If you were wondering when Blizzard might start developing World of Warcraft II, then wonder no longer: they aren’t. According to an interview with Gamasutra, Blizzard isn’t even thinking of starting up a sequel to the most successful MMORPG currently out there. Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce had this to say: “The game’s only been out for about 2 1/2 years. So I think for the foreseeable future it’s going to be expansions as it relates to World of Warcraft. We haven’t even thought about the idea of a World of Warcraft II.”
So will it just be expansion after expansion? Well, that’s the plan:
“The game’s only been out for about 2 1/2 years. So I think for the foreseeable future it’s going to be expansions as it relates to World of Warcraft. We haven’t even thought about the idea of a World of Warcraft II. I mean, we are all really invested in the game ourselves as well, we’re part of the community, we play the game. And we love it and we want to make sure that it has a long lifespan.
What would necessitate a sequel? For us as gamers, we are making the games we want to play. So it would really be about the dev team, and if they said ‘OK, we just can’t do what we want to do in regards to the Warcraft intellectual property with the current structure’. It would have to be a situation where we said: ‘This is what we want applied to what we want to do, and we can’t do it on the current framework’.”
And just who is Blizzard worried about in the MMO rear view mirror? How about Warhammer and Conan:
“There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and a lot of good stuff on the horizon. Certainly the Warhammer Online game has a lot of potential, Age of Conan, that looks like it has potential. There’s some good stuff out there inbound so we don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on what other people are doing. It’s more important that we feel that we’re doing right by our customer base, regardless of what other people are doing.”
