About a week ago, the Classic WoW-o-sphere was getting all excited about dataminers finding information about a new WoW project called "Camelot", which was largely thought to be a code name for whatever Classic Plus type thing Blizzard is cooking up right now. I did briefly consider writing about that, but to be honest there wasn't that much to say; it's not really telling us anything new if we already take the mere existence of such a project for granted.
The most meaningful thing I could think of saying about the name "Camelot" is that it's an excellent choice in so far as there are many different things you can read into it based on your own hopes and expectations. For me personally, the word association went something like this: Camelot → medieval low fantasy setting → something similar to Turtle WoW, which stays more grounded in the world of Azeroth without all the interplanterary shenanigans. That said, I also saw someone say that it reminded them of Dark Age of Camelot (another classic MMO), so maybe it was a sign that Classic Plus would have three factions. I'm sure you, dear reader, can come up with plenty of dramatically different interpretations of your own.
However, today things got more interesting! Due to a disruption on my commute I found myself on trains for three hours in the morning, and as I was browsing reddit I found that apparently someone had gone trawling through old leaks tied to the Camelot name and found one from over a year ago that at the time, was likely dismissed by most as just another attention-seeking fake, but which has now suddenly gained a lot of credibility with hindsight.
This is your cue to stop reading by the way, if you're worried about potentially being spoiled for Blizzard's future plans for the Warcraft franchise (there's nothing about specific expansions or anything like that though). The leak could still be fake, or even if true, outdated - after all, plans change all the time - but if not, we've got some interesting things to look forward to in the coming years beyond WoW itself.
It's a photo of a screen showing most of a slide labelled "Franchise Slate - World of Warcraft", tagged with the word "confidential" and a Blizzard logo in the corner. At the top it has a timeline going from Q3 2024 to at least Q3 2030 (there might be more that's cut off).
The first row under the timeline is labelled "modern/mainline expansions" and shows War Within coming out in Q3 2024, Midnight in Q1 2026, The Last Titan in Q3 2027 and the next two expansions labelled as "TBD" but scheduled for Q1 2029 and Q3 2030 respectively.
The second row is labelled "Classic/Camelot" and contains two separate lines, one called "Progression (expansions)" and one called "Era/Camelot". The first line has a lot of entries that we already knew about: Cataclysm just before Q3 2024, Classic Fresh in Q4 2024, MoP in Q2 2025, TBC in Q4 2025... and then WoTLK in Q4 2026, Classic Fresh again in Q2 2028 and TBC again in Q3 2029.
The Era/Camelot line only has one highlighted dot, Camelot in Q3 2026, followed by a little text box that just says "Live ops".
The third row on the slide is labelled "RTS" and indicates plans for a new real-time strategy game called Warcraft Chronicles, set to launch in Q3 2028 and meant to be accompanied by an anime series.
The fourth row promises an Arthas ARPG (I assume the A stands for "action" here, not "augmented"), slated to launch in Q3 2029 and meant to coincide with the release of a live action series.
Finally, there are two more rows labelled "CN mobile" and "Arcade", which are both just labelled TBD.
Reddit has additionally dug into the credibility of the now deleted account that originally posted this, and apparently the person claimed that the source of the picture was an ex-girlfriend that used to work for Blizzard but was laid off and had been exposed to these slides by accident - which, you know... "I know someone who works at Blizzard" is an age-old preamble to all kinds of BS, but at the same time it is also how this kind of stuff really can get leaked.
The biggest strike against the person's credibility in my eyes is that they also left a comment in another thread saying that "[t]he next expac will return to Black Blood/Worldsoul with Azeroth being final Titan and coming to life to cleanse the planet (including players) - last expac will wrap up with us having to kill Azeroth to restore her. Then off to WoW 2.0" which does very much sound like nonsense to me, but to be fair, that comment was in another, unrelated thread and has no actual connection to the screenshot so may just be an unrelated, unsourced opinion.
The image itself does look very credible to me personally, with the information we have now, over a year after it was originally posted. Blizzard wanting to milk people's nostalgia with repeat releases of the first three expansions sounds very on brand, and the fact that there's nothing after MoP would back up the notion that they themselves weren't sure how far that particular classic train should feasibly go.
A new RTS and an Arthas RPG would make parts of the fan base very happy for sure, and plans for multiple new TV series to go with them are also believable to me. Holly Longdale has been very consistent in her messaging about how she wants Warcraft to be more than it currently is, and it was always a bit strange to me how easily Blizzard seemingly just gave up and rolled over as far as multimedia goes when the Warcraft Movie wasn't a smash hit. Plus they've been doing a lot of experimentation with traditional 2D animation lately, such as with the animated shorts about Alleria, Liadrin and Arator or the A Place to Call Home music video - a lot of the comments on these also expressed the sentiment that people would like to see a full animated show in the same style.
Without taking anything shown in the image as gospel, it does fill me with hope and excitement that Blizzard's plans for the Warcraft franchise are ambitious in a good way - how well any of that will work out is a different question of course, but I'm curious to find out now.
This is all well and good, but with both significant layoffs for the XBox division and the current XBox CEO unwilling to say that the Activision Blizzard King acquisition was a good deal don't exactly fill me with good vibes right now. If all of Blizzard's plans survive the impending bloodbath then it might be an exciting time for Azeroth, but we'll see.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the XBOX situation may well throw a spanner in the works, especially as far as projects go that are still further out. I also think that smaller studios are probably more at risk than Blizzard though.
DeleteI can't believe that Blizzard is going to drop Classic+ (if Camelot truly is the promised Classic+) casually almost immediately after Blizzcon ends. Doesn't it mean that they are going to sacrifice the start of WotLK and these sweet, sweet level boost sales? Or do they think that people will be done with Classic+ after 2 months and move to WotLK?
ReplyDeleteWe'll see how it goes. If the leak is true, it's almost a year old, so the schedule might have been changed already.
I've seen others comment about the proximity of Camelot and WotLK, but I actually think that launching them like on the slide would be a smart move. You just know that no matter what they do with C+, there will be people who'll be bored after a month and complain that there's nothing to do. Allowing them to go play Wrath soon after would be a good way of taking the pressure off at that point, giving people who aren't no-lifing it (and the devs) time to catch up a bit.
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