ish months with the fated season (which as far as I’m concerned isn’t really anything worth subbing for - I suspect this is the case with a lot of people and they won’t want to lose out on that sub money going forward) so I expect them to cut that period off the end and have 18 monthly expansions with a tighter turnaround and a similar amount of content to now to avoid any major backlash.
I fully acknowledge that it’s highly likely I’m just high on copium.
Well, we don’t know how they’ve changed ‘the pipeline’.
They obviously did, seeing as they gave us a roadmap early in the year and kept to it basically perfectly. Something changed. So… Maybe enough changed that all of what you say is now doable? We just can’t say that with certainty yet; we’ll have to wait and see.
