Dare I say.... consoles? :o
Jokes, they probably won't

If Blizzard wants the MMO to be as successful as possible, then there won't be any console version.

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.

This should be epic :)

Call of Duty MMO

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?

To a certain extent this happens in all MMO games, but I never saw nearly as much bitching on any other MMO forums as I saw on WoW's forums about practically everything ... "Why does [class] have [ability] when in [geeky obscure lore reference] it states that this was a unique ability of [geeky obscure lore reference]" or "Why does the Horde now have Paladins, or the Alliance now have Shamans, it's now World of Genericraft" ...

Personally, what drove me away from WoW was Blizzard's efforts to appeal to the small (amazingly noisy) segment of their population

its a starcraft mmo , following the quiet exit of starcraft ghost. they may have stumbled on something when it was in developement and ralized it would be better as an mmo

at least thats what i think :D

The amount of bitching on forums is propertionnal to the number of people playing the game, with 10.9 millions subscriber you will always have more people bitching in Wow than in the worse MMO ever created.
10% of the people playing wow and being unhappy it still more players than any western based MMO can claim to have :P


One thing to note is people bitch, they threaten to leave when a new MMO come out ( Age of Conan anyone ?) but a few months after they are back and Wow population is still growing........


Anyway I don't expect Blizzard to release any new MMO before 2012 at the earliest.
They have set the bar very high with Wow and they will want to set it higher with any future MMO and that is going to require a tonn of work ( at this point wow is probably the game that had the most man/hours of developmenent invested to it...)

Let me gaze into my crystal ball here for a moment...

Their new MMO will be...a boring leveling treadmill in a static, unchanging world where players are expected to treat other players as content and gather together in groups of 20 or more at the level cap to spend hours in massive dungeons for the slim chance of acquiring a stat-boosting item before Blizzard releases a $40 expansion and makes all those items worthless.

Move over Nostradamus...