Theme of WoW’s next expansion might have been leaked, and fans are already making theories

The next expansion in the World of Warcraft franchise may have been leaked, all thanks to an intrepid player who was simply messing around with Blizzard’s API. 

A post on the WoW subreddit by a user named Wiraneusz showed off some datamined unlisted achievements that are nowhere to be found in the game. One of those achievements references a potential mount called the Algarian Stormrider, which could likely be the mount that’s included in the Heroic Edition of the game’s next expansion. The datamined achievement is called “Heroic Edition: Algarian Stormrider,” so it’s likely that that’s the case. 

While this information is not enough to build any theories on its own, it does point us in the right direction. A player in the comments of the aforementioned Reddit thread named jump9575 noted that an area called Khaz Algar was hinted at by the WoW devs through notes and items in the new Dragonflight dungeon Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr, and that the zone could be a major point of interest in the future. 

Uldaman and the potentially new zone, Khaz Algar, both have a lot to do with the lore of the titans, a race of primordial beings whose origins and purpose we’ve explored extensively throughout Dragonflight’s main campaign. Players were initially under the impression that we’d be getting a full-fledged titan zone in Dragonflight called Avaloren (which was also teased by notes in Uldaman), but after the game took us in the direction of Zaralek Cavern and the Emerald Dream, fan-driven ideas surrounding a titan zone were shelved for the future. 

It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to go from Dragonflight to a titan-themed expansion. The game’s ongoing storyline has set up some serious cosmic threats, with villains like Iridikron and Scalecommander Sarkareth both being clearly interested in the Old Gods, the most direct threats to the titans. 

It’s possible that the next WoW expansion could be announced at BlizzCon later this year, with the Algarian Stormrider being revealed as a pre-order bonus. Typically, expansion announcements come just about every other year, and judging by that schedule, WoW should be due for another announcement sometime in the coming months.