WOD Release Speculation
Nina, Tay and I have been having a little debate in the shoutbox at the web site on when Warlords is going to be released, so I thought it would be fun to extend that to the Daily Kos diary. Of course, we will find out next week (8/14 12:30PM Eastern time, a livestream to Gamescon in Germany and on their website for all of us not there) when they announce the "street date" for the expansion and show the cinematic. But hey, we're all nerds who love to argue about meaningless crap, so why not speculate!
The state of the beta, and some aspects of the anniversary event coming in November, argue for release in December, and it's a strong possibility. Several factors, however, also point to release in October:
1) Sub losses - they lost 800K last quarter, and if that trend is continuing or accelerating currently, they must be under pressure to release new content soon (and promise a sooner date now, while the 3rd fiscal quarter is ongoing) to stop the bleeding.
2)They're announcing the date of release on Aug. 14th - the last 3 expansion release dates have been announced 2 months before the actual date (see http://www.wowwiki.com/..._(World_of_Warcraft). Also. they're making a big deal of this announcement, which seems odd to do if the release is 3 1/2 - 4 months away.
3)November seems unlikely for release as it is now packed with both BlizzCon and the 10 year Anniversary event, plus U.S. Thanksgiving on Nov. 27th.
4)December is certainly possible, and would be preferable from the standpoint of having a more finished game - but everything the developers and CM's have been saying for the last few weeks points to their being out of time to get certain things done before release - see, e.g., no new blood elf character models at release. If they aren't releasing the expac till December, it's hard to see why they wouldn't have time for that and more. I keep reading comments from CM's saying stuff like everyone is crunching hard to get the expansion ready so they don't have time to put out more public explanation of various issues. It just sounds like they are pushing really hard to get the game out in October, maybe October 21st if not the 14th (both Tuesdays.)
They've also indicated the PTR for the pre-patch 6.0 will not be lengthy - so I could see a schedule of 6.0 on the PTR maybe in a week or two, 6.0 drops mid September, WOD drops Oct. 21st (I think 28th is too close to BlizzCon, but maybe). I'm not saying this is the optimal schedule - I'm just thinking there are a lot of things that point that way. But there are also a lot of things that point to December, and if that is the release month, we will likely get a better product that we'll all be happy with, and I'll be happy to have this speculation proved wrong. And I have to stress that the beta so far looks great, I've really enjoyed the play, and it looks amazing, so I will enjoy WOD whenever it gets here.
So, what will it be? October? December? January? We'll know next Friday!
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