No new expansion, instead WoW 2

[Pandragon]

So if you wanted to skip forwards, say, 20-200 years, this would be a good moment, maybe the moment.

Thats what I've been thinking about since the Anduin comic came out. Cause the place Anduin is sitting in at the end looks like a Naaru vessel/building, and Velen talks about fighting the shadow. I thought, maybe N'Zoth, or some other Old God, succeeded in taking over Azeroth, and the Naaru evacuated as many people as it could, and took us to a new planet. And blizz has WoW2 take place starting there, where we are now fighting against the Void Lords and Azeroth as a void titan.

[TheTaurenOrc]

There is a WoW 2, and you're currently playing it.

[deniter]

I think the biggest issue wow is having and thats why is not growing at all anymore, is because new gamers (kids nowadays) prefer to play games that are fast paced and last anything from 20mins to an hour. Thats why mobas are a massive success, overwatch the same, hearthstone the same, cs go the same etc. They are all fast paced and you can say ok am gonna spend 1 hour and play a game or 20 mins and play a game and thats it am off.

I think you're on right track in here, but action games and FPS genre in particular were big things even when WoW was its prime, yet WoW managed to get over 12mil players at that time.

You should ask for whom is WoW targeted today. It's a former MMORPG altered heavily towards action games and MOBAs, yet being neither of them. It has alienated lots of RPG'ers and at the same time failed to lure many of those more action orientated gamers, and that's pretty much true for every MMO game released post 2010.

And i guess you're right about the new gamers (a.k.a kids). It's a real shame they haven't got a chance to even try other kind of games than half baked MMOs and action games on 5" screens.

[Farath]

No, as long as they can milk the cash cow that is WoW, they will.

[Deleted]

... the only thing that would create a "WoW2" would be if they felt the current WoW engine had gone as far as it could technologically

That means it's already high time. The engine still can't utilise multi-core CPUs so the game can stutter and choke on 2016 gaming machines just because it has no concept of such architectures.

, and that the designers could not do what they wanted with the current engine (by which he seemed to mean a lot more than just graphics/physics, but the way the game was built, the way the players interact with things and so on - little has fundamentally changed in those regards since 2004).

Doesn't seem to stop them actually. When I do a raid boss, my GPU is far from fully invested, but the game is stuttering and the lags get funny. So they do add ever new eyecandies and particlefests, but basic problems remain unsolved.

Obviously we can't tell if the engine has gone as far as it can. My feeling is - not yet. They've expanded it in fantastic ways.

We can tell easily and your feelings happen to be wrong on this. The engine is already far below the bar and it already is impairing the game's ability to deliver high quality entertainment.

Still, most likely not going to happen. One strong reason is the collector aspect of the game. I might only use about 20 of my mounts regularly, but I did spend time getting the other 200. Same with toys, titles, transmogs, you name it. If it was all to be reset in new game, I would not play it as long as WoW 1 was running and if they pulled the plug from WoW 1 to "encourage" players to move to WoW 2, sure as hell I would move to a non-Blizzard franchise permanently.

So, not really. A thoroughly reworked continuation - yes. Not any time soon now, though. There are other ways to handle discontent - like refusing to publish sub numbers. A lot cheaper than actually doing some serious programming.

[Deleted]

Dont see it happen since millions of players still play this game.
That is a large money cow for blizzard and till Overwatch can generate more profit they will not move on from WoW or when the profit from WoW get below Overwatch.

[The Penguin]

The only way a WoW II works is if all players achievements / pets / mounts and gear, transitions to the new game. The undertaking of such a thing? Astronomical. I'd be fine releveling from 1-100 if that was the case, but re-starting? I am sorry but as I'm sure many others will echo..

This is 13 years of my life. Not interested without that being preserved.

[MoanaLisa]

People love to ignore this. It's why the "subs are dropping because wow is old" argument never holds any water. The game succeeds or fails based on the quality of the current expansion, which is in essence a sequal to the previous one.

