Actually, I missed all those other Pokemon RPGS on that list somehow. So, RPGs are indeed profitable and popular. RPGs and Strategy/War games have been my favorite since I was a teenager (back in the 1990s). However, I have only considered three MMORPGs to be fun enough to play to max level. (Started trying/playing MMORPGs in 2008 or 2009) The only popular MMORPGs I haven't tried are BDO and ESO. But since I wasn't impressed by FFXIV or GW2, I don't really think it would be worth it to pay money just so I can be disappointed again.
Grinding (especially long-term grinding) isn't fun for me and paying to win or paying to grind less isn't fun for me either. I also believe that MMORPGs should feature a lot more role-playing, I would have a lot more fun if my character's choices could effect or change the game world in a meaningful way. So, I totally understand why MMORPGs are dying or being overtaken in popularity by other online multiplayer genres. I had more fun playing single player rpgs than I did playing most of the mmorpgs I've tried.
Roleplayinn.com - New forum for people who love role-playing of all kinds - tabletop/pencil & paper, live-action, and role-playing in mmorpgs.
Too bad it is no longer the drug of most gamers. You may have to live with no AAA "source of your drug" for the future.
I wish I had psychic powers as well. Well, that or the Tardis (are you the Doctor?). Yes, MMOs are not in a good place right now (not counting South Korea and Japan) but games tend to trend up and down. The genre can certainly go back to a small niche genre but it might jump us really fast again.
5 years ago people said that 4X games (like CIV and Heroes) were dead but a few good games jump-started the genre again, now it is as popular as ever.
If someone like Blizzard, Valve or Rockstar decided to make a AAA game and made it fun enough we would be back to 2005 MMO wise soon. The future is rather impossible to predict besides that what is cool today will be uncool tomorrow and possible cool again somewhere later.
And in worst case will Nero have to do with Japanese and Korean AAA MMORPGs.
Too bad it is no longer the drug of most gamers. You may have to live with no AAA "source of your drug" for the future.
I wish I had psychic powers as well. Well, that or the Tardis (are you the Doctor?). Yes, MMOs are not in a good place right now (not counting South Korea and Japan) but games tend to trend up and down. The genre can certainly go back to a small niche genre but it might jump us really fast again.
5 years ago people said that 4X games (like CIV and Heroes) were dead but a few good games jump-started the genre again, now it is as popular as ever.
If someone like Blizzard, Valve or Rockstar decided to make a AAA game and made it fun enough we would be back to 2005 MMO wise soon. The future is rather impossible to predict besides that what is cool today will be uncool tomorrow and possible cool again somewhere later.
And in worst case will Nero have to do with Japanese and Korean AAA MMORPGs.
I agree. Anything could happen to bring the genre back at any point. I'm not convinced we won't see one of these upcoming Kickstarter titles such as Crowfall or Star Citizen prove to be the savior of the genre. Maybe more than one.
But yeah, right now, as thing stand, there is little evidence to suggest a revival of the genre / turn around of the player bleed is going to happen any time in the near future. I'm just kind of watching the dice that are the kickstarter MMOs to see where they land.
So far the kickstarter MMOs that have come out have been varying degrees of bad, but I also think every kickstarter MMO that's come out at this point was undercooked. AKA it wasn't in development long enough to make a decent title. The waits and delays people are whining about in the titles that have yet to come out are the very reason they aren't nearly guaranteed to be terrible.
MMOs are not in a good place right now (not counting South Korea and Japan) but games tend to trend up and down.
5 years ago people said that 4X games (like CIV and Heroes) were dead but a few good games jump-started the genre again, now it is as popular as ever.
Some do, some don't. Text adventures are still dead. RTS is pretty dead except Starcraft 2. Point & click adv gets a revival. Military sims are still pretty dead. War games are still pretty dead. 2D scrollers are still dead except some indie effort.
