They brought Chris Metzen out to announce three new expansions and try to spin them a planned out trilogy, called
The Worldsoul Saga. Except Blizzard had already repeatedly stated in the past that they always plan two expansions ahead of the current one. So Blizzard hasn't actually changed their development philosophy, the only difference is that they are telling us what's coming down the line and telling us how they view their expansion stories has interconnected rather than leaving it to players to infer (like the overarching Sylvanas/death storylines of Legion -> BFA -> Shadowlands).
Once you look at the actual content of the expansion, it appears to be the most lackluster one yet. You only get four questing zones at launch. That's in line with the last two expansions, but at least Shadowlands had 2 more launch zones with the new starter zone of Exile's Reach, and the Maw endgame area, and Dragonflight had the Forbidden reach starter zone (which was later turned into an endgame rare hunt zone in a patch).
The War Within doesn't appear to even have a starter zone or an endgame zone. You only get the four questing zones, period. (Remember when we used to get 8 zones per expansion?). And then outlook of patch content is bleak. The last two expansions only had two major content patches each, and one of them didn't even introduce a whole new zone. 9.1 introduced a small fraction of a new zone in Korthia, which you could run from one end to the other in under a minute. And now Chris Metzen is saying that Blizzard going to pump expansions out faster. The last time Blizzard attempted annual expansions, we got WoD, an expansion that only had one major content patch. We will be very lucky if we even get 2 major content patches for TWW (again, remember when we used to get 4 or 3 per expansion?). Perhaps only one.
Next, we have content and features. A key selling point of WoW expansions was experimental new content and features.
- Mists of Pandaria introduced scenarios, which was short, objective based three man instances. MoP also introduced scaling raid sizes, so you could have any number of people in your between 10 and 30 and people could leave or join at will.
- Warlords of Draenor introduced garrisons, an unfinished but unique attempt at player housing with an RTS base building flavor. It also introduced Ashran, an ambitious attempt at a non-instanced PvP war zone like Alterac Valley.
- Legion introduced mythic+, which is an alternative form of endgame progression where you speedrun dungeons on a scaling difficulty with additional, randomized obstacles added called affixes. Mythic+ also made old expansion dungeons relevant again. Legion also introduced artifact weapons as another form of character progression, and also had a lot of class exclusive content.
- Battle for Azeroth introduced Island Expeditions, another variant of scenarios from MoP but this time more refined and more difficult. Personally I quite enjoyed island expeditions and preferred queuing for them to reach level cap since I found the levelling questlines to be mediocre. Island Expeditions were also an alternative form of PvP as well. BFA also introduced Warfronts, an attempt at portraying huge battles, though they wound up being too easy and there was no danger that you might lose. The final BFA patch introduced corruptions, where you would get gear that had detrimental effects, which added an extra layer of character building and challenge.
- Shadowlands introduced Torghast, which was a roguelike dungeon with a randomized layout. Shadowlands also introduced Covenants, which were four new factions that you could join.
Dragonflight was the first expansion not to introduce new, experimental content and features at launch. I don't consider dragonriding (aka griffon riding copied from GW2) to be content. It's a travel mechanic that gets you to the content... which is the same as before. The 10.1 patch did add a new universal item upgrade system where you could obtain currency from any current expansion activity to upgrade the ilevel of your current expansion gear.
But what does
The War Within bring? The only new thing is Delves, which sounds like 5 man scenarios, or just dungeons. The only thing of note here is that you get an NPC party member. WoW has experimented with advanced NPCs before, such as in the WoD proving grounds or the NPCs in the BFA island expeditions. At first I thought that Warbands would allow players to build parties/raids of NPCs like in Guild Wars 1, Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy 11, etc, but no, it's just a few QoL features like sharing reps across all of your characters.
This is the second expansion where is nothing interesting about this expansion in terms of content. I've seen this happen before with other MMOs like GW2 or FFXIV, where eventually the devs just stop experimenting with new content and features, and you just get the same cookie cutter formula and eventually the quality and quantity declines over time, until you get to today where the latest GW2 and FF14 expansions are embarrassingly light on meat. I wonder if Blizzard too has finally ran out of creativity, and from now on expansions are just going to be 4 new zones, a new raid, and maybe a reskinned race.
So I feel like the "announce the next three expansions at once" is a ploy, trying to deflect people's attention from how light the expansion's content is by trying to get them excited at the idea of overarching storylines, which we already had. I think once people get their hands on TWW and the novelty of the gorgeous new zones wears off, people will realize that the expansion doesn't have meat and opinions will sour. We're already seeing people reevaluate Shadowlands' qualities due to how bland and lackluster Dragonflight is in comparison.
The new cinematic had incredible CGI. I think that is the most convincing CGI human I've ever seen. I think it's how jerky the movements are that sell it, since it doesn't look fluidly animated/interpolated like your typical CGI animation. I do think that it is odd that Blizzard chose to announce their
Worldsoul Saga with a boring scene about two mopey characters talking, rather than trying to get people excited by depicting action. Yes, the action cinematic will probably come later, but this is the moment that will have the most eyes paying attention to WoW (given that Blizzard is locked in for the next 3-6 years, WoW might not ever get this many views again), and they chose to show this instead.
