14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has quite a lot of different ideas in terms of expansions for World of Warcraft besides the upcoming Warlords of Draenor one, as the studio plans to keep on making them as long as it makes sense in terms of financial figures.
World of Warcraft has dominated the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) market for many years, and now for its 10-year anniversary, Blizzard is going to launch its biggest expansion yet, in the form of Warlords of Draenor. The ambitious add-on aims at revisiting plenty of iconic characters from the Warcraft universe and should certainly bring back plenty of WoW veterans that suspended their subscriptions in the huge game.
However, Blizzard is already looking past Warlords of Draenor, at least according to Game Director Tom Chilton, who has talked with GamePlanet about the WoW team's future plans and how his colleagues already have plenty of ideas about where to take the online experience.
"We are already in progress with our next expansion. We already have zones in production for it. Our next expansion after that, we have a couple of different options that we’ll be choosing between over the next several months. "
Chilton even goes so far as to estimate that, if all the ideas were to become a reality, his team could easily fill another 10 years of content for the game.
"Beyond that, there are about six or seven different ideas for expansions that we can take elements of and say, 'You know what? Let’s take that and put it in this one for our next expansion after the next one.' Or we might shift the timelines around from what we originally envisioned. There’s easily 10 years' worth of stuff that we can draw from – more, really."
However, seeing as how World of Warcraft's subscriber count is decreasing more and more in recent years, it might seem that Warlords of Draenor will be the last expansion for the game. Chilton begs to differ and reveals that the studio will keep supporting WoW for as long as fans ask for it and it makes financial sense.
"I think that not only do we have content planned out for a good amount of time, I also think that while MMOs go through a life-cycle, the life-cycle tends to be very long. As long as there are enough players demanding that we make more content then we’re likely to do so. I think it’ll be quite a while before the financials indicate that it’s just not worth doing anymore."
World of Warcraft still has millions of active subscribers and it's going to be interesting to see how many will return to the game after the launch of the new expansion this fall.
