The "BIG" Expansion is Getting Delayed to 2015 Isn't It?

Back in March at the Boulder Cantina event two things were stated by the team there:

1) The level cap would be going up and we would be hearing about it "sooner than later".
2) We would be getting a new operation this year.

http://dulfy.net/2014/03/23/swtor-bo...shdrive-files/

That was all said at the end of March, which was two months ago. Obviously we know that Bruce told us back in February that we would be getting a RotHC style expansion in 2014. (http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20140203)

We also know that Galactic Strongholds is being pushed back by a little over two months. (http://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20140423)

But keep in mind that GSH is part of BW's new strategy of staggering content launches in order to spread content over 8 week periods so that they can essentially release the same content twice to cover the start and end points of an 8 week cycle rather than having new content in week X and then new content 8 weeks later. So the completion of the roll out of GSH will not be until October 14th. (http://www.swtor.com/galactic-strongholds)

This puts a new 8 week content window around December 14th.

However, I just can't see BW releasing back to back major expansions. The original delivery cycle for these two expansions was to have one in the Summer (June) and then the RotHC expansion in the Winter roughly six months later (Nov/Dec).

I think it's fairly obvious at this point that the large expansion will not be released this year because they will want to have both time between large content patches so that they are not dropping too much content in a small window. They will want to spread this out over the year, and additionally, they will just need more than 8 weeks to be pulling people off GSH projects that will need to be moving over to join the team that's already working on the big expansion.

Going back to the original part of this post I think that's why two months after the comments about a new raid this year and hearing something about the level cap increase "sooner than later" we have heard nothing about the expansion, level cap, raid, etc, because it's not coming and they don't want to announce the delay yet.

I'm thinking we will see the RotHC expansion sometime between March and April 2015 based on the time they were hoping to put between GSH and this big expansion.

My big concern with this is that will mean by the time this thing launches, assuming that there are no other raids/etc in the works seperate from that expansion, that it will be 18 months between new Operations by the time this big expansion drops and will also be around 2.5 years with only one new WZ.

If that is the case then we are currently looking at a 9 month content gap from this month on outside of doll houses and whatever this Guild Ship support for some type of Ground Battle is going to be. That is a massive amount of time without any traditional content. The bulk of players aren't going to spend hours in their doll house every day for 5-6 months. So the new Guild Ship/Ground Battle thing better hold players attention, or we are going to start slowly bleeding out players over the next 9 months and it's not going to be good.


CN: Big RotHC expansion most certainly has been delayed to 2015. Potential for 9 months without new operations or warzones or other traditional content. Could cause massive hemorrhaging of subs.

That's the vibe I'm getting as well to be honest.

Two years or so to get a new planet? My congratulations to Bioware on that front, in case it turns out to be accurate... Unless they're able to surprise me and deliver two or three instead, which I doubt.

I'm waiting till august tbh, before I start questioning the release.

But in the mean time.

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2...rgo_dances.gif

Go. Away. Silly. Wrath.

The club can't even handle me right now.

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...uy-d5y2y6p.jpg

But seriously, I would imagine we would get some type of news in August.

Well the way I figure it,

GSH was originally going to pre-launch in June as a fairly substantial patch, then full launch in August as a relatively smaller patch. I think they've simply reversed the order. 2.8 is fairly small(like 1.6/1.7 size), and 2.9 will be fairly substantial.

Now its intuitive to think that delaying some content will mean a delay of all other content by a similar period of time, but from what I understand, they've got teams working on things in parallel(which when you really think about it makes sense). Their PvP warzone design team isn't their PvE operations design team isn't their GSH design team.

And by then, I'm fairly sure whatever interest by the game I had may have waned...

No increase in character slots per server, class stories are a thing of the past, eight(!) freaking months without a new operation, a full year(!!!) without any Holy Trinity flashpoints, let alone an HM version of the ones we got in recent months, space missions have pretty much been abandoned and GSF has been shelved - for now - in favor of something we know nothing of.

Again, unless Bioware somehow manages to squeeze...

In 3.0 and have the guts to even talk about it by August, I'm done with this game quite honestly. Forged Alliances was supposed to be a story-arc which would span multiple updates. I'm honestly confused about the word "multiple" and what it means to Bioware... More than two, three perhaps?

/rant

Sorry, went out to grab food.

I can understand your frustration and wouldn't be surprised you weren't here in August.

I was thinking that might happen but also they have diverted a lot of work into getting those expansions done right and we know almost nothing about the second expansion, it may be delayed, it may not, my advice, best not to make too many assumptions up until we get a denial or confirmation.

According to BW, 2.9 is the big content patch. So my guess is 3.0 will be Jan or Feb at the EARLIEST.