No rest for the weary! Expansion World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King might just have gone on sale, but the Blizzard wheels are turning and the developer is busy plotting its next MMO. According to Blizzard COO Paul Sams, the game is still in the early stages of development, but sounds like it will be a departure from WoW. Says Sams:
We want to create a great game... Something that's cool, and new, and different, and kind of next generation in terms of look and feel and gameplay. That's a challenging endeavour...We're definitely at the beginning, in the first half of development... [Eds Note: Blizzard's development is two part.] When we're building a new game from the ground up, what happens is that it's slow going for the first bit, while the team goes round and round and round figuring out how it's going to look and feel, what the player experience is and what the differentiators are, and then the speed at which we then bring in the content and polish and actually get to the finish line... I think the second half of the process is always substantially faster than the first half of product development. For us, we want to make sure that the gameplay and the experience that the players are going to have is fleshed out quite a bit... The last thing we want to do is say, ‘Hey we're doing this,' and everyone says, ‘Oh cool,' and then we change things completely. We want to have a level of confidence that the direction we're going in the right one, and that it's polished enough to be able to show something, also. And we're not in either of those places yet.
When asked when an announcement will be, Sams replied, "I don't know yet." Blizzard COO: Our new MMO is "cool, new, different, next generation" [VG247 via 1Up]