World of Warcraft 2 Speculation thread. Post anything about the sequel to WoW.

[Deleted]

I'll bet for WoW The Movie before we see WoW2, but as all of you know, Blizz do things slowly....very slowly

[Gunmoku]

OK, first off, WoW won't die due to external measures like a game "stealing" subscriptions or whatnot. The only way WoW will ever die is the day Blizzard pulls the plug on the last remaining servers of the game and then it's dead. Secondly, that 500,000 + subscription-loss announcement DIDN'T HAPPEN OVERNIGHT. It happened over the course of 12-18 months. Blizzard always has subscription drop-offs partway through an expansion's life due to casuals running out of stuff to do so quickly and higher-end content (like Heroics and raids) not being as accessible as they would like, so they quit and move on. With an estimated 11,000,000 subscriptions still out there, I highly doubt WoW will just drop off the face of the earth.

A more hardcore / grind-heavy WoW is the bane of MMO's. There's a reason people secretly hated games like Everquest (at its Vanilla state) or Final Fantasy XI. Why? Because it was nothing but a grind after grind after grind. It's BORING to just grind out points day in and day out with little to no satisfaction from doing so. WoW is one of those few games that make grinds somewhat worth it with rare rewards seldom seen amongst the server population and things like achievements. Accessibility on a multitude of levels is key so you can target a very wide audience rather than just target a minority (i.e the hardcore raider or the PvP-nut, which make up a MINORITY of the subscriptions), and WoW almost does it extremely well. The problem with WoW as-is now is that Blizzard is trying to do too much with one or two systems and end up pulling the whole game around with it, basically WoW is getting a bad case of Feature-Creep.

Going down your list of "features":

1) WoW doesn't "feel pigeonholed". The problem is players are always choosing the easy-to-play classes (Hunters, Paladins, Death Knights), so their population feels over-saturated. Class balance is ESSENTIAL in an RPG, otherwise everyone will flock to the dominant class and the severs will be filled with NOTHING but Death Knights or whatnot (Remember back when Wrath came out the sheer number of Death Knights? People did want to play them because they were new, but the main reason people played them is because they were ridiculously overpowered right out of the gate). But, I do feel Blizzard is over-thinking the process of homogenization in classes so all of them can fill certain roles well enough so that nobody feels left out. As of right now, certain classes do feel like one another without any true unique twists to combat mechanics (i.e Demonology Warlocks are just Hunters with wands, Retribution Paladins are Rogues in plate with bigger swords, etc.) but I think that has more to do with the underlying combat system itself more than just how the classes work with the combat system.

2) WoW's graphics do show a bit of age, but that's just the issue with MMO's. It's either you make a good graphics engine and everyone suffers from bad latency due to large amounts of client-side processing from too much on the screen at once or you make the game look super-simple and everyone has good latency, but everyone complains the game looks like ass. What Blizzard has achieved with WoW's engine (which is actually a heavily modified version of the engine Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was built on) is still a beautiful game with its own unique style. It borders on cartoon-like, but still retains enough dark grit to keep the older audience in the game.

I do advocate that Blizzard does pull WoW offline for a short period of time (i.e a year or so) and completely revamps the graphics engine to maybe bring it up to circa 2009-2010 levels of quality rather than be stuck in 2004-2006 times, and relaunches the game with a new look and feel as an anniversary celebration or with a new expansion. The character creation I do believe is extremely limited in its look and feel amongst player-characters. Armor homogenization is the worst offender, but changing how people customize their basic toon's look is a good step in the right direction. I would think something along the lines of Brink or All-Points Bulletin's character-generation system would be a much more rich experience in what your avatar looks like. You'd build your basic body type, face, and whatnot from scratch using sliders and small menus picking hard-set features (eye color, hair color, hair type even) to very finitely change how you look.


3) A much larger world would actually hurt the game rather than help it. Make a world too big, and the player gets overwhelmed with what to do next. Make it too small, and the player runs out of stuff to do too quickly. WoW did strike a good balance with Cataclysm's revamping of the world, but I do think it needed more initial content for the level 80 player going for the cap and getting into endgame content.

Also, condensing servers / realms is bad for business in an MMO. You over-populate a realm, you end up with a complete gank-fest for resources, quests, and PvP. It will encourage population clusters in certain zones and hurt other players trying to advance through the area and getting caught in the middle of people stealing their herbs/ore/cloth or ganking their quest objective. What the problem, I think, really is with WoW is that they make city hubs too rich in content and condense things like trainers, battleground vendors and battlemasters, etc into one big hub and then it leaves the rest of the world empty and lifeless, sans for the occasional passer-by farming for something. If they just relocate certain things back out into the world or encourage more player interactivity outside of the main cities, the world would FEEL that much bigger.

