If you’re the type of person who can’t handle apprehension, and as such, forces themselves into a drug induced stupor every time an awesome game is announced in order to avoid the wait…now would be a good time to tie off your uppoer arm with some rubber tubing.
Last week news came out that Blizzard was going to announce a new game at their upcoming event in South Korea (read: where Blizzard’s RTS super soldiers dwell.) A little while later that story advanced a little when we learned that the game to be announced would be based off the ultra-popular Starcraft franchise. “Sweet! Starcraft 2!!!” We thought. Well…not exactly.
CVG is reporting that they have “well placed US sources” that have confirmed that there will indeed be a new title announced at the event in South Korea. It will be a Starcraft game. It will be an MMO. It will be World of Starcraft. At least, presumably it will be called WoS. I imagine Blizzard will want to affiliate it in every way possible to World of Warcraft in order to best snare the general public.
Those of you wishing like mad for another RTS entry in the Starcraft series, don’t lose hope yet. You may recall back in January, Itzik Ben Bassat, Vice President of Business Development for Blizzard said the following:
"I'm a StarCraft player myself and I hope it's not a decade, and we launched StarCraft in 1998, before I'm standing here again, celebrating the next game in the series,"
There is definitely a very slim chance that he was talking about Starcraft 2, and not the MMO. In either case the time frame of 2008 still stands to give a decent picture of where the game is. He says he hopes it will make 2008, so basically, best case scenario we’ll see something around the ’08 holiday season. Knowing Blizzard however, they wont release that sucker until it’s perfect so don’t expect it to make that window.
I’m as psyched as anybody about this news, but that doesn’t mean that I understand it. World of Warcraft surpassed 8 million subscribers not too long ago. They are making, quite literally, hundreds of millions of dollars off WoW. What’s the point in starting another MMO franchise so soon? In all likelihood WoW will continue its popularity until it hits a steady decline over the next six years or so. Why would they take a risk in dividing their subscribers over two products anyway? Well, they wouldn't.
