Curiously for all the time I’ve been playing WoW (10-13 years since 2005) and all the time I’ve been writing here (since 2009) I’ve never actually written a post about a WoW expansion announcement. I did it for other games.
Sure, sometimes there are mentions of the upcoming expansion, but always when it’s already in the Alpha, or Beta, or in prep for the launch – but never when it was announced. Looking at my RSS feeds, it’s all over the place and quite a few people seem cautiously optimistic or even more positive, that’s good.
As I wrote in a comment on Belghast’s blog… I don’t even remember when (or if) I was ever hyped up for an expansion. My (maybe realistic) guess is that I was excited for TBC (as the game was still new to me at < 2 years and it was the first expansion) and WotLK (because I want to say TBC+WotLK were my peak of WoW enthusiasm). Cata and MoP I’m not so sure anymore and then I stopped. WoD was meh in prospect and meh in hindsight and I only played one month. Legion seemed ok but I still vanished after around 3 months. Not sure how I would count BfA,I wasn’t expecting it I think, I wasn’t really hyped, but I ended up a playing a lot, it was a bad time at work and then the pandemic hit. I was absolutely looking forwards to Shadowlands, but not because of what was announced, just that it would be a new expansion and I could level up and raid at the start.
I think I enjoyed most of the expansions in their own way, but only after I had actually played them. I know I’m easily excited about things on a small scale, but usually not one to eagerly anticipate anything that will launch in the future. To me it wouldn’t matter if they announced ANY info on a new expansion just a month before. I guess I would actually prefer that because then I could decide short-term if I would invest my time in a few weeks in the future. Maybe I’m just overall bad with long-time planning.
So, three long paragraphs and nothing about the actual expansions? As Preach put it so nicely, “there’s nothing I hate about it”, which is always a good first smoke test. I’m not a fan of ranged classes in general, so the Evokers are nothing I am specifically looking forward to. If it’s ingame I will try it out and level one, simple as that. Then I will tell if I liked it. The professions revamp sounds nice, the question is whether they will pull it off. Talent trees? Dunno, I’ve always been a “use optimal cookie cutter for raid” person and for alts I’m just questing with I mostly use a “good” spec and adjust single talents to my liking, usually anything with travel speed (or sometimes survivability) over damage. The dragon-riding looks fun and I hope there won’t be any weird borrowed power, that’s about it. My optimistic prediction for a launch would be Christmas 2022, but maybe February 2023, not later. (Shadowlands Alpha begun early April and it launched in that year.)
Also those big reveal presentations are not for me. I started to watch it and had to switch it off after a bit and just looked at the MMO-Champ updates because it was just so scripted and cringe worthy.