Legion reveal

I was considering staying up for the expansion announcement all week, the schedule had it at 2am AEST which was a bit of a stretch for me on a work night, but doable. This was until a guildie pointed out that they usually draw out events like this and it could be hours until the reveal occurred. But, I was still wide awake come 1am so I committed to finding out, and fortunately the wait wasn't that long.

There was skepticism leading up to the announcement, what could Blizzard possibly do to right the ship, what could they announce that would get people excited at this point. The answer seems to lie in the quantity. They aren't just tackling one of the popular expansion ideas, but seemingly many of them.

In our small late night guild gathering, the reaction was one that quickly moved from blasé to acceptance to amazement, as Blizzard pulled a Demtel and kept reeling off features that seemed to cover so many of the theories and long standing appeals for future expansion content.

"But wait, there's more"

It is an ambitious list, some questions arise naturally about whether they can pull it off that only time will tell. Will the quality stand up, will adequate attention be given to all the locations and lore, or will we see features cut and storylines resolved in short questlines?

And then there's the when. WoW expansion betas have lasted between 3 and 6 months in the past, so with the Legion beta starting "later this year", it is unlikely to make a Christmas release. The only expansion to date to be released in the first half of the year was the Burning Crusade, and that was a date slipped for quality control. The Blizzard of today seems unlikely to do this, so it'll be interesting to see what their target dates are.

For now the main question I have regards the location and size of the Broken Isles. Based on past representations, it was a chain of small islands, some of many, that surrounded the maelstrom. Other times it has been considered part of the South Seas, where Pandaria now largely occupies. In the announcement, it is described as a new continent 'at the heart of Azeroth' - wherever that is. From what we saw of the maelstrom in Cataclysm, it may just be a case of it being over-represented on the old maps, and with a little 'adjustment' the new continent fits in easily. Or has the Broken Isles' location been retconned to sit somewhere else completely, such as on the opposite side of the world from the maelstrom?