So not all genre goes up and down. Some go down and cannot get back up. Now clearly i do not know if MMO is one of those ... but you can claim that there is no chance that it will just stay down.
MMOs are not in a good place right now (not counting South Korea and Japan) but games tend to trend up and down.
5 years ago people said that 4X games (like CIV and Heroes) were dead but a few good games jump-started the genre again, now it is as popular as ever.
Some do, some don't. Text adventures are still dead. RTS is pretty dead except Starcraft 2. Point & click adv gets a revival. Military sims are still pretty dead. War games are still pretty dead. 2D scrollers are still dead except some indie effort.
So not all genre goes up and down. Some go down and cannot get back up. Now clearly i do not know if MMO is one of those ... but you can claim that there is no chance that it will just stay down.
The RTS genre isn't so much dead as changed. Total War is still releasing a game every year and while the map portion is turned based the actual combat is RTS. I know there are some other Steam based RTS games that are doing pretty well. It's just that games in the general style of Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Empire Earth etc. have fallen in popularity. Though Halo Wars was pretty much a Starcraft clone and they came out with another one pretty recently and they are rereleasing the original Starcraft with updated graphics so I wouldn't call it dead by any stretch. Even Age of Empires II has more people online now through Steam than it had for many years.
I agree. Anything could happen to bring the genre back at any point. I'm not convinced we won't see one of these upcoming Kickstarter titles such as Crowfall or Star Citizen prove to be the savior of the genre. Maybe more than one.
But yeah, right now, as thing stand, there is little evidence to suggest a revival of the genre / turn around of the player bleed is going to happen any time in the near future. I'm just kind of watching the dice that are the kickstarter MMOs to see where they land.
So far the kickstarter MMOs that have come out have been varying degrees of bad, but I also think every kickstarter MMO that's come out at this point was undercooked. AKA it wasn't in development long enough to make a decent title. The waits and delays people are whining about in the titles that have yet to come out are the very reason they aren't nearly guaranteed to be terrible.
I don't think any of the kickstarter games in themselves will turn around things but I hope they will start the process (then again, with SCs budget it is AAA so you never know) and be profitable enough to show that it is worth putting money into the genre.
If anyone can show that a different game can reach about 500K players on a low budget (for more then 6 weeks) it will certainly prove that MMOs that are different can pull in money and that would help revitalize the genre. Another possibility is that Japan or South Korea makes a really good MMORPG that becomes popular here as well. They still make AAA games and while most of them never really hit it off here it could happen.
Some do, some don't. Text adventures are still dead. RTS is pretty dead except Starcraft 2. Point & click adv gets a revival. Military sims are still pretty dead. War games are still pretty dead. 2D scrollers are still dead except some indie effort.
So not all genre goes up and down. Some go down and cannot get back up. Now clearly i do not know if MMO is one of those ... but you can claim that there is no chance that it will just stay down.
Text adventures have indeed been dead a long time. RTS games are in a bit of dip right now but there are some popular still (https://www.mobipicker.com/best-real-time-strategy-games/). As for military sims, the really realistic have generally not been that huge, the slightly more FPS like are still big but games like ARMA always had a rather limited following.
2D scrollers have moved to mobile platforms where you can find plenty of them. Some console games still do it and rather successfully as well, particularly by Nintendo.
Text adventures was killed by technology, they were generally popular on old office PCs in the late 80s and I don't see any bouncing back for it. I did not claim there is zero chance that MMOs wont just slowly die but i think it is unlikely since improved technology actually can improve MMORPGs instead of killing them.
The dip we see now is the same dip that happened for FPS games between Quake 2 and Half-life, the games were just so similar that most playersbeither lost interest in it or played the old games. Of course if no-one actually bothered to make new things like half-life the genre could have been dead by now and that is a possibility for MMOs but I think it is unlikely.
