Will Blizzard show their next MMO at BlizzCon 2010?

by Kyle Horner on Jan 8th 2010 9:00AM

WoW.com's Zach Yonzon takes a speculative look at BlizzCon 2010 and all the possibilities that lie ahead. The article predicts that Blizzard will officially announce their sophomore MMO effort this year, which seems likely given StarCraft II's impending release and Diablo III being a known quantity. To top it off, the developer probably wouldn't mind stifling some of the substantial buzz building up around Star Wars: The Old Republic.

We'd love to see the cyberpunk MMO described in the article, but who wouldn't want a sci-fi MMO that's like Diablo's dark fantasy to Warcraft's light-heartedness? Nobody (well, except for Blizzard) really knows what the future holds, although for now you can read about it and share your thoughts if that helps out -- at least, it helps us feel slightly less helpless when pondering our MMO gaming future.

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Reader Comments (23)

@somuchmass: That's bunk. Blizzard's track record isn't to be at the cutting edge of graphics, but to have graphics that look good and don't take an expensive PC to run. WoW especially is a good example, they do as much as they can with as few system resources as possible and make sure the result looks good, but their older games like Starcraft and Warcraft 2 have aged surprisingly well graphics-wise in my opinion.

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No one cares about news Blizzard provides, because they provide news way too far in advance.

We will be lucky to see a new Blizzard MMO within the next 5-6 years. It is more likely we see a new Blizzard MMO in about 8 years.

Cat will last 2 years or a year and a half, that will take us to 2012.

Then the next expansion will take up from 85-90 and 2 more years.

Then the next expansion will either be 90-99 or 90-95 and another 2 years.

I think what blizzard means with "broad appeal" is that they realized that WoW was essentially an MMO-ized version of Diablo 2 game mechanics, which means a steep level curve. 5 lvl 20s in WoW get wtfpwnd by a single lvl 40, and itemization being king, this creates two kinds of players, the "geared" and the non-geared. Putting those in the same PvP context was a recipe for fail.

These mechanics also made the game "hardcore" friendly, which means that someone who has invested enough time in a game can completely destroy casual players with no challenge, again a game-breaking mechanic. Blizzard likes hardcore players but they realize that they are always going to be a minority of the paying customers. Normal people can't muster up to the level of hardcore players so eventually you have to either choose going hardcore or leaving wow. Most people ofc leave wow, as I did.

Blizzard wants to create something as a fun as WoW but that isn't frustrating if you don't play it fulltime, in order to keep all those lucrative casual monthly payers. That's part of the reason for the IP switch too, WoW and D2 are all to associated with competitive gamer culture. If they manage to pull it off, they'll have MY interest.

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