Back in March during a press event for the fourth expansion for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen said that the release of Mists of Pandaria would mark a turning point for the grandest and oldest of all MMOs. "This is definitely different fare from any expansion we've tried so far," he said at the time. Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard believed right in the middle of its development, wasn't just about five more levels or pet battles or big, playable Pandas, though all of those things are in there. It was about designing the next cycle of content for World of Warcraft. "The big global threat that's coming, to define the next couple years of WoW's gameplay, is really war itself," Metzen said.

At the end of the last expansion, Cataclysm, Blizzard did need a new plan. Long ago, even before the game's first Burning Crusade expansion, word had leaked out that the development team had ideas for expansions about the world's Northrend continent (which eventually became the Wrath of the Lich King expansion), and the setting's elemental planes (which was reworked into Cataclysm). But Pandaria was never on that list, or any other lists that have reached the public's eyes before it was announced.

So Mists of Pandaria, then, does represent a new turn in the already long and still growing story of World of Warcraft. It represents not only a turn in the game's lore (which up until this point has been heavily based on the series' previous titles), but a turn in the game's direction, the first step in answering how (and even why) you keep a PC game this old and this unwieldy still profitable, fresh, and growing.