Blizzard is working on a new unannounced MMO

[alpha_dk]

HappySqurriel said:

Bodhesatva said:
As someone who avidly follows WoW, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've known about this project for over a year. They've been listing job apps on their website for "Next Generation MMO" for a long time now. Unless they magically knew about the Activision deal back then, it's not Activision stuff. Even if Blizzard ever agreed to do it (which they would not), it's not chronologically possible. Just wanted to squash that rumor right away. It's likely a new IP, based on previous statements. The end.

Yeah, I could be wrong but I suspect they 'learned their lesson' about producing a MMO game based on an existing IP ...

The nice thing about an existing property is that you have a massive ammount of lore and a gigantic following of dedicated fans; and the bad thing about an existing property is that you have a massive ammount of lore and a gigantic following of dedicated fans. My favourite example of this problem is Star Wars Galaxies ... You have a class (Jedi) which a large segment of your population wants to play as, another large segment wants to stick to the lore and have them be rare, another large segment wants them to match the lore and be amazingly powerful and dangerous, and no-one wants the game to lose balance; hypothetically speaking, you could balance this by making Jedi-Skills take 10 times as much experience to develop as other skills, but I don't think many people imagined Jedi's training by killing 35,000,000 bores in the low level forests to improve their lightsaber skills.

On the one hand, I agree; certain existing IPs would not work at all as an MMO.

On the other hand, both of Blizzard's remaining MMO-less IPs would work as an MMO.

You don't have one class that *should* be more powerful than the others; Blizzard has a strong history of good balance, and so most people would be fine with (for example) a Space Marine and a Hydralisk being approximately equal in power, or a Sorceress and Barbarian. Careful selection of classes should remove any remaining lore-related intrinsic imbalances. It's not like WoW lets you play as a Frost Wyrm, after all.

Further, the lore of both already takes into account a world of large numbers of people all fighting for a common goal. Diablo 2 established that tons of heroes tried to kill diablo in D1 before 'your' character was successful. Starcraft should be obvious

That said, I will choose to trust Bod when he says that this is old news and likely to be a new IP. I just wanted to point out that the difficulties you're talking about wouldn't necessarily apply to Blizzard's existing IPs

P.S. What lesson? The one where they have the biggest MMO on the planet?