The thing though is that a Renaissance like that can take a long time, particularly for the genre that have the longest development time of all (around 5 year seems to be standard) so when things get better (if they do of course) is still anyones guess, can take 10 years more.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2. Those guys loves sequels after all and Wow is probably the game that have earned them most money over the years. Sooner or later someone there will decide it is time to make a sequel, probably not in the next few years but eventually. And Wow 2 will earns loads of cash, don't think anything else.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
no wow 2 for at least 10 years. im beginning to like toaster wow graphic..its simple but nostalgic
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
No way, my guess would be that they start on it somewhere between 2023-2025, whenever Wow dips to around a million players. Of course a really bad expansion could make that faster just as a really good would make it later.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
No way, my guess would be that they start on it somewhere between 2023-2025, whenever Wow dips to around a million players. Of course a really bad expansion could make that faster just as a really good would make it later.
I said eventually, not "soon".
I'd imagine there would be two reasons for a WoW two.
1. Major shift in technology. For instance VR practically pushing non VR games of the market (Not that I see that happening any time soon) or the ability to make really, really, beautiful games (Like movie quality) for much cheaper on an engine that's different enough it's easier to just start over from scratch.
2. It isn't WoW 2. It's a totally different MMO released by Blizzard after WoW dips below a million players as you hinted at.
I think the WoW 2 people are looking for though may be their shift to other games we've been seeing. Heros of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft II, Diablo III, the re-release of Starcraft etc. I'm sure everyone remembers how there was a huge gap between the release of WoW and any other Blizzard game and now they seem to be coming back at an increasing pace, and how "Project Titan" got canceled.
That seems to me like Blizzard might be deciding "We don't think the future of gaming is in MMOs. Let's focus on other games instead."
I'd imagine there would be two reasons for a WoW two.
1. Major shift in technology. For instance VR practically pushing non VR games of the market (Not that I see that happening any time soon) or the ability to make really, really, beautiful games (Like movie quality) for much cheaper on an engine that's different enough it's easier to just start over from scratch.
2. It isn't WoW 2. It's a totally different MMO released by Blizzard after WoW dips below a million players as you hinted at.
I think the WoW 2 people are looking for though may be their shift to other games we've been seeing. Heros of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft II, Diablo III, the re-release of Starcraft etc. I'm sure everyone remembers how there was a huge gap between the release of WoW and any other Blizzard game and now they seem to be coming back at an increasing pace, and how "Project Titan" got canceled.
That seems to me like Blizzard might be deciding "We don't think the future of gaming is in MMOs. Let's focus on other games instead."
Blizzard have made a sequel to every game they made from 1997 to 2014 besides WoW and I have no doubt we will see Hearthstone 2 and Overwatch 2 (not sure about HotS, it havn't done as well as I expected) when they been around a bit longer. Only EA sports loves sequels more.
Wow 2 would earn an insane amount of money so I think it is unlikely that it wont get made eventually, but it might take a while. Wow is still rather much in focus and the sequel would probably win more if people feel nostalgic and the original game is close to dead.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
No way, my guess would be that they start on it somewhere between 2023-2025, whenever Wow dips to around a million players. Of course a really bad expansion could make that faster just as a really good would make it later.
I said eventually, not "soon".
2025 .. that is still less than 10 years. I will take that bet too ... are you game? The problem, of course, is whether anyone is going to remember.
I just don't think WoW is the kind of game to go the sequel route without a very good reason. Most MMOs that do the sequel thing are fixing something very difficult to fix with a patch or expansion. Heavily outdated graphics. A desire for a completely new model of gameplay, etc. Games that consistently keep up with graphical updates to make their game not stay ancient tend to never do sequels.
For instance EVE is another game I don't anticipate we will ever see a sequel to outside some major shift to a new technology because it still looks good in 2017. Runescape may have had "Runescape Classic", "Runescape 2" and I think they are on "Runescape 3" now but they are not really new games. They are expansions / graphical updates as is evident by the fact that core gameplay never changes and stats carry over. That again is a game I don't expect to see have a true sequel outside some pretty major tech changes.
