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World of Warcraft is now ten years old and Blizzard is fully expecting it to still be around when it turns twenty, according to lead designer, Ion Hazzikostas. With Blizzard's recently cancelled MMO, Titan, now out of the picture, it looks like to publisher is throwing its resources back in to World of Warcraft to keep it going.
Speaking with Cnet, Hazzikostas said: “I definitely can’t tell you what our 20th anniversary is going to be. I can tell you there is definitely going to be one”, apparently Blizzard is always planning its next expansion and hasn't ran out of any big picture story arcs just yet.
Despite rumors of a World of Warcraft sequel following the cancellation of Titan, according to Hazzikostas, Blizzard has no plans for a sequel at present since the world can just keep evolving:
“It’s clearly not the same game it was 10 years ago, right? The engine is different, all the graphical assets are different, a lot of core combat mechanics have changed.”
“It’s hard to pinpoint one turning point when it changed, but we definitely have taken an incremental approach to the pressing problems the game has that we feel we need to solve and what we can add to it that will make it better and deliver the most value to our players. That’s what we do each step of the way.”
World of Warcraft's sixth expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor, is set to release on the 13th of November, adding in some enhanced graphical features and a slew of new content.
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KitGuru Says: World of Warcraft is still insanely popular and old players tend to go back every now and then to play for a bit at a time. With the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion coming out, we might see a boost in subscribers as well. However, subscription based MMOs aren't doing quite as well as they used to, do you guys think World of Warcraft can go on for another ten years? Do you think Blizzard can keep it fun and successful for that long?
If anyone can, than Blizzard can.
It would take someone doing F2P right and well to really hurt Warcraft right now. It’s nearly impossible for another subscription game to go up against them due to the amount of content they are behind from the start. You’d need a LoL like popular F2P MMO.
They already ruined it with all the recent simplification that they did.
Can they reach 20 year anniversary? Yes they can. But with MMOs actually progressing by now I have no idea at what kind of subscriber numbers they’ll be at that point. For example Everquest 1 is still alive too 😀
actually all you need is many many many new MMOs that change things up. All that WoW can die to is age. The only thing that can age it is changes that WoW won’t be prepared to take.
We already have many examples of it, from action combat, to personal nodes, to quests that you don’t need to report. And it will slowly continue.
Reason it has last so long though is it has done a good job of adapting to the changes or being on top of them. I mean look at how many MMO’s have ended up changing themselves to be more like WoW or how many coming out have been influenced by features or changes that WoW made to the genre. Trying to take it down right now is like trying to take down League of Legends in the MOBA genre. As long as those 2 games keep getting updated and stay relevant with where the market is heading it will be hard to knock them down.
Usually you’d say eventually technology would make the game obsolete, but it seems these companies have found ways of upgrading their hardware and giving the games a new coat of paint to keep them from being completely out classed by newer games.
well unlike League, World of Warcraft is past its peak. It’s in its falling stage, but with people still coming back for each expansion it will be an incredibly slow process.
The recent simplification was something they needed to do to allow the game to continue evolving for another 10 years, without the spell removal, where is the room for more spells for another 6 expansions? Same reasoning with the stat squish, numbers were getting too high for the client to handle.
well when WoW came out one of its attractions were its complexity and build diversity. Right now almost all of it is gone.
Remember shield strength warriors that used shield bash in PvP? Gone. Tanks with a two hand sword relying on parry? Gone.
They didn’t remove just spells. They removed anything that allowed you to build your own character and make it unique.
Just wait til you see Garrisons. They are the best feature of the new expansion and something entirely unique to the genre. Basically you get to build your own RTS Warcraft base in the game and command units and do quest from it.
If I could bring myself to seriously play a MMO again I’d be all for the new expansion. It looks to be the best thing they have done since Wraith of the Lich King. The only downside is no new class or race this time which is disappointing.