Blizzard had inadvertently posted the schedule for this years Blizzcon on their EU site; several web sites including MMO-Champion reported the schedule on Friday.
The following is an actual snapshot taken by the Internet Wayback Machine of the Friday schedule (the schedule has been online since October 1st though).
The Saturday one was not archived though but I did see on the EU site before it was taken down and is as re-produced on the MMO-Champion site.
Update: Wowhead has snapshots of the schedule (it also apparently still exists in the updated Blizzcon app)
Given the planning logistics involved, I would say the schedule originally posted (and later removed) is going to be mostly accurate.
I would say the chances of them announcing the next expansion at Blizzcon is likely nill. This is Blizzard after all and their marketing has always been about building up hype beforehand. Reaper of Souls wasn’t announced at Blizzcon 2013; it was announced months before at Gamescom in August.
The only D3 panel is on day 1 is dev chat session which the tooltip mentioned as being about new features and concepts (which was reworded on the non archived version as being about new zones, new sets and legendary powers, new monsters, and more) coming to the world of Sanctuary.
In addition to that, there were several fireside chat sessions also planned on the voice actors stage for both Friday and Saturday.
And that is what has many Diablo fans up in arms making “the sky is falling” sort of statements that Diablo 3 is dead and that there won’t be any expansion period. Both statements are pretty much hyperbole and inaccurate.
The game was already planned to be a trilogy so lot of the story has already been done. What’s going to change is the actual game play aspects. And that is where their original plans have constantly gone awry because of bandaid fix after bandaid fix.
Patch 2.3 is a good indicator that they’ve been working on the expansion (Ruins of Sescheron as well as the cube). Actually, let me re-phrase this. I believe this was content that they originally were planning to release as part of the next expansion. The next patch will likely follow a similar tact (additional zones, monsters, and features); again, taking content that was slated for the next expansion and releasing it as a content patch.
The actual meat of the expansion is wrapping up the D3 story line. At the same time though, the game play has to follow some sort of system that keeps the combat meaningful. That is probably where the design issues are at given the kind of power creep associated with Greater Rifts that I’ve written about before; especially with Paragon inflation.
That part is on the verge of going out of control given that they obviously did not have the entire Paragon progression worked out past P2000 (plus the game engine has absolutely zero coding to deal with anything past P10000 as evidence by how the console version does not deal with anything past it in the UI and the game play itself). These are real things they need to hash out because they literally shot themselves in the foot by allowing multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts (taken along with the experience bonus in multiplayer AND XP sharing in 2.3) where players will more than likely be hitting P2000 on the rollover to non-season.
With the linear XP scaling past P2000, players are going to be able to gain power that allows even faster progression to P10000 in non-season. The power creep associated with each Season will also allow Seasons to also hit P2000 in Season 5 (where the linear scaling issues will really become an issue). You cannot make this stuff up because Paragon 2.0 was originally designed around additive XP gains (thus why XP beyond P2000 was linear since they figured back then that they had time to deal with it).
The games design follows the WoW expansion model in terms of increasing the level cap to make going through the new story line content at least interesting when it comes to combat. See where this entire power creep design in D3 is creating a real issue? It’s yet another thing they need to solve. Do you handle it by re-designing Paragon again? Sounds simple but changing it up means more variables. The current design is as shallow as it can be but their entire design is balanced around this simplicity.
They are also constantly designing themselves into corners because they also don’t want to negate the power players have managed to acquire (as per their “philosophy”). Yet, the way they do expansions means increasing this power curve over what currently exists. See the conundrum I’m getting at? Allowing Paragon to grow out of control due to allowing multiplicative XP bonuses in Greater Rifts creates a large variance of low to high Paragon that didn’t exist to the same degree with Reaper of Souls. This is why I wrote before that their entire Greater Rift design was flawed and not good for the game because they also allowed all of that power creep to spill over into the base game (again, there are ways to design challenge modes where that power creep can be contained into that mode).
The other issue is what do they have planned for end game play? Is it still going to be just Greater Rifts? Or do they plan on releasing more challenge modes? My point is that while they probably have the next act (and its related story line and content) worked out, the bigger issue is dealing with current systems. And that is probably why they aren’t yet ready to announce that next expansion at Blizzcon.
The other one is that this is still going to be a 2016 release at the earliest due to the way they stagger releases across franchises. D3 is an important revenue driver; for this year, that’s going to be Legacy of the Void. For the early half of 2016, the next WoW expansion (Legion) is going to be an important one. The next D3 expansion thus is going to make sense to cover the back half of 2016.
The way I look at it is like this; at least one more major content patch and Seasonal ladder before they make an expansion announcement as by that time, they should have some implementable design ideas on how to deal with the game play leading into the next expansion from Reaper of Souls. They need to deal with revamping the Paragon XP curve BEFORE players begin actually hitting P2000, deal with stat inflation, and deal with managing the power curve from legendary gems to where all of this can be normalized when leveling in the expansion content (and I would be very surprised if they don’t increase the cap from 70 to 80, and using that along with an actual stat squish that obfuscates the actual details to deal with all of these issues).
