More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard

Blizzard has announced their intention to follow up this year's Burning Crusade expansion with a new World of Warcraft add-on every year. While not terribly surprising, they have also announced that they're working on a major announcement for next year. Consensus seems to be that it will likely be another Starcraft game, given comments by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2."

Well..

[Necreia]

I'm very excited to see more of the Starcraft series, as long as it is not MMO.

Geez, and this is news?

[theRhinoceros]

Wow. An announcement that there will be an announcement next year about a game that likely will not come out for a while after that, barring no (ahem) delays. Anything to get hits on a blog/AdSense clicks, right?

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[Ryan Amos]

Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010. And I'm not kidding about that, actually.

Wow churn

[BrookHarty]

I've been playing since beta, and checking the stats on my server, the number of total online players have been going down hill for the last year.

Many of the large guilds are gone, they dont play as much, and people just pop on to talk to friends.

I cant wait until the expansion when they disconnect honor/rank from pvp'ing and allow smaller groups for instances. Non-instance pvp, The casual player suffers from wow's (l33t guild) attitude.

I think many people are just paying but not playing, soon people will finally just cancel the accounts.

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[jackbird]

With a billion a year in WoW subscriptions, I think retail Xmas sales are icing on the cake to Blizzard.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

Just because you happened to use it to avoid paying for the game doesn't mean that the people who were getting together on their own servers using the software they paid for were all committing copyright infringement. Blizzard used an unconstitutional law to persecute an open source project, and they will never see another dime from me. Unfortunately, there are plenty of sheep unwilling to vote against their war on freedom with their wallets.

Re:We've Heard This Before

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but my point is that they've been selling WOW as "the MMO for the casual player" since it opened, while at the same time modifying the game to be *less* friendly to the casual player. (Adding in the honor system, adding in 40-man insane-hard raids, etc.) It's great that they're finally getting around to fixing that, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of WOW's press releases in the past have been almost-lies.

BTW, I don't consider "25-man" good enough. IMO, they should add a new 5-man and 10-man for every 15 levels or so. All the new instances are level 60 instances, and that's not fair to people who are just starting-- they deserve new content too.

Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters. When you enter with your group, the instance would create monsters designed to give you at least a little challenge. (This scheme works in Oblivion; why not put it in an MMO?) That would make it so when you're level 60, you can run any instance in the game and have a good time.

Re:We've Heard This Before

[another_fanboy]

Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters.

This would also prevent higher-level players from farming in lower-level dungeons.

Re:If they don't release on the Wii, I won't play

[freshman_a]

Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but ..

So... you loved their PC games, including one that never existed (perhaps you mean StarCraft: Brood Wars, not Starcraft II?), but you will only buy the game they have yet to announce if they release it on a system that has yet to be released and you have yet to actually play?

Please tell me there is some sort of sarcasm or humor that I'm missing...

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exceeeeeeeeeept that Blizzard doesn't see most of that money go directly in to their pockets.

Vivendi Universal, on the other hand, is quite happy.

Re:Well..

[Cornflake917]

Many of the developers who created Starcraft split from Blizzard and went off to make Guild Wars. This scares me. I want too see a new Starcraft sooo bad, but not if it's ruined by people who don't know what there doing.

Blizzard

[Blaaguuu]

1. Make Extremely Adictive Game. 2. Charge Monthly Fee. 3. Profit. 4. Make Millions of Already Addicted Players Buy Additional Content. 5. Buy Solid Gold Yacht.