Variety in content IS good, but again, too much and you overwhelm your audience and they end up quitting from managing all the content that is available to them and ends up just being a headache rather than an experience. With the way Blizzard is TRYING to push out smaller bits of content in rapid-fire succession (and I do believe this will eventually work when Blizzard irons out the kinks in Firelands), they allow everyone to progress through endgame or whatever is featured at a steady enough pace rather than spreading out amongst a MASSIVE patch of content and you end up overwhelming support and the fansites with too many questions and problems.

The problem with things like standing away from bad obstacles or how WoW handles boss fights isn't an issue with a non-creative raid designer, the combat system itself is the limitation. You can only do so much with a limited system until you're forced to go in and redesign the engine to fit what you're trying to achieve inside of the game. I honestly think the biggest flaw with WoW and people's problems with repetitive bosses or seemingly unfair PvP lies in the combat system itself, and Blizzard should completely throw out the current system and make a new one. Of course, that's what Project Titan is for. That could also be what destroys WoW's reputation in the process. Make the system too complex and you end up shunning your target audience away from the game, or make it too simple and you invite in worse players than there already are. What Blizzard should concentrate on is instead of making ultra-complex encounters is that they should immerse the player in the lore of the situation and encourage interaction with the boss beyond just hacking its ankles until it keels over. Mechanics like the use of vehicles or hopping on the boss to wrangle it to a certain spot on the ground (i.e Magmaw) should be more concentrated on rather than just reverting to cloning an old boss and just giving him/her/it a new coat of paint and calling it "done" (4.1's Zul-Aman instance is the ultimate offender of this, even Naxxramas in Wrath used that formula to a bad way).


TL;DR Gist of it: The problem with WoW right now is that Blizzard is thinking too hard about pulling a larger audience into the game. I think if Blizzard just thinks more outside the box with what they already have, WoW could head in the right direction and bring players back that decided to quit too early in Cataclysm and thought that was the end of it. Here's hoping 4.3 and beyond bring good things.


Also, why are all of you people thinking Titan's gonna be an FPS? Just because Blizzard is spilling beans to keep people satisfied with teases doesn't mean it's going to be real. It's all PR stunts to keep the fanboys at bay until they're ready to yank the curtain back and reveal it.

[Devils]

agreed its way to soon to tell if they will be bringing out a world of Warcraft 2. the basic Wow is doing ok at the moment.

[Blznsmri]

SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!!!!!!


Oh wait... Um...

It'd be cool for all the Aspects to get the hatchet.

[WingsofLiberty]

Screw mmos. Bring back the Warcraft rts.

This period.

[Zaelsino]

The "revamp the world" Cataclysm dynamic would've set the stage for a WoW 2 quite well, somewhere down the line.

But alas.

[Deleted]

Everything there is opinion. Some of us like everyting you are complaining about.

I am 100% for more dungeons for the random queue though.

[Varyk]

There isn't going to be a "WoW 2". Some amount of months ago there was a chart showing Blizzards projects (On this site) over the next several years (obviously these could change). There Was cataclysm, a WoW movie, some starcraft stuff, Diablo III, and Titan as the last project. It wouldn't even make sense to make a "new" wow rather just another expansion.

[Joodoc]

Why would there be a WOW 2? This story is being told in WOW, It is set in a time line and story basis. There are meanings and stories behind those bosses your killing over and over. I suspect Blizzard will call this a masterpiece of games and move on to make other unique titles.

How do you describe a dying game. Some games are still alive with much smaller player bases and they are still not considered dead. I.E. Lineage 2 it has a smaller player base and community but people are still logging hours every day on this game. I would hardly call a small drop in WOW's subscription numbers a dead or dying game. With the economy the way it is people might just be too broke to activate their accounts or internet or other bills.

There would be a wow 2 because currently it is expensive as hell to buy all the old expansions before getting to the new one, eventually it will be too expensive.

[Deleted]

A wider array of class choices is definitely something I think they'd put in. They'll probably keep most, if not all, of the classes we have at the moment, with a few changes of course, but they'll need to add in quite a few new ones as well as changing the current ones enough so that the original classes will still feel like the class you know and love, but there'll be enough differences for them to feel new.

The 'next gen' graphics is a hard one when you think that if there was a WoW2, it probably won't be for atleast another 10-15 years. The 'low' graphics they have at the moment makes WoW accessible to a much wider audience who aren't willing to shell out the money for powerful computers, so I don't think that a WoW2 would have better graphics than normal for it's time.

