I can’t find the source for this on Wired’s own site, so presumably it’s only in the print mag for now. Original source found (thanks, Zuffox). Mike Morhaime dropped the following uber-hint whilst chatting to the US tech mag:
“Let’s just say it’s going to be different and it’s not going to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. It will be different. We’re not trying to replace World of Warcraft with this new MMO. We’re trying to create a different massively multiplayer experience, and hopefully World of Warcraft will still be going strong when that one is released.”
Hmm. I’m still banking on it being something Eve-y or Planetside-y, possibly in the Starcraft universe. It seems hugely unlikely Blizz will move to a new IP – but it would be nice. Do spill your own theory-o-thoughts below.
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We’ve said it a load of times, but: post-editing dying is an unfortunate and unintended side-effect of adding the forum – as soon as we can find a way to fix it it’ll be back.
Grmbl. Cannot login to EVE, escapes me why….
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. @Kieron: Are you telling me that GW does not have separate licences for their different worlds, dimensions, whatever? Or is someone sitting on a 40k licence and does absolutely nothing with it? Hmmm, now that I think about it, I believe I heard that a 40k MMO is in the works somewhere…
As far as the name goes, I’d go with Starcraft Universe.
@YogSo:
while it’d make more sense, the game acronym would turn out to be SOS, which in itself isn’t the best way to generate enthusiasm about a new project.
I just hope they make it something that isn’t a complete waste of time, like all current MMOs are
Grinding for virtual accomplishments is a waste of your life.
@ Arnulf: iirc I believe it is THQ who will be making the 40k MMO, what with THQ pretty much owning the license to make any and all 40k themed games. I would be interested to know if their specialist games are seperately licensed, at least then it could be possible for some other company to acquire a Necromunda license.
For a Starcraft mmo, you can’t go with Space of Starcraft, as that acronym is SoS, similarly Starcraft Universe is SU, and World of Starfcraft is WoS. Gotta think of the abbreviation first, then fit the words around it.
Call me blindly optimistic, but I’m sure that whatever Blizzard releases will be a good time and certainly worth a go.
I’m going to be disappointed if it’s not a Starcraft-based MMO, though. The idea of a game like that makes me deliriously excited.
@Malagate: What’s wrong with SU?
Considering their current plan is WoW expansion, Starcraft in 3 campaigns and DIII, it wouldn’t make sense to overshadow any of those projects with a related MMO. I’m guessing a new-IP. Mainly because it’d be the most interesting possibility.
@Arnulf, aside from sounding like Sue (”I can’t wait to get my hands on SU, hur hur hur”), SU already has over 1.4 billion hits on google and is usually associated with Universities (Student Unions). You want an abbreviation that is fairly unique and also associated with something good or cool.
WoW works for obvious reasons, but I’m struggling to think of something as punchy involving Starcraft.
I’d go with Starcraft: The F***ing Universe.
@ rez You’re blindly optimistic.
Call me blindly cynical, but I’m sure whatever Blizzard make it will be about as original and interesting as a spade and still sell like bottled sex.
After logging out of WAR, again, after not being able to find anything interesting going on but the same dull scenarios, I’ve lost faith in the ability of any developer to make an MMO where the ‘massively-multiplayer’ component and the subscription fee it’s supposed to justify is neccessary.
I’d cancel my internet and stick with single-player games now if it wasn’t for the bag of virulent wank that is Steam, requiring a connection to play the games I have on it. I’ll send Valve my fucking Virgin Media bill.
@ Dante: World of Spadecraft!
A farming/manual labour MMO is just what we need.
Who is Keron and why does he say “Skaven”? Is he trying to be like Kieron?
Well spotted sir!
Oh, wait, it says Kieron now. I’m confused. Is Kieron pretending to be Kieron? Or has Keron just bought a better disguise?
@ Gorgeras
You do know you can set steam to offline mode, right?
Hmmm… maybe it will be a massively multiplayer RTS.
Dante.
Shazam. Now to suggest the unpopular idea of YouTube and QVC online shopping removal to the family. But for any kind of online game, it’s ‘fuck off’ for good until there’s a developer that knows how to do it properly. My time on WAR runs out in eight days and I won’t be subscribing. I might try it again in january but if the ‘War is nowhere’ thing hasn’t changed by then, Mythic has failed just as Blizzard did.
Yeah, a Starcraft MMORTS wouldn’t be that surprising. Though it would step on the toes of Starcraft 2 a little. Hmm… Starcraft-themed Puzzle Pirates-alike? : )
Universe of Warcraft.
cant it just be a WOW for consoles?