WoW could make a killing off initial sales of a WoW 2 but they would be leaving behind over a decade of development on their game. The initial sales would be followed by a steep decline unless, get this, WoW 2 isn't a WoW clone. XD
I just don't think WoW is the kind of game to go the sequel route without a very good reason. Most MMOs that do the sequel thing are fixing something very difficult to fix with a patch or expansion. Heavily outdated graphics. A desire for a completely new model of gameplay, etc. Games that consistently keep up with graphical updates to make their game not stay ancient tend to never do sequels.
For instance EVE is another game I don't anticipate we will ever see a sequel to outside some major shift to a new technology because it still looks good in 2017. Runescape may have had "Runescape Classic", "Runescape 2" and I think they are on "Runescape 3" now but they are not really new games. They are expansions / graphical updates as is evident by the fact that core gameplay never changes and stats carry over. That again is a game I don't expect to see have a true sequel outside some pretty major tech changes.
WoW could make a killing off initial sales of a WoW 2 but they would be leaving behind over a decade of development on their game. The initial sales would be followed by a steep decline unless, get this, WoW 2 isn't a WoW clone. XD
Hmm, reason? You mean besides loads of money? But sure, you could not just clone the current version of Wow with better graphics. A new game do have advantages though, any game with that many expansions get issues a vanilla game wont have.
They will still have to change enough, about what they did from Diablo to Diablo 2, to pull it off. Probably jump a few hundred years in the story as well like EQ2 and GW2 did.
Another possibility would be to change Wows engine and make another expansion that revamps the old content but I think that would be just as much work as a new game with less possibility of getting players back. That is even rarer then sequels.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2.
care to put a bet on it? I say Blizz will not make WoW 2 in the next 5 years. That is, by 7/21/2022, if Blizz has not announced a Wow 2, i win. Otherwise you do.
Since no one on the internet will believe that i will give you money or vice versa, let's bet on bragging rights. I will be doing a lot of "i told you so" if I win. Feel free to do the same.
No way, my guess would be that they start on it somewhere between 2023-2025, whenever Wow dips to around a million players. Of course a really bad expansion could make that faster just as a really good would make it later.
I said eventually, not "soon".
I could see that. With a goal of releasing on the 25th anniversary of wow's original release.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
I don't think there will be a WW3. All the powers strong enough to get a nuke are painfully aware that a WW3 will wipe humanity out entirely at least if it happens before we colonize other planets. Unless you are talking the WW3 waged by international mega-corporations to gain control of the world economy and effectively enslave the rest of humanity. And that's already happening as we speak.
Back more on the topic of a WoW2, @Loke666 I don't think WoW2 is as profitable as you assume it would be. WoW has over a decade of assets built up. Like I said, without something really groundbreaking to make it stand out there would be a huge flurry of box sales followed by them being in a worse situation than they already are. And that flurry of box sales would be largely offset by the development costs.
I'm not betting it isn't going to happen but I'm not betting that it will either.
The reason WoW doesn't already have a sequel is because the content that has been developed for WoW already surpasses all the expansions and sequels of any other Blizzard title.
Successful MMOs need no sequels. They aren't like traditional games in that sense.
As you can see above. WoW is its own sequel in many senses.
I don't think there will be a WW3. All the powers strong enough to get a nuke are painfully aware that a WW3 will wipe humanity out entirely at least if it happens before we colonize other planets. Unless you are talking the WW3 waged by international mega-corporations to gain control of the world economy and effectively enslave the rest of humanity. And that's already happening as we speak.
Back more on the topic of a WoW2, @Loke666 I don't think WoW2 is as profitable as you assume it would be. WoW has over a decade of assets built up. Like I said, without something really groundbreaking to make it stand out there would be a huge flurry of box sales followed by them being in a worse situation than they already are. And that flurry of box sales would be largely offset by the development costs.
