Blizzard Announces 4th WoW Expansion: Mists of Pandaria
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
|
75 comments
Hope you like pandas!
Mists of Pandaria Trailer
As hard as it may be to believe, Blizzard is really making a Pandaren-based expansion to World of Warcraft. Rumors have been floating around for quite some time, but now it's official. Dubbed the Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's fourth expansion promises to bring many new changes to the game.
Things to come:
- New playable race, Pandaren
- New continent, Pandaria
- New Monk class
- 90 level cap
- Dungeon system changes
- Pet Battle System
- Talent system revamp
For more details on the latest expansion, head on over to the game's site here. What are your thoughts on the new expansion? Let us know in the comments below!
Discuss
Ask a Category Expert
FYI, in about 12 months after this panda expansion...Blizzard will have another one...cause people keep buying them...if you don't play WoW (i don't) then who cares since it won't affect you.
While I have my doubts on whether it may be a good idea to create content based on something that came into existance as an April Fool's joke years ago, I will hold judgement because much of Warcraft is tongue in cheek, so it could be ok. They were after all in WC3.
The issue is this. Will Blizzard stop doing what they have done in Wrath and Cataclysm and actually put the Warcraft story back in WoW. For both these past expansions we have not gotten half the content they talked about during the beta's for them and instead gotten constant nerf/buff cycles as well as 'premium' items.
If Blizzard puts the Warcraft story back into the game, I will seriously consider going back. But after nearly fours years and two expansions with little of the Warcraft story actually playing out in game, I won't hold my breath.
I'm just hoping the conference call with shareholders in a couple of weeks will show some more bad news that may actually lead to Vivendi shaking up some management at Activision Blizzard. Kotick should never have been made CEO and the division would be much better off with Morjaime over it. I believe that would allow Blizzard to be able go back to being the Blizzard of old.
Actually 12 million don't play it. When Wrath of the Lich King was released, they had 11.5 million subscribers. A little more than a year after Wrath's release Kotaku had an article, in February of 2010, talking about where the subscriber base was still at 11.5 million. A month after Wrath was released in China, that was when the 12 million mark was announced. The problem is Blizzard rushed Cataclysm out in China only about 8 months after Wrath's release. While Wrath lacked a lot of the content that was talked about in beta, that is still incredibly fast to try to push out the next expansion there especially when you consider that it barely gives those players time to experience the content and not to mention sort of makes all the extra work Blizzard put into China's version of Wrath rather irrelevant. It's not hard to believe that Wrath was not well recieved in China.
Then the problems really accelerated after Cataclysm was released. In the very first quarter after it's release, they lost 600,000 subscribers. In the second quarter they lost an additional 300,000. Those numbers would be disturbing in a year leading to a new expansion where there is precious little new content. But the fact they lost that many in the first six months following the release of a new expansion has to be worrisome. With the third quarter ending after September, it won't be too long before that quarters numbers are released, and I don't think any improvement will be seen.
For a long time it seems as if the Warcraft franchise fan, those who buy the novels, comics, collectibles, etc, have been leaving in droves. The fact that the comics, the place where intended content for the game that never made it into the game, was finished was canceled due to very poor sales, sort of makes that seem very true. They also canceled the magazine after only 4 issues because of poor sales. The Shattering, what was suppose to be the first of three novels dealing with the events leading up to Cataclysm had weak sales as well. Only a couple of months ago was the second novel released, and considering Cataclysm is about to get it's last content patch, that's rather late for a pre Cataclysm novel to come out.
And there won't be another expansion 12 months after MoP. Blizzard has never released a WoW expansion in just 12 months time. They have always been on a two year time line. For one thing, 12 months after MoP is released, Q4 of 2013, is the intended release date for the Titan MMO Blizzard is working on.
FYI, they just released news that Diablo III is free to any WoW player with a one year agreement (can be made in monthly installments).
Why is Tom's news so slow?
http://www.techspot.com/news/45964-wow-subscribers-get-diablo-iii-free-collectors-edition-unveiled.html