“So let’s just say it’s going to be different and it’s not going to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. It will be different”
same game, different platform
Hmm, I could speculate, I could suggest maybe they’re going to dethrone the other super hero MMOs. Hmmm. I could suggest that maybe it’ll be planetside-esque. Hmmm. But I’d rather just have information that I can interpret without making random guesses. Hmmmmm.
Heliocentric, Blizzard and “New” are contrary words.
If the new MMO is Starcraft, then I demand a Warcraft 4!
Ah, the old lack-of-originality complaint. “I have seen or heard of something sort of like this thing, therefore this thing is a rip-off and anyone who likes it is stupid.”
It’s rubbish. Tolkien ripped off a bunch of hairy Northern European tribesmen. Gary Gygax (provably) ripped off Tolkien. Warhammer – and a thousand other games and novels – ripped off Gygax. Blizzard ripped off all of the above and added in their own little quirks. WAR ripped off Blizzard. Blizzard will doubtless rip off the good bits from WAR as soon as they get round to it.
And you know what? THAT IS OKAY. These people are making games; the purpose of games – from the player’s perspective at least – is to have fun. If the games are fun, it doesn’t matter where the ideas came from. If something isn’t fun, it doesn’t matter how startlingly original it is.
Now for someone to point out I ripped this argument off “DarthVadorr666″ on some forum somewhere. :D
@Bonedancer: no-one would ever dare suggest such a thing; DarthVador666 is an idiot.
How are they even going to make a new MMO when they’re tied up making a WoW expansion every year and they have enough singleplayer projects with D3 and SC2 to keep them busy until 2012 (by which time Warcraft 4 will be overdue)? If they really had the spare development capacity they wouldn’t have paused SC2 to finish D3.
For my guess at the content I’d go for a super-mainstream social-networking/puzzle-game/casual-game/exploration MMO.
“Arnulf says:
@Malagate: What’s wrong with SU”
Soviet Union?
+1 to Tabula Rasa thingy.
They use to stand on the shoulder of dwarves after all. To crush them. And consolidate a new standard in the process.
@Gorgeras
I can’t understand some peoples negativity towards WAR.
I’m loving it so far and had a few ORvR events already, including one yesterday with 20ish Destruction players taking 2 keeps, where we were fighting with 20ish Order folks.
Which server did you play it on? Karak Hirn is RPS guild Dest server and Tor Anroc is RPS guild Order server. Check us out :)
(Sorry about the off topic)
Burlokk, RP server, destruction side.
It isn’t ‘negativity’.
When someone sees the world as Black and White, we know immediately they are a reactionary idiot with delusions of a golden age, usually the decade just before their birth like the 40s or 50s and they are invariably a Daily Mail reader.
But change the words to Positive and Negative, they are suddenly an open-minded consensus-seeker with a glass half-full. In reality, they are simply the counter-point idiot to the reactionary; so open-minded their brains are falling out.
The world is not Positive or Negative, people are not positive or negative. It is not ‘negative’ to criticise anything nor ‘positive’ to praise it.
What little pathetic guild-led, 20-something participant world-RvR there is(I wouldn’t sully the principle of real ‘open-mechanics’ by calling it open-RvR, even the open-RvR servers are not open-mechanic), is awful. It is nothing like the fights there were in the open beta. Something went hideously wrong between then and now.
Scenarios either need removing or pre-conditions based on world-RvR objectives before they can be entered. I’ll play TF2 if I want laggy anti-social mini-games. I’m expected to pay a subscription for a game not providing any kind of experience where the ‘massively-multiplayer’ component is unneccessary. It’s WoW all over again.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/06/16/
The speculation will be endless, but it seems like a very safe bet that since they have a huge fantasy MMO, their next logical step is a huge science fiction MMO. Eve, Dues Ex, Planetscape, or even Fallout 3 ish? Time and continued hints will tell.
@ Bonedancer
You’re way off base, I’m not talking about who did Orcs first, I honestly couldn’t give a fuck.
Blizzard’s entire business model appears to revolve around letting everyone else innovate, then releasing a slightly more polished version and going home with ten times the cash. There’s something about that that will always chime badly with me.
“Making a Starcraft MMO when they’re already going to be rolling out three ‘modules’ of Starcraft II also feels unlikely to me…”
Actually, that makes it all the more likely. They already have the concept art to build off of, and the team can be splintered off into the new IP.
I really, really hope it’s a Starcraft based MMO-FPS. I would be in heaven.
