World of Starcraft still a possibility

The Blizzard World Wide Invitational 2008 is over and as we all know Diablo 3 was announced. Although, slightly disappointing for those of us who had hoped to hear an announcement about the secret MMO project on which Blizzards “Team 3” has been working for a while now. But there were indeed tiny bits of information. You only had to listen carefully:

• Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard: He confirms in an interview at the WWI in Paris, that Diablo 3 isn’t the secret MMO: “..Diablo 3 isn’t an MMO,” Pardo says, “So we have another development team.” (Editor’s Note: that should be Team 3)

• Paul Sams, Blizzard’s Chief Operating Officer: Confirmed in an interview with Gamasutra that no new IPs are coming soon. “Are we ever going to release a new [franchise]?” Sams says, “I would absolutely say we will at some point. I just don’t know when that day will be quite yet.”

So let’s recap the current situation with Blizzards major franchises keeping in mind that no new Blizzard IP is to be expected anytime soon:

• World of Warcraft: the game is still doing well and Blizzard has projected the lifespan for WoW to be approximately 10 years. That would put a sequel quite far away.

• Diablo: The non MMO successor has just been announced. But even IF Blizzard had a Diablo MMO in the works it would probably cannibalize on the WoW subscriber base due to the relatively similar background.

• Starcraft: Starcraft 2 has been announced on last year’s WWI and similar to Diablo 3, the title has strong multiplayer capabilities but is definitely not an MMO. The difference is that unlike with a Diablo MMO, a Starcraft MMO would not interfere with the WoW subscribers but instead would open a MMO market for Blizzard without any real competition except maybe for Anarchy Online.

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More Rumors pointing to Starcraft Online

An article published at TradingMarkets.com points to the chinese Caijing Magazine that claims that an “industry insider” was quoted as saying that China’s leading online game operator Netease.com will be responsible for Blizzard’s next big MMO project *drumroll* Starcraft Online.

Netease CEO Ding Lei didn’t confirm the market saying, adding that the company is observing many online games and has not signed any formal license contract.
On an industry meeting earlier this month, Ding disclosed that Netease will strive to provide more game products by being licensed foreign games and co-developing games with foreign partners.

Source

Project Hydra

According to the folks at the Inquirer Blizzard’s “Team 3″ is working on a top secret project called Hydra. [Source]

World of Starcraft not in the works

Blizzard’s Chris Metzen confirmed that the company is currently not developing World of StarCraft. So while “Team 3″ is most likely working on an MMO (given the recent next-gen MMO related Job openings at Blizzard) it is based on a different IP. [Full story]

Blizzard Establishes Third Development Team

Frank Pearce, founding member and senior vice president of product development for Blizzard revealed that the company has a third team hard at work on a new title, separate from World of Warcraft and StarCraft II. [Source]

World of Starcraft information leaked

There are reports about leaked insider information stating that a Starcraft MMO is indeed in the works at Blizzard. Contrary to the popular belief that Blizzard is more likely working on a sequel to the Starcraft RTS. Pretty vague if you ask me. [Source]