Oh boy, 10 years after the launch of WoW, could we be at some great precipice of a new World of Warcraft? I hope so - actually, at this point, I’d almost 100% say that it’s gonna happen. Games media today is all up and about WoW 2 and if it’ll be a thing, but let me lay this out for ya. WoW’s graphics are so dated, that even the comic book look can’t pass for anything. I play WoW, all the time, because I have to - any failure on my part to not log into WoW makes me no longer able to call myself an MMO journalist - something I take seriously. You can’t talk MMOs unless you have experience in WoW and you live and breath WoW, because it’s the focal point of our industry.

However, we need to celebrate this idea, we need to push this idea, this great idea of a WoW 2. We need a WoW 2. It needs to wow us, because honestly, at this point, I have very little faith that any other developer at this point is going to capture the magic of WoW other than Blizzard. So much so, most major developers have pushed out their WoW clones and are off making their own magical genres of cool stuff - which means Blizzard has all these new awesome ideas to borrow from and produce a game that will wow all of us.

Picture it in your head. Let’s take voxels, multi-classing, housing, and all of Guild Wars 2 since there isn’t a game out there that isn’t copying some kind of mechanic or another from GW2, and put them into a heavily polished super invested into game that isn’t Elder Scrolls Online.

Much like baking bacon, WoW is the gold standard of an MMO and a second one has to be good. Well, heh, let me rephrase that. Let me go ahead and just add another heh into. It’s going to be good for the modern generation of gamers who want something different than a WoW could offer, with the same formula of everyone playing together in the same world.

Now people don’t want an Everquest game. They don’t want a WoW game. They want something that is challenging, heavily scripted, with a lot of emphasis on fun while keeping the lowest common denominator of doing something ridiculously easy. For instance, WoW is one of the few MMOs you could get an eight year old to play and not have to explain anything. Odds are they’ll be able to explore, quest, do whatever since the game is so simple. It plays itself.

Simple gameplay is important, really, even for advanced users. Look at MOBAs. They’re crazy insane easy but the depth and skill involved is through the roof. I can play a MOBA on an average level with your average bros, but facing anyone who is actually good will just get my face stomped. This is game where your hero has something like three skills, some which might be pure passive (I’m looking at you Strife), and an ultimate which is used every ten centuries to turn a fight. There is a shop, with a total of like 10 items you could even bother to buy for your hero. Think of how limited the choice of options are, but think about how much depth there is.

Simple isn’t bad - let’s get that out of the way. There is nothing wrong with simple gameplay. Mario is the simplest game out there, but at some point in your life you were like HELL YEAH! It’s mario! So come on, let’s get that complaint out of the way, WoW 2 is gonna be simple but fun, and everyone is going to love it.

So yeah, I haven’t really laid out a really nuanced look at why we need a WoW 2 other than make sweeping generalizations, but honestly, at the end of the day, there is a theory - this great big theory - that we’re going to hear the announcement of WoW 2 soon and with all kinds of good reasons, ranging from they’re writing themselves into a hole and probably need a good lore reset to please man WoW is so dated it’s almost impossible to play graphically to obviously these new character models are tech demos for WoW 2.

Finally, at this point, project titan has to just be WoW 2. They’ve stopped development on it and restarted and all that good stuff, so they probably are just making some kind of crazy steampunk WoW future where you roll in and are like yeah I have a mechanical eye and a top hat, what of it?

Finally, with all the news surrounding Blizzard saying it's feasible, let's take one final look at this formula - a new IP MMO would compete with WoW. Project titan then would have to be a first person shooter, but that would compete with Call of Duty, so why even compete with yourself? Just rebuild what you have into something better, newer, and more trendy, then pull in your entire previous playerbase, with your new monetization strategies, and rake in the dough.

If you want to pester Blizzard into bringing about a WoW 2, use whatever social media you want and pester them, I’m sure with enough voices this theory could be made a reality, even if it isn’t already, which come on it so is. 


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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