I wouldn't go that far though. While an expansion can be played separately more-or-less as a standalone, after this many years at it, the age of the game does matter. It makes it perfectly understandable that lots of people come back at the start of an expansion, play for a month or two and then stay out until the next one. Standalone expansion doesn't equate to a completely different game experience no matter how much it serves your argument.

The fact is at a higher level, as long as people return in the numbers they have for the last couple of expansions and the game continues to do well financially, subs really don't matter; the game pays for itself on sales alone. Subs are just gravy. The whole subscription argument is a distraction from how successful the game is financially. If the game is making enough money then things will go along. Blizzard would of course like everyone to stay subscribed as long as they can. But they're not hurting because millions buy expansions and stay around for 30-60 days. Development costs are perhaps higher than they used to be due to the team's current size but WoW's development costs are historically much less than people would have thought. The first four years for World of Warcraft cost something like $200 million dollars total. That includes payroll, customer service and hardware. That's Blizzard's number from a conference call in 2008. There are AAA games out there now that aren't MMO's (GTA for one) where development costs have been something like $100 million.

People can make all the artistic arguments they want but WoW has been and continues to mint money for Blizzard. That's why a WoW II is unlikely and why people's dire predictions about the game are delusional. Anyone who says that Blizzard is milking the game while looking at that picture that was published the other day of their development team is either lying or not in touch with reality. If a company is milking a game, they won't have anything remotely like a large team of developers and support people. They invest. And it pays many times over.

The "game engine" argument is overblown too in that many assume that a new game engine means a completely different World of Warcraft. That's nonsense. If they thought it was worthwhile they could write another engine for the game or modify the one they created for Titan and keep the historical game as is and use the improvement on future expansions. So that whole logic of "New Engine = WoW II" is BS.

[Gendibal]

Yeah, I'd like to see WoW 2 and now it's the perfect moment, at first I thought there will be no other expansion because the problems with class halls, artifacts, etc. plus N'zoth should have been the final boss of legion (seeing as we had an old god as raid boss every other expansion), but they clearly reworked legion.

And I see many people thinking they would milk wow as long as they can, well, they can still milk it for 1 more year of legion.

[Themanintobuildafire]

I have friends who play WoW on regions outside NA and ask me to come join them. The #1 reason I say screw that is I don't want to give up my mount, pet, and toy collection, my rare items in bank, my millions in gold and my achievements.

WoW is the last MMO for me. I just don't have time to do all that stuff again.

[papajohn4]

I think wow 2 will happen but not as separate game. It will be a transition from wow. Like ffxiv a realm reborn. They will build wow again in a new and much better engine which will open many more possibilities for revolutionary design and also they will allow them to move to consoles too, where there is a database of million players they cannot reach atm

[FertsBlert]

There is a WoW 2, and you're currently playing it.

This 100%, the game we are playing now is WoW, not World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft was a full blown RPG, what we are playing now is less of an RPG than Diablo.

There is nothing in any classes toolkit that is not directly related to performing their role, there is absolutely minimal flexibility in how you can play or build your character, a single button dictates 100% how your class will be played when you select your specialisation. At least in Diablo you can choose which spells you run with which gear there is less player input than that in WoW. Your choices as a player are limited completely to which pre-built archetype will I play and frankly it's a lot more moba vs AI than RPG.

Most people will say 'of course it's an RPG, I'm playing an ELF' but seriously take a look at how the game played back in 2004 compared to now it simply is not the same underlying game or even genre any longer.

I really want to play World of Warcraft the RPG I can't because that game does not exist anymore.

[Alvito]

Also the only reason we got an announcement last time at Gamescon was because WOD was such a disaster they just wanted to move on. Announcing a new xpac at Blizzard this time is just a correction back to normal xpac reveals.

The game was hemorrhaging subscriptions at the time with that timing just a few months after the token introduction they bumped subs on the tail end of one quarter and the start of another. They also went back to not showing subscription information again after that. WoD was a series of smoke and mirrors 2 events were used to give a gilded shine to a year of nothing.

[equus80]

WoW2 would be a massive mistake.

