Blizzard has been working on a new MMO for a while and CEO Mike Morhaime finally gave some details on how it might coexist with World of Warcraft.
The new MMO is codenamed Titan, but other than that we know almost nothing about it. Speaking at the DICE Conference keynote last night with other top executives in the industry, Mike Morhaime divulged what he thought the game might do different than WoW and how the two MMOs would coexist without stealing each other’s audience. The process starts with some of the best guys who built Azeroth now working on something new and exciting on Titan.
“Without giving away any details, we have some of our most experienced MMO developers, people who spent years working on the World of Warcraft team, working on this project,” said Morhaime.
“We’re really trying to leverage all the lessons we learned through the years,” he told the audience at DICE. “Some of which we were able to address in World of Warcraft and others that maybe because of the design decisions we’ve made, you just can’t address. So we’re kind of taking a step back with all that knowledge to make something that’s completely new and fresh.”
It’s important then that the new game is a chance to correct a lot of the mistakes made with World of Warcraft, something that not even the world-breaking of the last expansion could do. “With Cataclysm, we did something pretty dramatic. We went back and redid the entire old world, we redid the quests. But we didn’t actually change the game itself. We think there’s a lot more that we can do within the context of World of Warcraft, but sometimes to break the mold you have to start over.
“We’re not trying to make a WoW sequel, so we actually envision these two games coexisting in the future,” Morhaime said.
The new game will focus on social features like guilds and friends lists, but also competitive PvP. “We really value the social experience of being able to play with your friends, make new friends in the game, and the whole guild experience. Games are more fun when you’re experiencing them with other people, whether it’s competitively or cooperatively,” he said.
“For me, playing with people that you know always deepens the engagement and connection,” he said.
Source: G4 and Ars Technica