The larger world than Azeroth is also a tough one. Mainly because Azeroth IS large. Flying mounts make it feel smaller, but if the World was 3-5x the size of the current Azeroth, not having flying mounts would make travelling feel like a huge pain in the arse. Not sure when you started playing WoW OP, but in Vanilla, if you wanted to get to Stormwind from Darnassus... well have fun with that. It took ages. Now multiply that by 3 and it's a horribly long amount of time to travel as a low level character and would definitely put a lot of players off. Multiply it by 5 and they can kiss most of their playerbase goodbye. If WoW2 was set in a World 3-5 times larger than what we have atm, it would need a lot of portals and incredibly fast mounts (stuff that makes the world feel smaller) to stop travel from feeling like a painfully tedious process. If that were to happen, then there would be no point in having a larger world.

---------- Post added 2011-06-17 at 06:06 PM ----------

There isn't going to be a "WoW 2". Some amount of months ago there was a chart showing Blizzards projects (On this site) over the next several years (obviously these could change). There Was cataclysm, a WoW movie, some starcraft stuff, Diablo III, and Titan as the last project. It wouldn't even make sense to make a "new" wow rather just another expansion.

I haven't looked at it in a while, but that chart finishes in 2015 quarter 4 doesn't it? You really think that it just means Blizzard is going to call it a day at the end of 2015? No.

[Deleted]

MMOs >>>> Every other kind of game.
Face it kids, the future lies with MMOs!

I dont care, id gladly play any old game.

[Deleted]

The 'next gen' graphics is a hard one when you think that if there was a WoW2, it probably won't be for atleast another 10-15 years. The 'low' graphics they have at the moment makes WoW accessible to a much wider audience who aren't willing to shell out the money for powerful computers, so I don't think that a WoW2 would have better graphics than normal for it's time.

Crysis has ridiculously demanding graphics but tons and tons of people play it. I would go as far as saying that large majority of the people who play Crysis play it because of the graphics. It's much mor eimportant for Blizzard to restore WoW's cool factor and make new people want to play than for them to cling on to their remaining subscribers for dear life. Without a revamp ie. (WoW 2); Blizzard eventually will be in the exact same position with 2 million subscribers, far less than would stop playing after a graphics update.

The larger world than Azeroth is also a tough one. Mainly because Azeroth IS large. Flying mounts make it feel smaller, but if the World was 3-5x the size of the current Azeroth, not having flying mounts would make travelling feel like a huge pain in the arse. Not sure when you started playing WoW OP, but in Vanilla, if you wanted to get to Stormwind from Darnassus... well have fun with that. It took ages. Now multiply that by 3 and it's a horribly long amount of time to travel as a low level character and would definitely put a lot of players off. Multiply it by 5 and they can kiss most of their playerbase goodbye. If WoW2 was set in a World 3-5 times larger than what we have atm, it would need a lot of portals and incredibly fast mounts (stuff that makes the world feel smaller) to stop travel from feeling like a painfully tedious process. If that were to happen, then there would be no point in having a larger world.

I disagree, I and many others quite enjoyed travelling around the world, especially when you were required to meet other people and not just avoid them via your flying mount. I don't think flying mounts have a purpose in the game except maybe to be extremely rare and possessed by maybe 0.5% of the playerbase. And Azeroth is by no stretches of the word 'huge'.

[TheEaterofSouls]

Before I go around saying anything, isn't GW2 a sequal to guild wars, and Titan supposedly an mmofps. So a Wow 2 is entirely possible. Might take place after the death of sargerus? With a sorta fresh start involving a new antagonist to take the place of the old ones? Im sure it'll happen. Dont forget how popular Wow ended up being (players and media and all.) That be cool. But Wow1 still has life IMO. I like it and its probubly more populer now than people make it out to be.(Even tho its not at its peak.)

[Deleted]

Before I go around saying anything, isn't GW2 a sequal to guild wars, and Titan supposedly an mmofps. So a Wow 2 is entirely possible. Might take place after the death of sargerus? With a sorta fresh start involving a new antagonist to take the place of the old ones? Im sure it'll happen. Dont forget how popular Wow ended up being (players and media and all.) That be cool. But Wow1 still has life IMO. I like it and its probubly more populer now than people make it out to be.(Even tho its not at its peak.)

Sadly I don't think we'll get WoW 2 before Warcraft 4 so that is atleast 5 years and by then who knows if any of us will even give a damn about WoW.