On Nov. 3, Blizzard Entertainment revealed the next chapter of World of Warcraft—The Worldsoul Saga. This will consist of three separate expansions, and their releases won’t follow the regular expansion release cadence.
While speaking to media at BlizzCon 2023, lead WoW game designer Maria Hamilton revealed that The Worldsoul expansions will launch faster than past releases.
“We can’t speak to any specific numbers, but yes, it will be faster than, you know, two years. We’d like to make sure that folks are not finishing The Worldsoul Saga in 2030. We want to get a little faster clip than that. So we’ve worked on structuring our teams and our development pipelines so that we can parallelize a lot more work and make it so that we’re already working on Midnight,” the designer explained.
Normally, WoW expansions have a life expectancy of two years. For example, Shadowlands was released in Nov. 2020, and it came to a close with Dragonflight in Nov. 2022. This has been the case with past expansions as well, and the only exceptions to this rule are WoW Classic rereleases, with The Burning Crusade arriving in 2021 and The Wrath of the Lich King rolling out in 2022.
This then puts forward a critical question—what about the price tag of expansions and subscriptions? So far, there’s been no news about that, and it seems like the subscription system is here to stay, and the price will be $49,99 for a base edition of the game, with other editions having an even higher price tag.
But this all depends on the cash-to-value ratio and if these upcoming three expansions really deserve to have such price tags.
