Wow, and we're not just talking about World of Warcraft.

Chris Metzen, the Warcraft franchise's Executive Creative Director, has confirmed that the creative team is currently working on many years of story past the Worldsoul Saga, which made its early access debut with The War Within this past Thursday. In an interview with the WoWCast podcast, Metzen stated that it was "one of the most nuclear creative phases I've ever seen" at Blizzard. We've got confirmation that development is making sure each chapter feeds into each other.

Quote From Chris Metzen

In a way, you get to step back and see a far more cohesive vision and a far more refined idea over time. Without spilling any beans, we're already, honestly, talking about the next few upwards of 17.0. It's just keeping the conveyer belt going.

Currently, World of Warcraft has just launched its tenth expansion, putting the game version at 11.0 (the original game was 1.0 and is not an expansion). With Blizzard making plans already for 17.0, that gives us the Worldsoul Saga trilogy of expansion, which will see players going back to the Sunwell and Northrend, only a small part of the planning as that's an extra 4 expansions of planning currently going on. Hopefully this fixes problems the Warcraft story has had in more recent years with Blizzard's focus being very short-sighted and there not being large themes that take multiple expansions to build upon. This is truly a new era of the creative side of World of Warcraft and as one big World of Warcraft nerd, I've certainly got chills.

Now, when could we see expansion number sixteen release? Well, it's tough to say because the plans at Blizzard appear to be getting expansions out faster than before which is something that they've promised for years but appear to actually have the bandwidth to do so now. If we assume the current average of 1 year and 11 months between expansion releases, here's what a timeline could look like.

  • 11th Expansion: July 2026
  • 12th Expansion: June 2028
  • 13th Expansion: May 2030
  • 14th Expansion: April 2032
  • 15th Expansion: March 2034
  • 16th Expansion: February 2036

That's a bit of a wait and we're sure the later expansions aren't as fleshed out as the upcoming trio, but it's certainly great to see the commitment to the longevity. If instead Blizzard is trying to bring out a new expansion each year, it might look something like this.

  • 11th Expansion: August 2025
  • 12th Expansion: August 2026
  • 13th Expansion: August 2027
  • 14th Expansion: August 2028
  • 15th Expansion: August 2029
  • 16th Expansion: August 2030

Historically speaking, November has been the most popular month to launch an expansion with a total of 5 making their debut during the month. August, saw the launch of two more recent expansions, Battle for Azeroth and The War Within, which makes it potentially more viable as a target. It also just feels like a good time to get a big new blast of WoW content, much more so than November which would see raids in full throttle during December which is a mess around the holidays.

You can listen to the entire episode of the recent WoWCast podcast, which is all about the Worldsoul Saga, below.