The Queue: Looking to the future

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

In yesterday's edition of The Queue, there seemed to be more questions about the next expansion than the current one. Since the next expansion hasn't even been announced yet, there isn't much we can do with those, but we sure can try.

Joey4 asked:

weapon models to me seem to go by expansion theme, wrath had a dark cold look especially on greens and mists had the Asian theme, do you think we will see awesome looking models again like BC xpac had in the next xpac?

We won't know until they've announced the expansion, but I'd personally love to see the Burning Crusade motif make a comeback. Leveling clownsuits aside, I really loved the aesthetics of that expansion, whether it be equipment, zones, or NPCs like the ethereals.

Freshke33 asked:

What's the deal with the giant (Nether? Arcane?) extractors in Netherstorm? And why the heck are they being routed to ethereal biodomes? Why biodomes? And why are the draeni design? Ugh the whole zone of netherstorm just does not make sense to me, any lore reasons behind this?

I'm pretty sure all of this is explained throughout the Burning Crusade questing experience. The group of blood elves following Kael'thas were using the extractors to pull arcane power out of the environment, much like we would drill for oil in the real world. The biodomes are built and maintained by the ethereals. The ethereals can live in any environment they want, but most people can't. They're hoping to make some cash off of adventurers by terraforming fancy, exotic resorts in the middle of the Netherstorm wasteland. The draenei architecture is there because the draenei lived on Draenor for a very long time before they had to flee to Azeroth, and were likely much better at building permanent structures than the tribal orcs.

Ricky_Gabriel_Bird asked:

Do you think the emergence of Hearthstone and the possibility of a Warcraft movie actually happening is Blizzard foreseeing the reduction in subs and trying to introduce WoW to people through other methods?

I don't think either of those things was thought up with the intent of slowing down the decrease in subscribers, but I'm sure both of them will contribute to that regardless. I'm sure plenty of people who have never touched WoW before will give it a shot once they've seen the movie, whenever it happens to actually release. The movie has been in the planning stages for years now, since back when subscriber numbers were still rising dramatically.

Brett asked:

Speculation time! With Blizz implementing with MoP "no big baddie" at the end, do you think we will see a similar idea with the upcoming expansion, or do you think they will be going back to their roots on this? And who do you think it will be if they do this!?

This is another case where we won't know until we see it, but I don't think Mists of Pandaria's lack of apocalypse indicates anything either way. Mists of Pandaria was intended as something of a vacation from apocalypse scenarios, but vacations don't last forever. Maybe we'll get one in the next expansion. Maybe we won't, and our next doomsday is still a ways off. Anything could happen.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!