You realize how stagnant the MMO market is, right? Younger generations are largely not interested. There’s a reason the biggest MMOs are all over a decade old and why newer ones fail to secure a notable audience. New World had like 5k players online last weekend.
Hell, there’s room to argue that MMOs were NEVER more than a small niche market. WoW was an anomaly. It was always an anomaly. Nothing else even came close, and now WoW is back down to earth as well.
I’d try another Blizzard MMO. Not saying I wouldn’t. But financially it’s just a poor move for ANY company these days. Combine that with Blizzard’s post-Titan claims about not wanting to be “The MMORPG Company” and I think it’s safe to say we’re not seeing a WoW 2 or World of Starcraft / World of Diablo anytime in the near future.
I don’t see MMORPGs in general making a comeback unless something fundamentally changes about them, and such a change would likely have to be big enough to cause the current fans of the genre to consider the new thing as “not an MMORPG”. Like leaning into the looter shooter / Destiny 2 design, at a minimum.
They have no more morals. Its only profit before pleaser now.
I want them to fix WoW. And stop treating WoW as E-sports competition. No one cares about E-sports. I want RPG(Role Playing Game) adding back in the game.
I want WoW what it used to be as it was during Lich King.
More twenty five dollar cosmetics and decade-plus gaps in releases for beloved franchises, probably.
i’m seeing bankruptcy as blizz is out of money, so going forward, i see activision dissolving blizz studio
There’s no reason to dissolve Blizzard in general as D:I and WoW are both cash cows. They’ll probably kill the other stuff, but that is an obvious mistake, Blizzard’s brand power is so strong that even D4 sold a bunch of copies despite general bad word of mouth. If they cut the activism and hired some talented devs instead Blizzard could be popular again. There’s no reason you couldn’t make another highly successful starcraft game, other than the obvious current lack of talent and imagination. Literally everyone in gaming wants Blizzard to be their old golden era selves again, the brand is still valuable and has draw if they produce even an above average product.
Remember the intro to the old TV show “Get Smart”?
…all the doors?
Imagine all those doors are gates.
They are apparently working on a Starcraft shooter gane. Third times the charm, maybe?
Personally, I woukd love it if they made a Soulslike Diablo game. As much as I love the isometric ARPG genre, I feel the Diablo IP has enough creative design to make a brilliant soulslike spinoff title.
For Warcraft, I guess a return to their RTS roots woukd be neat, but no idea what they’d do with it.
Overwatch is simple. A nice singleplayer campaign that actually does something with the story they’ve been building up to since the launch of Overwatch 1. Shame Overwatch 2 has been not only destroying the chances of that happening, but has also been actively ruining things with thoughtless additions (cough Kiriko cough)
I also wouldn’t mind if they just made a new IP overall. That survival game that got scrapped could have been cool. Though, I’m sure its probably a good thing it got scrapped as I’m not sure I want to see an Activision led survival game.
It’s sad but unfortunately we’ll likely get more live service games with maximum profit and minimum effort.
I don’t blame Blizzard per se but the rise of live service hub games is getting so bad but it makes money so they’ll keep pumping them out.
After burning out of retail a few weeks ago I went back and started playing Dead Space. I had it in my steam games for years but never tried it. Was a nice change from the repetitive, instanced bs feed trough that is WoW retail. Conditioned players, waddling up to the M+ trough to get your fix and try to convince yourself that you are having fun.
A more recent example is Baldur’s Gate 3. There is a reason BG3 was a huge hit. It hearkened back to when games were actually good. There was actually a time when games like BG3 were the norm and not an outlier.
Alas, live service games offer in game stores, cosmetics, battle passes and even aspects of P2W. It’s all to make more money and show profits so the stockholders keep investing cause we all know a publicly traded company must always show more profits year over year.
These days it’s only a name and nothing more. I wouldn’t argue that the might come up with something new but why would they? The most money is in what they already have and milk their fans until they have no interest in anything they’re selling.
Them going forward I’d imagine anything they release will be some sort of a live service game with in-game store. I wanted to write f2p but they’d make more SELLING you the “f2p” game like with diablo 4. More mobile games for sure…
Honestly. I expect almost nothing. In fact if I had to bet I would say to expect “blizzard” to disappear pretty soon.
Microsoft will consume them. Wow will most likely move to a f2p model with a cancerous store that will kill the game. I give it a year…maybe, maybe 2.
All these doomsaying replies. Holy crap.
You know what I expect, OP?
WoW 2. Nobody, not even the devs themselves, realize how hard it is to kill off WoW.
RUNESCAPE 2, or OSRS, is still very much alive and kicking. TF2 is still very much alive and kicking.
WoW is not going anywhere anytime soon.
A game with every monetization scheme known to man, so probably mobile games.
Company is in bad shape and on life support, IMO.
Even if they brought back all the old school devs, pretty sure their new ownership would only be concerned about maximum profit for minimum investment.
The last almost week or so, I’ve been thinking the same thing about the game. I log in, usually on an alt, maybe get a couple of levels and then log off.
I haven’t touched either of the level 80’s I have after completing the campaign. No motivation or interest in raiding. PvP isn’t something I’m interested in anymore. I really don’t know why I’m logging in anymore. At least not enough for me to justify my subscription.
Don’t know if its a combination of getting older and having played the game for years on and off, or what, but I’ve really been chewing on the idea that maybe it’s time for me to move on.
i expect their games to feel like a hollow-shell of their former glory. for them to survive off of our nostalgia, and attempt to evoke feelings of fun, even though there’s no heart and soul in any of their work. what was once a product made by nerds that they themselves would enjoy playing, now hollowed-out and cheapened, made into a puppet to convince the desperate playerbase into giving them more money.
…apologese for being very doomer-minded right now, it’s getting late, i’m getting sleepy, and i tend to get wordy (and sometimes gloomy/depressing) when i’m tired.
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Playing through old content gives me that “this is the game I’ve missed”, while newer content doesn’t evoke that at all. I started off enjoying the expansion, but after the first playthrough there’s nothing that makes me want to go back to it.
It doesn’t feel like it used to. Visually it’s improved, but it’s missing something that I really can’t quite put my finger on.
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that’s the soul that’s missing. that feeling of ‘this was originally a tabletop roleplaying game a bunch of old-school nerds played’.
i mean… if i remember correctly, warcraft was a homebrew warhammer-fantasy thing the old-devs made. like, frostmourne’s runes used to be warhammer-elvish.
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