World of Warcraft players have been battling their way through Draenor for almost a year now as part of the game's fifth expansion, but a brand new adventure looks to be on the horizon. Blizzard has announced the next World of Warcraft expansion pack will be unveiled at Gamescom in Germany on Aug. 6.
Those who aren't in attendance will be able to watch a live stream of the announcement. On Aug. 9, Blizzard will also stream a developer chat elaborating more about what the game's next expansion will have in store. This new expansion will be the game's sixth. The fifth and most recent, Warlords of Draenor, released in Nov. of last year, just in time for the game's 10th anniversary.
Major new content patches are still being released for Warlords of Draenor, with Blizzard saying the next patch for the expansion won't be the last. That seems to indicate that the game's sixth expansion won't be released this year but rather sometime in 2016.
Blizzard has expressed a desire to release a new expansion for their hit MMO every year, but thus far expansions have been coming about every two years or so. Unless Blizzard has been incredibly, incredibly busy, expect this new expansion to be a on a similar rotation. As for where the next expansion may take players, there are a number of theories. Blizzard's fantasy world of Azeroth is quickly running out of undiscovered territory, which is perhaps why the developer took gamers to a past, alternate history version of the orc's homeworld for Warlords of Draenor.
One popular theory is the game's next expansion may revolve around "The South Seas", a group of islands to the south of the Maelstrom in the center of Azeroth's world map.Of course, nobody knows for sure what Blizzard has in store. Few could have expected they would throw players back in time for the game's fifth expansion. Keeping that in mind, the possibilities are endless.