Blizzards Next MMORPG Will Be A New IP

Posted by Stropp on May 14, 2009

It’s official, well sort of official; the news on teh Interwebs is that Blizzards next (I hesitate to say it’s upcoming) MMORPG will be based on a new intellectual property, something I have previously speculated about.

From a post by Zarhym on the official forums:

We have nothing to advertise for the new MMO because it’s a shell of a game thus far. We’ve already stated it’ll be a brand new franchise, which means the lore, art, and game play are being developed entirely from scratch. It’s an overwhelming process, but a process through which we excel. Our track record supports this.

I’m not sure when, or where, it was already stated to be a new IP, but this is good news as far as I’m concerned.

I was a little worried that Blizzard would base their new game on one of their existing properties, or worse,  licence a third party property for their game. (Though I think the chances of Blizzard going the third party route were pretty slim at best.) Despite the fact that I’ve seen some excellent sequels — Star Trek XI a case in point — I’ve believed that the Hollywood approach to milking a franchise for all its worth tends to do a dis-service to the fans.

This comment does tell us one other thing too. The new Blizzard MMORPG is at least a couple of years away.

I was wondering, since there had been a bit of noise about it recently, if there would be an announcement at the next Blizzcon. I reckon that’s pretty unlikely now. There might be some teasers, possibly even some concept art, but I doubt we’ll be finding out anything about the genre (fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk) for quite a while now.

But if Blizzard is still so close to the start of this development (which I’m a little surprised about really) then we probably won’t be seeing the game until late 2013, possibly even late 2014.

Still, it will be fun speculating more about these and other new Blizzard MMORPG things as the release gets nearer.

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