How many World of Warcraft expansions do you think Blizzard is working on? At the very least one, probably two, three or more. They have officially said that they want to release a new expansion pack about once every year.

If that’s the case, the next expansion should enter beta later this year.

Personally, I think Blizzard is planning very, very far ahead. Want proof? I give you "Exploration The Movie". If you haven’t seen it, check it out on google video:

Exploration The Movie

It was uploaded to warcraftmovies.com on May 19th 2005, but later taken down at Blizzard’s request. In other words, WoW was in version 1.4 when this movie was made. At that time, the following did NOT exist in WoW:

• Battlegrounds (1.5)
• Blackwing Lair (1.6)
• Zul’Gurub (1.7)
• AQ
• Outlands

Despite that, this guy somehow unlocks "unreleased" content and goes to ZG, AQ, BWL… even Outlands! And look at "Old Ironforge" under Ironforge. You’ll recognize some of the places in Outlands from the movie which haven’t changed at all.

Think about the design of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdom in WoW, with some zones left intentionally "blank". Did they just "happen" to fit in well as starting areas for Blood Elves? Of course not. Blizzard probably started working on The Burning Crusade at the same time as original WoW.

And, as I said, they are working on a couple of expansion packs now for sure. Maybe new classes. Probably a new WoW, too. After all, this one will not be around forever. It’s gonna need a new engine sometime. Maybe we will be able to import our characters into the new game then, as Blizzard wants to keep as many people as possible playing their games.

Theorycrafting is fun. Please comment your thoughts.