I'm not betting it isn't going to happen but I'm not betting that it will either.
The reason WoW doesn't already have a sequel is because the content that has been developed for WoW already surpasses all the expansions and sequels of any other Blizzard title.
Successful MMOs need no sequels. They aren't like traditional games in that sense.
As you can see above. WoW is its own sequel in many senses.
wow has talented artist who make fantasy land like it should be
I don't think there will be a WW3. All the powers strong enough to get a nuke are painfully aware that a WW3 will wipe humanity out entirely at least if it happens before we colonize other planets. Unless you are talking the WW3 waged by international mega-corporations to gain control of the world economy and effectively enslave the rest of humanity. And that's already happening as we speak.
Back more on the topic of a WoW2, @Loke666 I don't think WoW2 is as profitable as you assume it would be. WoW has over a decade of assets built up. Like I said, without something really groundbreaking to make it stand out there would be a huge flurry of box sales followed by them being in a worse situation than they already are. And that flurry of box sales would be largely offset by the development costs.
I'm not betting it isn't going to happen but I'm not betting that it will either.
The reason WoW doesn't already have a sequel is because the content that has been developed for WoW already surpasses all the expansions and sequels of any other Blizzard title.
Successful MMOs need no sequels. They aren't like traditional games in that sense.
As you can see above. WoW is its own sequel in many senses.
It depends on how you define WW3, eventually the world will see a great war fought on more then one continent unless humans have evolved behind that, history teaches us that but it might be far less massive and unconventional then the 2 great ones.
Heck, you can call Alexanders, Genghis, Kublai's and Timur's campaigns world wars as well, they did span over 3 continents and had many countries involved. Something like that is likely to happen eventually unless the future will be like Star trek.
I think the reason Blizzard never made a sequel so far have more to do with the fact that Wow is still very profitable, why kill the goose that lays golden eggs? But I base the idea more on knowing Blizzard then everything else, when Wow eventually becomes unprofitable they will want to replace it.
Ummm. If a fantasy land is supposed to be an on rail experience for ten year olds with no ability customization or need to think.
It is not "supposed to be" anything. Games are just games. Dev tries to find a design that will sell, and consumers find games that entertain them.
There are plenty of people who don't want to think when they consume their entertainment. I don't see there is anything wrong with that. I would be alarmed if we are talking about work, or education. But games? Whatever entertains people is fine.
Ummm. If a fantasy land is supposed to be an on rail experience for ten year olds with no ability customization or need to think.
It is not "supposed to be" anything. Games are just games. Dev tries to find a design that will sell, and consumers find games that entertain them.
There are plenty of people who don't want to think when they consume their entertainment. I don't see there is anything wrong with that. I would be alarmed if we are talking about work, or education. But games? Whatever entertains people is fine.
Entertainment actually is very important. Way more important than you seem to think. Even animals play fight and while it's fun for them they are also learning skills they need to survive.
Humans operate in a similar fashion. Looking at the morals and prevailing schools of thought found in popular TV shows can help gain an insight into the culture, or predict future morals (As often they preach morals to help bring people more in line with them).
I think the fact that almost all TV shows that had educational value have been replaced with reality TV on channels such as the History Channel and Animal Planet says a lot about our society. I think the fact that during the process of dumbing down skill tress WoW developers gave the justification that they were "too mathy" says something about our society.
I've learned a lot from the games I play and back when I watched TV I learned a lot from TV programs too. Infact I wrote an essay about a subject I saw on the History Channel (In addition to three more based on the IB History class I took) to pass an IB history test with flying colors. And most of the upper level math I've used outside school has been in games.
Entertainment isn't supposed to be 100% pure time sink. Good entertainment teaches life skills too. It's a form of education.
