Highlights
- World of Warcraft fans can expect a nostalgic experience at BlizzCon 2023, with Creative Director Chris Metzen potentially revealing the next expansion.
- While Dragonflight introduced exciting dragonriding, standard mounts still have a dedicated audience of hardcore collectors in World of Warcraft.
- The new BlizzCon mount, resembling an earth elemental, has sparked speculation about a possible world redesign and a return to the story of Cataclysm.
While Dragonflight is entering the second half of its story, World of Warcraft is slowly setting the stage for a big presentation at BlizzCon, as players believe this year's exclusive mount has already been revealed. With Chris Metzen announced as the new Creative Director for the Warcraft franchise, World of Warcraft fans will likely be treated to a nostalgic experience at BlizzCon 2023 – with an excited Metzen revealing the next World of Warcraft expansion once again.
Though Dragonflight gave players dragonriding as the new and exciting way to traverse the zones of Azeroth, standard mounts in World of Warcraft will always have an audience, as the stable of hardcore mount collectors is never full. Over the years and across several expansions, Blizzard introduced a myriad of ways for players to obtain all sorts of mounts, but the BlizzCon ticket had always traditionally awarded players with an exclusive mount, and there's no reason to believe that this year will be any different.
Shared by player112304 on the official World of Warcraft subreddit, the new mount resembles an earth elemental wearing elegant silver armor. Though the BlizzCon mounts may not necessarily hint towards the theme of upcoming expansion packs, the more optimistic side of the World of Warcraft community would argue that the earth elemental points to the heavily-demanded world redesign. Elementals were an important factor in the story of Cataclysm, and with Thrall featured on the BlizzCon 2023 banner, World of Warcraft may well be planning to resume that particular plot thread.
An important thing to consider regarding future expansions is that World of Warcraft notably featured a time skip between Shadowlands and Dragonflight. Players believe that revisiting the old zones of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms following the time skip would be an intriguing story hook. Furthermore, the graphical disparity between the old Cataclysm zones and the newer content from Dragonflight (or even Legion) has gotten distractingly wide, which has been the primary reason for fans demanding a visual glow-up in the past couple of years.
Following BlizzCon 2022's cancelation, this marks be the first time that the show will be hosted in Anaheim, California since 2019. Though the mount was showcased through the official program reveal by Blizzard, more will be revealed in time as BlizzCon 2023 will take place on November 3 and November 4, 2023. The World of Warcraft mount will likely be restricted to ticket holders (along with a plethora of other goodies), but the stream itself will be broadcasted free of charge.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.