WoW is the perfect storm. It was based on videogame lore that hooked people into it's story when it came out, it launched when MMOs were just becoming a hot new product, and it marketed itself to the widest possible fanbase through it's similarity to other unrelated properties.

But that's how it -started-. How it continued was by being the game anyone could play, and that anyone -should- play. You usually don't see people who are the only person they know playing WoW. Friends, family, friends of friends. The came is -lousy- with recommendations. The only reason I played it is because my 60 year old mother (At the time) had been playing from Vanilla through Wrath with my older brother and twin sister and finally convinced me to pick it up.

These connections, and the connections created within an active guild structure, really helped to give people a sense of community and almost family-like quality to the game.

WoW is not the finest game on the market. I honestly prefer Wildstar's combat system and SWtoR's focus on my character's personal story. And the Elder Scrolls and Dark Age of Camelot had a much better conceit for mass PvP in their territory control designs. No. WoW is the game that everyone plays. And most of us play for the Momentum of it. We've spent years playing and it's a part of our lives. So we keep playing.

Even when someone dislikes a given bit of content.

WoW 2 would undercut the hell out of that. It would destroy the momentum aspect by asking us all to start over. No more 3 million gold in your bank. All your mounts and achievements and transmog gear gone. Every pet and every toy you've found. All gone. All the old quests and dungeons and raids and environments: POOF! Gone.

There's some incentive to play the new game, but what you'd -lose- would wind up killing the attention of a massive portion of the playerbase who just aren't interested in trying to invest that much time, energy, and flat out cash in something new when they have something familiar and warm, like an old blanket.

Exactly what you said is really why I still play wow really. I don't raid on any team anymore, I just don't have the time each week for it, but I still do play several hours a week here and there. There are times I groan and am like I don't want to play, and I don't, but other days I really do and love being able to log on with a plethora of things to do new and old, with all my gold, my pets, my mounts, and everything else I have collected. But just like you said, the big thing that keeps many playing is the momentum of having played this game so long you almost feel like you need to keep going because you owe it to the hours upon hours you have spent playing it for well over a decade.

If a new wow came out, Blizzard would most certainly lose me as a MMO customer. Not because I would be pining for the old wow, but I would use it as an escape route to get out of MMO's altogether. Let's be honest, they are a huge time sink, and wow is my last MMO I play. I don't see myself playing more of them, and in fact I see myself playing less wow as more years go on. MMO's require a lot of time that the aging well into adulthood customer base who cherish the MMO market just don't have time for any longer. To start all over from scratch, losing everything I have earned, and more than likely having to dedicate even more time than I do to playing wow in a new one to establish myself...no thank you.

When WOW ends, that will be the end of MMO's for me. WOW 2 or not.

[Bathory]

I really don't understand why people not only keep asking, but keep thinking this will happen.

[Chkin]

Whilst WoW2 seems to be very much wanted by the fans (and I am one of those fans), it just won't happen as long as WoW is still as popular as it is. Some people in this thread have hit the nail on the head in which we are invested in our characters and our characters achievements and exploits that having a WoW2 run parallel to WoW would be a giant mistake. Now if WoW shut down completely and only WoW2 was up and running, then that would be bloody awesome. But the two really can't go hand in hand - only one should be active at any one time.

[Rusken]

I really don't understand why people not only keep asking, but keep thinking this will happen.

They believe that if WoW re-released itself on a brand new engine with super high-def models and amazing graphics that they'd enjoy it like they did Vanilla.

[xcitng]

yeah no thanks

[Micronetic]

There is a high chance they will add Wow 2. But 1.st they need to milk wow as much as posible, since once you add a new version a lot of people will jump on it.

But many people would stay on the WoW 1 and then Blizzard would have to manage 2 WoWs at a time, they wouldn't do it. It's the same why they don't make Legacy servers.

[Perkunas]

You soft sunset WoW with a Diablo MMO then when WoW is all but dead you make a WARCRAFT 4 RTS FUCK YEAH *GUITARS*