As we keep upcycling through Classic, now heading towards Mists of Pandaria, that leaves us with:
Draenor
Legion
BofA
SL
DF
TWW
But I don’t know if anyone wants to play Draenor or SL over again, unless things are dramatically different, so really it’s just legion and BofA left, before basically current or near-current content. Given this, I think it’s entirely possible that Blizzard runs Legion (skipping Draenor, or just ‘throwing it in’) in line with the Last Titan, and then runs BofA after the Last Titan is done, at which point they then also announce a WOW2.
WOW will have essentially run full-classic-circle at that point, and they can decide if they want to keep throwing money at new expansions for WOW1, or just switch it to being part of Blizz account and shift focus to the new WOW2 instead. Or even just convert the whole thing to some sort of gamepass option.
At this point WOW can become F2P, and will probably still get expansions, but nothing special or great anymore. There’s no way they are going to keep high-profile development for WOW going past the Last Titan. I don’t think they can afford to.
Yes they can.
Want to know what’s actually special about the Worldsaga that The Last Titan is part of?
They publicly announced that they develop expansions in a 3-expansions cycle. Which they have been doing since at least Warlords of Draenor. So they only really special thing is that they publicaly announced it.
So yes, it is entirely possible for them to keep going with WoW as long as the game makes 'em money.
The problem with WoW is that we don’t have anything really “evergreen” content wise. It’s all seasonal. If they added easily accessible new zones with actual places to hangout, rather than everyone having to gather in convenient SW, then we’d have a more thriving community as well as more folks on during these end of season lulls when the raids are long past played out.
We need more social content to get WoW back to where it was pre-Cata and WoD.
Honestly if we got a casino or bar or something in Undermine that was basically FF’s Goldensaucer or some other type of social zone, it’d solve a lot of the problems WoW currently has.
Yeah because i trust the company who made the garbage / cashgrab “overwatch 2” to make WoW 2.
I don’t see them making WoW 2 for a very long time. It takes a long time to make a new game from scratch like that - final fantasy xiv did it because the game was an absolute failure.
Edit: and no, your opinion of the game currently being a failure does not count towards it being made
I think the better lesson here is how to come back from failure, which they are slowly doing with the DF and TWW reworks to WoW. I’m really hoping Player Housing and us getting RPG elements like pet specs back for SV/BM is just the start of us reversing course on the anti-RPG design.
what, specifically, makes WoW P2W? is it the auction house mount? or the level booster? Most of your point I agree with but I never got the P2W argument. No amount of throwing cash at wow is going to make a bad player suddenly not be a bad player, and paying for carries and other boosting services hosted by players doesn’t count since thats Technically against game rules if real money is involved (not that it stops anyone from doing it.)
I wonder what the consequences of making a place like Dalaran the capital hub in every expansion would be. Instead of going to a new land and finding a new city, we’d just fly to that new land in Dalaran and graft new expansion themed islands onto it… or something like that.
I don’t know, I think it’s an interesting thought. I think consolidating the playerbase has been an issue since TBC.
We’re on WoW 1. WoW is an old tire that has been plugged and patched like 300 times. The outside might look new, but it’s still the same old tire that’s eventually going to blow out due to dry rot and god knows what else.
Shadowlands should have never existed. BfA was a perfect template to issue into WoW 2. I wrote about my conceptions of it extensively in other threads… But technologies like wall climbing, skyriding etc, would have all fitted perfectly with no need for new risky settings.
I just wish the game was bold enough to uphold its identity again, move forward capitalizing on its strengths rather than retreating into the past or trying extreme things nobody asked for every time players get slightly bored. It screams incompetence and the inability to handle competition due to the curbing of creativity and disregard for processes of gradual feedback and wholesome testing.
People have different definitions of P2W so I won’t argue this point but
crafted gear is P2W because it costs large amounts of gold and the easiest way to get gold is $
Carries are P2W because Blizzard sells you gold that you can then spend on carries, essentially fully supported RMT carries
AH mount is P2W because it gives an advantage to the player you can only get with $ (the advantage being time saved = more time for other things = higher rating/prog etc)
Lvl boosts are P2W because it’s the easiest way to level, which gives an advantage because some classes are way stronger than other classes in a given season and having more characters lets you flex to the meta
I’m looking forward to leveling at least. WoD had one of the best leveling experiences of any expansion - it just had no endgame to speak of and way too much focus on garrisons
Everyones forgotten because it has been so long since the last big one released, lol.
New World was announced in 2016 and was released in 2021…so it took at least 5 years to make. Probably more if you count the concept and planning phases
With huge price grabs on skins decades of mounts, time, achievements, etc etc only way wow 2 would succeed would be if it connected to wow 1. Where you could pass between the twonand retain some of your work. The longer a game is out the harder it is to make a sequel without causing fans to go scorched earth. Wow waited to long, so now there needs to essentially be chromie time method to pass to old content. Retain mounts, skins, achievements. Even if the blow up azeroth at end of these 3 expacs to plave us on a new world with new races, graphics, engine they have to find a way to port peoples efford data without messing up new systems. Much like overwatch titan mmo with srarcraft hints that got scrapped after Wildstar launched from old wow devs. Would have to be progression of time, technologies, bring the wow population forward but with ability to step back into fantasy. Many companies are working on this right now linking MMOs much like Sword art universe without loss of account to cross over.
We don’t necessarily even need a WoW 2. We can always just innovate the current design. We can’t have color dyes on OLD armor, because of how they’re designed, however in the course of doing NEW sets, they could always make modern 3D renditions of old sets like was done with the anniversary tier and while they’re designing it add in color channels to the new mogs.
Similarly, we have presumably a world revamp of old cities with Player Housing in Midnight, if they change things like that while they’re simultaneously introducing new assets for new expansions, it’d cut down on a lot of need for more R&D funds separate from the rest of the development.
