Blizzard Talks About The Future Of Warcraft

World of Warcraft‘s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is only a couple days away. It’s a momentous occasion for sure, but more WoW is, well, more WoW. We’re used to it. What about after that? Will we ever see Warcraft IV? Or even a World of Warcraft 2? I asked Blizzard.

First things first: World of Warcraft isn’t going anywhere, even after Warlords of Draenor wraps up its post-release plot, which will come (as per usual) in a series of patches in the coming months. However, Blizzard wants to drop another bouncing baby expansion into this orc-infested world much more quickly this time. If all goes well, the expansion after Warlords will be out in a year.

“Our goal is certainly to release expansions a little faster than we have been,” said lead game designer Ion Hazzikostas during an interview at BlizzCon. “I know we’ve been saying that for years. You can go back and find quotes from 2008 about how we’re gonna release one expansion per year. Ultimately that always got hung up on, ‘Well, we’re not gonna release before we feel it’s actually done to a Blizzard level of quality. That tended to take closer to two years. But we’ve increased the size of our team, and we feel like we’re in a place where we should be able to move faster than before. So our goal is to get expansions into players’ hands faster.”

The next expansion is, naturally, in the works already, as is the one after that, to a much smaller degree. Blizzard hopes to fill the gaps between expansions better, too. Shorter waits between major patches, more ways for cow people to wallop wolf-people and whatever-draenei-are people, and so on. For better or worse, Blizzard seemingly wants WoW to live and die keep living, but probably with a slow exodus of people, on content. That means there will always be a cycle of ebb and flow, boom and bust.

That also means a focus on the new, not the old, Hazzikostas told me. So while fans have been clamoring for things like a revamp to Outland (WoW‘s current level 60-70 zone, which many feel is kind of a slog) and legacy time machine servers that’d play like WoW did pre-any-number-of-expansions, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up. The latter, especially, comes with a wheezing, head-barely-above-water boatload of technical issues. WoW has changed a lot over the years, both in terms of gameplay and under the hood. “It’s not even remotely as simple as, ‘OK load up an old build off some old drives, throw it up on the servers. That wouldn’t work,” he explained.

What about the world of Warcraft beyond the World of Warcraft, though? Here at Kotaku we all secretly work to give Yannick whatever he wants because he has such a good, pure heart, and I’m sure things are no different at Blizzard. So is another Warcraft strategy game—a Warcraft IV, presumably—in the cards? Warcraft III, after all, pushed RTSes forward in a few interesting ways and created many cherished memories in the process. WoW, meanwhile, has given orcs, humans, and everything in between a more personal battleground, a place where everybody gets to be a hero (or jerky ganker, or collector of exotic herbs) to some extent. Sounds like a pretty interesting foundation for a new RTS, right? While Blizzard has “nothing to announce right now,” they seem interested too.

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“There’s definitely a lot of cool potential [in tying World of Warcraft and Warcraft IV together in some way],” Hazzikostas said. “Everyone on the WoW team is hugely inspired by the Warcraft RTSes. I’d love to see something like that happen, but it’s up to a different team in a different time and place.”

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