Guild Wars 2

In gw1 the campaigns came out within a year of each other. Does ANET have plans to realise another expansion within a year of HoT being released?

No, but it had better be sooner than three years with the next.

Now that Anet knows what it wants to do for the future (i.e. expansions combined with living story instead of just living story) and since Anet has designed several systems which were aimed at being expanded (i.e. masteries, elite specializations, raids, the new fractal system etc) I expect expansions should come in somewhat less time than the 3 years it took between launch and HoT. How much less time is anyone’s guess.

Best answer I can give is no idea. There is no official or formal plans. Whats most likely IMO is we will see an expansion every 1.5-2 years. Remember, if that seems like a huge content gap that they are still (to my knowledge anyway) planning to do more seasons of the living world, festival and holiday events and many more free updates in between.

My guestimate is the schedule will be like this

Expansion hits
Living world season 3
WvW season
Living world season 4
Next expansion

However, I also think that if HoT is a massive success and outsells any other content they have combined, we might see a revised strategy and them pumping out expacs every year.

HoT took a while to get out because thay also worked of the groundwork for future expansions. Next one should come faster.

I’d venture that within weeks after HoT ships the super-secret expansion team will begin work on the next unannounced expansion, and they’ll reveal and release it whenever they feel it’s done.

Anet has been really careful not to put out a hard schedule for expansions because of the highly iterative nature of their content development. They’ve been known to spend six months on a thing and scrap it because they felt it wasn’t enough fun.

I would expect it to be sooner than three years though, as they didn’t spend three years working on HoT, although nobody outside Anet known exactly when the decision was made to do a full expansion and it’s likely a lot of the HoT systems were designed in the middle of that process as reactions to player concerns and behaviors in the live game.

I think with HoT they’ve solidified their game plan after the grand experimental stage and have built all of the extendable mastry, guild, living story panel, and other such systems so it’s a lot more content driven and less systems driven from here on, so probably a lot less time tossed away in terms of iteration.