Does World of Warcraft need a proper sequel, a real “second part”? The Game Director has now answered this in an interview.
World of Warcraft is old. Ancient. At least in terms of computer games. Currently, the 20th anniversary is being celebrated, while the 10th expansion of Blizzard’s MMORPG is running. Over the past two decades, the question has often been asked whether WoW would consider a fresh start – a “WoW 2”.
This very question was posed to Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, who had to ponder it a bit.
Old systems in WoW need to be constantly revised
Where does the info come from? Ion Hazzikostas was asked in an interview with GamesRadar magazine how he would feel about a fresh start with World of Warcraft; whether it wouldn’t be time to start “from scratch” and essentially create a successor.
What did the Game Director say about this: Unlike many previous interviews, there was no clear denial of this topic.
Theoretically, at some distant point in the future, that could be a question we seriously consider. But, at the present time, we have a large, vibrant, and growing community that we are very keen to support.
That the age of World of Warcraft is sometimes a problem in development is also no secret. Because time and again, ancient systems need to be overhauled to adapt the game to the modern needs of the time:
We are constantly tearing down some old systems of the original foundation and replacing them with something that scales better with our modern server architecture, that better supports our new graphics, or that is more suited to new aspects of multiplayer interaction than what the original game could manage. (…)
We are making improvements that we believe better fit our modern audience.
Is there any work being done on WoW 2? Even if Blizzard had rough plans for the development of “World of Warcraft 2”, it should be clear that these are not yet being implemented anywhere. Because that would mean that either a huge new team would need to take care of it, or the current WoW team would have to take on this task.
However, given that World of Warcraft is currently releasing content much faster than ever before in the game’s development, everything points to the fact that they will continue to work on the “old” World of Warcraft for many expansions to come and will stick with it. After all, the story chief Chris Metzen is already planning with 6 expansions into the future.
