World of Warcraft: Dragonflight - 11-28-22

They also added a unique high level piece of gear that can be easily crafted. You can only equip one of them at a time. It’s currently ilvl 262 which is Heroic raid level maybe?

Pre-orders up. World of Warcraft®: Dragonflight - World of Warcraft | Battle.net

Yikes, base edition is $50.

Also ships this year. Ugh. This is not going to end well.

I’m torn. This may be the first WoW expansion that I sit out. Going to slog through FFXIV and ESO before I decide. Maybe whichever supports Apple silicon the best will win my dollars!

2022 is definitely surprising.

Definitely expect it to ship around Xmas with the final zone unfinished.

Nothing says we learned from Shadowlands like slamming out an expansion in 5 months.

Edit, They don’t even have an Alpha out yet. This is going to be a disaster.

It’s going to be WoW.

ESO has already said they aren’t porting to Apple Silicon. SE still doesn’t have an FFXIV version they support on Monterey.

Wow, yeah, I figured the best we’d see is beta this year. Getting the full expansion out in 2022 seems like a stretch.

The best part is the WoW forums: Of course that’s not the real date. That’s the date they just put on the preorders. Of course this thing is going to slip.

No, no it’s not. That date is a commitment to the shareholders this will ship by the end of the fiscal quarter. This puppy is going to catch the car by 12/31.

Especially considering how conservative Blizzard generally is about putting out release windows.

Now they’ve slipped before. The most-recent expansion slipped, so it’s not impossible, but they don’t announce fake dates. They have every intention of hitting it.

Also:

https://twitter.com/towelthetank/status/1539311475256242181

Which is also why I think this one isn’t slipping. Especially the big money maker that is WoW for them. They need to boost to their financials for Q4 and the end of the year.

I don’t disagree that they really want it to ship this year, but I’m not sure this is why. They have a pending offer from Microsoft to buy them for $67 billion. I don’t think hitting their Q4 and FY numbers are meaningful at this point.

They have a responsibility to their shareholders. Their shareholders and Wall Street want to see the stock go up up up up.

Also, as someone who just closed on an investment property sale, the deal isn’t done until it’s done. There are still a lot of ways the deal can fall apart, and even then, it’s a year from now at best. They still need to deliver for roughly 4 more quarters.

Also, thinking about it, assuming it launches in mid-December, a 10-month gestation period isn’t unheard of.

Legion and Shadowlands went 12 months, BfA was 10 months from announcement to launch.

Dragonflight was announced April 19, so it’d be an 8-month gestation period. If I were a betting man, I’d bet one of the below things is going to happen:

  1. They’re going to end up slipping Dragonflight into 2023
  2. They’re going to ship an expansion with much less content at the beginning than they usually have
  3. They’re going to ship an expansion with tons of bugs

Blizzard will rise to the challenge and do all 3.

I think it’s 9 months, but still, if there is a friends and family alpha, it’s a damn quiet one.

Seems like there’s a need to cash in before the MS acquisition finalizes. That always makes for quality gameplay.

Sticking with Classic.

I think the big news here is that the game is 10 bucks more than any previous expansion.

The collectors edition, which I always buy is 90 bucks now. Shadowlands was 80.

Why?

Those golden parachutes aren’t going to weave themselves.

Yeah. This whole thing reeks of “Pump up the Q4, 2022 numbers so we get the big bonuses and let MS deal with fixing it”

I miss WoW a lot, but I doubt I will play it again until it rolls into the MS Game Pass umbrella.

I was listening to a podcast and their theory is that Diablo Immortal missed projections (if you can believe that) because there were issues with the launch in China. So to make up for that lost revenue, the pre-order gambit was played.