Comments
Grinding (especially long-term grinding) isn't fun for me and paying to win or paying to grind less isn't fun for me either. I also believe that MMORPGs should feature a lot more role-playing, I would have a lot more fun if my character's choices could effect or change the game world in a meaningful way. So, I totally understand why MMORPGs are dying or being overtaken in popularity by other online multiplayer genres. I had more fun playing single player rpgs than I did playing most of the mmorpgs I've tried.
Yes, MMOs are not in a good place right now (not counting South Korea and Japan) but games tend to trend up and down. The genre can certainly go back to a small niche genre but it might jump us really fast again.
5 years ago people said that 4X games (like CIV and Heroes) were dead but a few good games jump-started the genre again, now it is as popular as ever.
If someone like Blizzard, Valve or Rockstar decided to make a AAA game and made it fun enough we would be back to 2005 MMO wise soon. The future is rather impossible to predict besides that what is cool today will be uncool tomorrow and possible cool again somewhere later.
And in worst case will Nero have to do with Japanese and Korean AAA MMORPGs.
But yeah, right now, as thing stand, there is little evidence to suggest a revival of the genre / turn around of the player bleed is going to happen any time in the near future. I'm just kind of watching the dice that are the kickstarter MMOs to see where they land.
So far the kickstarter MMOs that have come out have been varying degrees of bad, but I also think every kickstarter MMO that's come out at this point was undercooked. AKA it wasn't in development long enough to make a decent title. The waits and delays people are whining about in the titles that have yet to come out are the very reason they aren't nearly guaranteed to be terrible.
So not all genre goes up and down. Some go down and cannot get back up. Now clearly i do not know if MMO is one of those ... but you can claim that there is no chance that it will just stay down.
Can I sell you a bridge? May be somewhere in the state of NY?
If anyone can show that a different game can reach about 500K players on a low budget (for more then 6 weeks) it will certainly prove that MMOs that are different can pull in money and that would help revitalize the genre. Another possibility is that Japan or South Korea makes a really good MMORPG that becomes popular here as well. They still make AAA games and while most of them never really hit it off here it could happen.
Text adventures have indeed been dead a long time. RTS games are in a bit of dip right now but there are some popular still (https://www.mobipicker.com/best-real-time-strategy-games/). As for military sims, the really realistic have generally not been that huge, the slightly more FPS like are still big but games like ARMA always had a rather limited following.
2D scrollers have moved to mobile platforms where you can find plenty of them. Some console games still do it and rather successfully as well, particularly by Nintendo.
Text adventures was killed by technology, they were generally popular on old office PCs in the late 80s and I don't see any bouncing back for it. I did not claim there is zero chance that MMOs wont just slowly die but i think it is unlikely since improved technology actually can improve MMORPGs instead of killing them.
The dip we see now is the same dip that happened for FPS games between Quake 2 and Half-life, the games were just so similar that most playersbeither lost interest in it or played the old games. Of course if no-one actually bothered to make new things like half-life the genre could have been dead by now and that is a possibility for MMOs but I think it is unlikely.
The thing though is that a Renaissance like that can take a long time, particularly for the genre that have the longest development time of all (around 5 year seems to be standard) so when things get better (if they do of course) is still anyones guess, can take 10 years more.
I do believe that if nothing else Blizzard will eventually make Wow 2. Those guys loves sequels after all and Wow is probably the game that have earned them most money over the years. Sooner or later someone there will decide it is time to make a sequel, probably not in the next few years but eventually. And Wow 2 will earns loads of cash, don't think anything else.
I said eventually, not "soon".
1. Major shift in technology. For instance VR practically pushing non VR games of the market (Not that I see that happening any time soon) or the ability to make really, really, beautiful games (Like movie quality) for much cheaper on an engine that's different enough it's easier to just start over from scratch.
2. It isn't WoW 2. It's a totally different MMO released by Blizzard after WoW dips below a million players as you hinted at.
I think the WoW 2 people are looking for though may be their shift to other games we've been seeing. Heros of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft II, Diablo III, the re-release of Starcraft etc. I'm sure everyone remembers how there was a huge gap between the release of WoW and any other Blizzard game and now they seem to be coming back at an increasing pace, and how "Project Titan" got canceled.
