Woot! There It Is...

The Cataclysm release date is December 7.

Release Date Shuffle!

There's been all sortsa speculation about when Cataclysm is coming out. Here is just a quick rundown of the sources and what I think of their liklihood for the moment.

Amazon.com and Other Retailers
Amazon widely reported that they would be distributing pre-orders of Cataclysm around November 23. A few days later, I and another 14 million people received an e-mail saying that it would be early January.

I know all these people who go to Gamestop and say that the release date is printed there, or who know somebody who know somebody at EB Software that says "blahblahblah"  but experience shows that there is no way the retailers ever know this stuff with any accuracy before the WoW community. There are too many people in WoW following this one detail extremely closely, whereas EB and Gamestop are probably more concerned about the next Splinter Cell sequel, among 1,000 other titles they are handling.

Mark Your Calendars

You know you want this too

Yesterday, Boubouille, the writer/instigator/sage of MMO-champion.com went on record saying he is expecting a Nov. 2 release for Cataclysm. There are very few in the greater WoW community who I would listen to as for these sorts of predictions, but Boubouille is one of them.


Boubouille described his estimate primarily from what sounds like his inside sources, and backed that up by saying that the pre-Cataclysm event that started last week, (Operation Gnomeregan, and whatever they call that thing the Trolls are up to) had started according to the schedule he had heard. He also indicated that further pre-Cataclysm events should occur in 2-4 weeks.


But, and I stress this as muh as Boubouille does: Anything can yet happen. Blizzard is good at delaying product, so that may yet happen. However, even if it's not right on Nov. 2, I think that general neighborhood is pretty likely right now. BlizzCon is happening on Oct. 23, I suspect that a release date will be well established by that time.