World of Lost Vikings. I’m calling it now.
Or, better yet, World of Rock & Roll Racing.
My guess is something inspired by don Quijote, ’cause of the windmills y’ know.
(the first one to figure out what I’m getting at might not eventually be treated to a quite organic cookie)
Rock & Roll Racing – The MMO!
Rock and Roll Racing – The MMO would probably kill me with happiness. I would die from loving it that much.
It’s going to be Lost Vikings: the MMO. Puzzle Pirates can’t hog all of the puzzle-solving mmorpergers out there.
cowboys and indians
Lost Vikings Online would be awesome. Would propably be the best co-op game ever!
“Blizzard’s entire business model appears to revolve around letting everyone else innovate, then releasing a slightly more polished version and going home with ten times the cash. There’s something about that that will always chime badly with me.”
I dunno, I think their rts introduced a LOT of new elements that other games rip off today. They were still rts games, but it’s a little harsh to tar them with that brush.
And lets face it, while wow couldn’t exist without everquest (which couldn’t exist without ultima which couldn’t exist without mud, to skip a few steps), it took a formula and made a pretty amazing experience. Yes, I, as many others, have tired of it, it doesn’t stop what they’ve done being an impressive work that others are now using.
I couldn’t guess about what blizzard are going to do next, but I’m pretty sure it will actually be awesome. Bear in mind that if you bought wow, and played it for three months and got bored, you would have paid thirty pounds for more hours of gaming than most other games you can experience….
I don’t ever see how anyone could do a good version of EvE… i mean, earth and beyond was great for what it was, but… then again, i only got to play it around a week before it went down. Shame on that.
However, there is HUGE, HUGE opportunity left after Neocron’s wake. Steampunk and Cyberpunk wave their hands and scream agitatedly. They want their own properly done MMO.
Then, there’s the space flyin’ shooting stuff and so on thing that EvE couldn’t do right, or jumpgate for that matter. I’m a little meh about the next jumpgate, knowing how the developers have done with their other products and lazing off on them… i just hope they can take their time with this one and polish it, and we’ll see what it is.
And everyone who says that blizzard merely takes ideas and polishes them must be in some manner retarded. They do take ideas, of course. Everyone does. Point to me a game developer that you claim doesn’t, and i’ll show you a game where they have taken their ideas from.
Blizzard just does things… right way around, they’re like this gigantic diamond cutter that can cut raw diamonds into beautiful gems, but that’s not just all they do, they encrust their own to make it even more pretty. Look at WoW Talent system for instance. Everyone else has tried to copy that, and everyone else has failed. I’d dare to say Blizzard is about the best game developer there is in these days, even rivaling GOD-games(well, which has gone down under, probably).
I agree to everything Kanakotka says. Polish is not just some kind of generic formula anyone can apply to a game. If it was then we’d obviously see more of it. We certainly haven’t seen it in any of the MMOs that have been released since WoW. Blizzard appears to have a superb understanding not only of what they want and need to achieve, but their skill in execution is also unsurpassed. I would not be surprised (and not disappointed) if they present a new IP now. The time for it is right, and they should have the economy to “risk” it. Not that anyone would perceive it as a risk, Blizzard’s portfolio taken into consideration. Personally I think there’s much interesting untested ground in the direction of more casual MMOs – more related to Planetside, Quake Wars and CoH than WoW.
Since it will be a new IP, I’m thinking science-fiction universe, but I am also thinking more story-evolved. One of the big trends in MMO’s is moving away from the endless little quests to something with a bigger longer story. Star Wars talks endlessly about the storyline, FF talks endlessly about the storyline, Wow doesn’t have one. Oh, they have a story, but as your normal player running around in Hellfire Ramparts, you are not much involved in a story. Blizzard is changing things with the WotLK expansion though. I think its needed for anyone except the hardcore pvp’ers who can spend months endlessly fighting other players.
With the experience Blizzard has received in learning how to work things (and the money they have), I suspect they will do something that will far exceed the current crop.
I’m hoping for a new IP. While World of Starcraft (Or whatever), would be cool, can anyone imagine playing as a Zerg character? I just don’t think it would work. And with regards to an EVE style game, I think the whole trading, political thing would be too complex to appeal to a mass market. Ideally, I’d like a polished Planetside style thing. With dropships. And stompy robots.
Who knows, they could use an old IP that people forgot blizzard owns.
Blackthorn: Prince of persia with shotguns
Lost Vikings: Puzzles and fart jokes