WoW 2: What Would That Be?

The idea of a "World of Warcraft 2" has been floating around for quite some time, but it's always been something of a complicated notion. Certainly, there are sequels to MMOs, like Everquest and Guild Wars. But the problem with MMO sequels is that you either split the player base, or you essentially obsolete the old game.

Think about how many hours, days, or even months you've sunk into your characters in WoW. It would be pretty disappointing to find all that washed away, or at least stuffed in a crate with mothballs. MMOs end, yes (as all things must,) but the company that makes one needs to have some really compelling reason to do so - usually it means the money's dried up. And even though WoW is almost at half its subscriptions than it had at its peak, it's still the biggest subscription-based MMO in the world by a large amount (not sure how Wildstar is doing. I actually hope it does well, because it looks cool and I'd try it out if they made a Mac client.)

But apparently Tom Chilton, game director of WoW, says that Blizzard has, actually, considered doing a WoW 2. But I have no idea what form that would take.

Now one possibility is that this would be a new IP that takes the structure of WoW. This would be like what they did with Starcraft - taking what they had learned making Warcraft and Warcraft II and making a totally new setting and switching genres, but preserving the gameplay.

But generally, when I think of sequel, I usually think of a more direct sequel. In my mind, in order to be WoW 2, you'd have to make it set on Azeroth and deal with the Alliance and the Horde.

Of course, as mentioned above, the pitfall of an MMO sequel is that you set everyone back to one. If you needed to really change the balance of the game (perhaps by trimming classes, or splitting them - such as making the more nature-based Beastmasters a separate class from the more military-like Marksmen) you would have to bring everyone back down to level 1, and essentially have them start over.

New mechanics and new gameplay could certainly motivate people to do that, but you'd also probably lose a ton of players as well.

But of course, if you let people carry over their characters, you'd have to use the same classes and races, and at that point, isn't it just an expansion? You might totally revamp the early-level stuff, but of course, we saw that already in Cataclysm.

In a sense, we've already had WoW 2. It was called the Burning Crusade. We're about to get WoW 6.

But then, Blizzard has always been more about expansions than sequels. Sequels really need to fundamentally change the mechanics of the game. Beyond the Dark Portal and the Frozen Throne were not sequels, because they still worked essentially the same way. But a lot of other companies would be happy to call them sequels, because their campaigns at least are fully-formed, other games. Starcraft II is being released in three segments, but Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void are not considered sequels. They are expansions.

So I don't really know if I'm going to hold my breath for WoW 2. This is something that's been talked about for a long time, and I think that until WoW's system is just totally ready to collapse (which I think is decelerated every time they do a big revamp, like the talent system in Mists) we're just going to be seeing expansions to WoW, and not a sequel.