Blizzard’s legendary MMORPG World of Warcraft will have a 20th anniversary, according to lead developer Ion Hazzikostas. Speaking with CNET, Hazzikostas said he had no doubt that there will be a 20th anniversary for WoW. He also mentioned Blizzard is hard at work planning for future expansions.
“I definitely can’t tell you what our 20th anniversary is going to be. I can tell you there is definitely going to be one. I have no doubt saying that,” he said. “We’re definitely planning into the future, talking about what the next expansion is going to be, and what the one after that is going to be, just in terms of big picture storylines, how can we start setting things up now, where do we want the game to go.”
The game has changed significantly over time. Hazzikostas said the World of Warcraft today isn’t the same game that launched in 2004. He mentioned different graphics, different combat mechanics, and the game’s overall engine is far different.
“It’s clearly not the same game it was 10 years ago, right? The engine is different, all the graphical assets are different, a lot of core combat mechanics have changed,” he said. “It’s hard to pinpoint one turning point when it changed, but we definitely have taken an incremental approach to the pressing problems the game has that we feel we need to solve and what we can add to it that will make it better and deliver the most value to our players.”
World of Warcraft began Nov. 23, 2004. It has gone on to become a cultural phenomenon through board games, books, action figures and plenty more. According to the latest subscriber count, there are 7.4 million paying subscribers for the game at the moment. That count is expected to grow to over 8 million with the release of expansion Warlords of Draenor.
Warlords of Draenor will release for PC and Mac Nov. 13. Temporary world events are currently going on in-game to lead up to the release of the new expansion.
Blizzard announced the cancellation of Project Titan, an MMORPG project that was in development since 2007, back in September. Titan was supposed to be Blizzard’s next big MMORPG to stand beside – or even surpass – World of Warcraft, but the project suffered creative problems.
“We didn’t find the fun,”
Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said.
“We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”
BlizzCon 2014, a convention for all things Blizzard, will be held in Anaheim, Calif. on Nov. 7-8 at the Anaheim Convention Center. The event is expected to reveal additional details concerning Heroes of the Storm, the upcoming Warcraft movie and additional details for Warlords of Draenor.
So what do you think of WoW being around for another ten years?
