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Eurogamer sat down and had a talk with Chris Metzen and Sam Didier from Blizzard about the giant gab of money we all call WoW or World of Warcraft.
Quite easy the discussion gets into a show and tell about what they wanted the game to be in teh time before launch. Metzen tells that during the development of WoW alot of developers were in fact playing EverQuest and even Ultima Online, both which are quite a bit more hardcore and raw then Blizzards game did end up. One quite intresting part in this discussion was that the designers seem to have the game beeing played hundred of years into the future of the world of Azeroth. But that they had to let that idea down because, as Metzen revealed, “It didn’t feel like Azeroth”.
At the exact same time I was reading this it hit me that I just had been told a secret about what the X-team at Blizzard actually is working on. Can it really be that easy that the PR-team let out Metzen and Didier to do what they just did – plant the idea of the crossbreed of Warcraft and Starcraft which is a sidestory of which rumors have been passed around for years. And if we combine these rumors with the second largest one, the Blizzard Sandbox, can it be the future?
Personally I feel that Blizzard is too big to pull of a sandbox-game at this time. They have atracted an audience which will follow into their new MMO almost whatever it may be and from a buisness-perspective that would give us a quest-based, class-based mmo from the studio sometime in the coming two years. If a sandbox was to be released I’m afraid that they would loose a portion of the WoW players (at the same time getting alot of new) and this might be the biggest obsticle for them to overcome.
Fear of not making as much money tomorrow as today is cruel.
Feel free to check out the full article over at Eurogamer.