Sunday (23 Jun) - Guessing The Future

Sunday (23 Jun) - Guessing The Future

Blizzard Entertainment's Blizzcon 2013 officially kicks off on 8-9 November. Tickets for the event sold out thirty minutes after they went on sale in April. The interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any concrete news about what announcements will be made. In fact, there doesn't seem to be anything exciting at all on the near horizon.

In the World of Warcraft there is talk of another expansion coming out on an 18 month cycle instead of the usual 24 month cycle. I have to point out, though, that Blizz has scheduled 18 month cycles before, and it always ends up around 24 months anyway. Despite that, hopes are high that the next expansion will hit the streets in the Apr/May 2014 timeframe, which I take to mean that it will "really" be released in it's usual Sep/Oct/Nov timeframe. All of that is pretty normal. So, what is the focus of the new expansion? Blizz is not saying. However, the rumor mill is that Mists of Pandaria is played out and they won't be expanding along that line. Instead, the "new" danger to Azeroth will be ... drum roll please ... a return of the Burning Legion. Again. Yawn.

My subscription to WoW runs out in August this year. I am not going to re-subscribe. I was not really considering NEVER coming back to WoW, but frankly, if it is going to be a year plus before I see a new expansion, and that new expansion is a rehash of the Burning Legion (which we already did in the Burning Crusade expansion), then I have nothing to look forward to, WoW-wise.

In the interim there are plans to release an expansion pack for Diablo. I'll probably play that. If it is on a similar scale to Diablo 3, I'll be done with that in a month. What else is on the horizon? There is the super secret Blizzard project called "Titan." It is supposed to be a brand new MMO they've been working on since 2007. There is even some information that says that developers have had a "playable" version since 2011. There is no information about the content at all, although we are told that the game will co-exist with WoW, not supplant it, because Titan will be very different from WoW. Last month Blizzard announced that the Titan project had been "rebooted." The release date is a moving target, now penciled in as 2016.

So. I installed a couple of my older single player games. I still have a computer that can play them. I remembered how much I loved those games. The bottom line is that while I still got some fun out of them, the graphics have so far surpassed those old games that they no longer felt real. Still, I like single player games. I may go that route for awhile. Maybe Blizz will surprise us with the next expansion. Maybe not. It's hard to tell if I will even care by that point.

Of course, as of now Happy is still working the Auction House and Fist is still farming. The Wild family won't forget our cousins, either. Happy is working on building a little nest egg to pass along to Sis and Sin when the time comes to turn in Happy's Auction House pass and close the doors. Maybe forever.