That seems to me like Blizzard might be deciding "We don't think the future of gaming is in MMOs. Let's focus on other games instead."
Wow 2 would earn an insane amount of money so I think it is unlikely that it wont get made eventually, but it might take a while. Wow is still rather much in focus and the sequel would probably win more if people feel nostalgic and the original game is close to dead.
It is too much money to throw away.
2025 .. that is still less than 10 years. I will take that bet too ... are you game? The problem, of course, is whether anyone is going to remember.
For instance EVE is another game I don't anticipate we will ever see a sequel to outside some major shift to a new technology because it still looks good in 2017. Runescape may have had "Runescape Classic", "Runescape 2" and I think they are on "Runescape 3" now but they are not really new games. They are expansions / graphical updates as is evident by the fact that core gameplay never changes and stats carry over. That again is a game I don't expect to see have a true sequel outside some pretty major tech changes.
WoW could make a killing off initial sales of a WoW 2 but they would be leaving behind over a decade of development on their game. The initial sales would be followed by a steep decline unless, get this, WoW 2 isn't a WoW clone. XD
Hmm, reason? You mean besides loads of money?
But sure, you could not just clone the current version of Wow with better graphics. A new game do have advantages though, any game with that many expansions get issues a vanilla game wont have.
They will still have to change enough, about what they did from Diablo to Diablo 2, to pull it off. Probably jump a few hundred years in the story as well like EQ2 and GW2 did.
Another possibility would be to change Wows engine and make another expansion that revamps the old content but I think that would be just as much work as a new game with less possibility of getting players back. That is even rarer then sequels.
I could see that. With a goal of releasing on the 25th anniversary of wow's original release.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Back more on the topic of a WoW2, @Loke666 I don't think WoW2 is as profitable as you assume it would be. WoW has over a decade of assets built up. Like I said, without something really groundbreaking to make it stand out there would be a huge flurry of box sales followed by them being in a worse situation than they already are. And that flurry of box sales would be largely offset by the development costs.
I'm not betting it isn't going to happen but I'm not betting that it will either.
The reason WoW doesn't already have a sequel is because the content that has been developed for WoW already surpasses all the expansions and sequels of any other Blizzard title.
Successful MMOs need no sequels. They aren't like traditional games in that sense.
As you can see above. WoW is its own sequel in many senses.
Heck, you can call Alexanders, Genghis, Kublai's and Timur's campaigns world wars as well, they did span over 3 continents and had many countries involved. Something like that is likely to happen eventually unless the future will be like Star trek.
I think the reason Blizzard never made a sequel so far have more to do with the fact that Wow is still very profitable, why kill the goose that lays golden eggs? But I base the idea more on knowing Blizzard then everything else, when Wow eventually becomes unprofitable they will want to replace it.
There are plenty of people who don't want to think when they consume their entertainment. I don't see there is anything wrong with that. I would be alarmed if we are talking about work, or education. But games? Whatever entertains people is fine.
Humans operate in a similar fashion. Looking at the morals and prevailing schools of thought found in popular TV shows can help gain an insight into the culture, or predict future morals (As often they preach morals to help bring people more in line with them).
I think the fact that almost all TV shows that had educational value have been replaced with reality TV on channels such as the History Channel and Animal Planet says a lot about our society. I think the fact that during the process of dumbing down skill tress WoW developers gave the justification that they were "too mathy" says something about our society.
I've learned a lot from the games I play and back when I watched TV I learned a lot from TV programs too. Infact I wrote an essay about a subject I saw on the History Channel (In addition to three more based on the IB History class I took) to pass an IB history test with flying colors. And most of the upper level math I've used outside school has been in games.
Entertainment isn't supposed to be 100% pure time sink. Good entertainment teaches life skills too. It's a form of education.