BlizzCon 2014: Day 1

So BlizzCon 2014 has come and Day 1 gave us some big surprises. The biggest was the lack of Warcraft news.

With all the hype over the past week about the trademarking of the Eye of Azshara, everyman and his dog wasguessing that this was either Warcraft 4, the next World of Warcraft expansion or an outside shot as the new Hearthstone expansion. Which at least two of the three are now definitely out of the running as the new Hearthstone expansion was announced as Goblins vs Gnomes, and this is hitting the streets, albeit virtual ones, in the next month and will feature on cards of a mechanical nature.

It is also very unlikely to be be Warcraft 4, as Blizzard decided that their next big title was a new IP. Yes despite officially abandoning project Titan, the FPS MMO, Blizzard have decided that the next big thing they're giving us is to be an FPS, but NOT an MMO, and a certain Jeff Caplan was the man at the helm of the team, sounds like the restart of Titan changed the direction from including an MMO element to the game, which will be called Overwatch. It looks awesome and I'll certainly give a go but my past experiences of FPS style games makes me believe that I'll both suck at it and hate it unless I can play in 3rd person mode because my brain can't cope with the loss of peripheral vision.

 

The thing I particulrly like are the graphics which are typically Blizzard cartoon style rather than realistic but there is now a much more polished feel than even the new WoW models. If only they could get this style into WoW...

This leaves Eye of Azshara as really only a WoW title now, and if that ends up being the case that is fine, I'm just glad the announcement hasn't happened at BlizzCon because, quite frankly, knowing the next expansion content (WoW 7.0)  just a few days before we get the Warlords of Draenor (WoW 6.0) would feel very wrong and detract a lot of focus from the new shiny content before it was even live.

The fear this creates in me is knowing that we're likely to only get two raid tiers in Warlords and that the chances are we won't get sight of the WoW 7.0 beta until after next BlizzCon which means one of two things:

1. We're getting two very long tiers of raiding over 18-24 months;
2. We're getting a third tier of raiding which could mean a Trial of the Crusader/Helion raid;

Of course there is a third option of us getting an announcement 'soon™' of the expansion and beta is going to happen around spring 2015 (which coincides with Overwatch beta) and the launch will be Winter 2015/2016. But if that is so, what of BlizzCon 2015?