Flash Entertainment

The next expansion for World Of Warcraft is likely to include a new continent, according to Blizzard.

Lead systems designer Greg Street told CVG that it will follow previous expansions and will add a new land mass.

"I think the next expansion will be something more like a new continent approach. More like the Burning Crusade or Nothrend, where we send players somewhere new that they haven't seen before," he said.

"I think the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are good now - we won't have to mess with them. There might be some small areas that may require polish or changing if things still don't feel quite right.

"On the other hand we have this weird story now where you almost go back in time when you hit the Burning Crusade and Lich King content. We're going to have to do something to bring that up to speed." 

Street told DS that it will approach the next expansion by going down a list of features that need updating.

"The start of things we have to think about in terms of, what's the theme? Are there new zones? Probably... What do they look like? What areas haven't we done before?" he said.

"We'll have the concept artist will start to whip up some inspiration for different zones, and we usually make more than we can actually use, and on the feature side we think about things like are we going to do a new race or a new class, or how that would work?"

"[Cataclysm] had the Rated Battlegrounds - do we need a big keystone feature like that for a new expansion? What are we doing to do with new classes: are we doing new abilities? This time we changed all the talent trees for all of the classes.