I received an email asking me to blog my thoughts on future expansions for World of Warcraft. I love that sort of input, it helps me decide what to write about. So let me gaze into my crystal ball and look for the next expansion after the Burning Crusade. As far as we know Blizzard plans to release expansions once a year from now on. Optimists among the players and Vivendi shareholders are hoping that the next expansion will be out for christmas 2007. But realistically the first quarter of 2008 is more likely. Expect some sort of announcement by mid-2007, Blizzard's marketing department works a lot faster than their programmers.
The only thing we can be sure about the content of the next expansion is that there will be new zones with new quests and new mobs. What we don't know is what level these new zones will have. It is perfectly possible that every future expansion raises the level cap by another 10, so we would get currently unused portals opening to zones of level 70 to 80. There is no theoretical limit to the level cap, World of Warcraft would "work" with a level cap of 200 in the 14th expansion in the year 2020. That would bring certain problems, but there are solutions for those.
The other possibility, and one that I would prefer, is to make a new continent with new races, and zones from level 1 to 70, without increasing the level cap. The reason why I would like that is that World of Warcraft is getting a bit thin in the middle. The Burning Crusade expansion adds two new races with quests from level 1 to 20, and then new zones for level 60 to 70. But if you make a character of a new race, you will need to play through old, known content from level 20 to 60. Especially the levels from the 30s to mid-40s currently have too few quests and zones, I call it the Stranglethorn Hole. Blizzard cheated a bit in that area, by creating one big neutral zone, instead of one Horde and one Alliance zone. If you play characters of both sides, you quickly learn to hate these levels, as they are always the same, regardless of faction. A new continent with some alternative zones for mid-level characters would be good, as it would give new possibilities to everybody starting a new character.
Sooner or later, and maybe already in the next expansion after TBC, Blizzard will add new classes to World of Warcraft. The possibilities for that are endless, monks, necromancers, bards, other fantasy based games have shown that many more classes are possible, and WoW could even invent a couple of new ones. TBC is a bit of a cheat, by offering new classes to people that only ever play the same faction, giving paladins to Horde and shamans to Alliance. Future expansions would have to add real new classes.
Now a new class could be available to everybody with the expansion, by just chosing it from the character creation screen. So you get a new level 1 character, which would make the idea of having a new continent with new quests for all levels even more appealing. The other possibility is the much discussed hero class, last mentioned in Battleplan 2. Everybody has his own ideas how that one would work, but the basic idea is that this class would *not* be available to new players, you would first need to level a character to a certain level before the hero class would open up. A hero class could be an alternative advancement for existing high-level characters, or it could be a new class which is "unlocked" by reaching a certain level or doing a high-level quest. Even Blizzard doesn't know yet how to handle that.
Probably the greatest weakness of the World of Warcraft game is that in spite of coming from a real-time strategy game franchise, the PvP isn't as good as in other MMORPGs. Blizzard is painfully aware of that, and spends a lot of time fiddling with the system. Hardly a patch goes by in which the PvP system isn't revamped. We can expect future expansions to introduce more PvP changes. One of the most popular forms of PvP in other games is the "realm vs. realm" type of combat, where there are special PvP zones with castles and other structures to conquer. Sooner or later something very similar will be introduced into World of Warcraft.
What else could future expansion bring? Ranking high on many players wish-list is player housing. But that is a tricky issue. Allowing people to put up a house in lets say the Barrens would be a mistake, it would destroy the atmosphere of most zones. But totally instanced housing, where you only ever see your own house, misses the point of player housing: showing off your status symbols. My favorite solution would be special player housing zones, accessible from cities, containing just a square grid of housing plots, with the possibility of growing the grid if more plots are needed. New players would just have a small shack, but the richer you get the nicer a house you can construct, and your adventures could provide you with items for decoration, for example the head of Onyxia mounted over the fireplace.
This isn't an exhaustive list, other new features could be possible for the next World of Warcraft expansions. What would you like to see added to the game?
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