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Blizzard's Next Quest
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Online gaming giant Blizzard have announced via a job advertisement and tweet that they're working on a new game.

How big is this news? That remains to be seen.

Titan / Overwatch

It's not the first new game Blizzard have announced since their major success and claim to fame, massively online roleplaying game (MMO), World of Warcraft, which launched in 2004.

Back in 2007 they revealed that they were working on a new MMO known as Titan but the game was internally cancelled in 2013 and officially cancelled the following year.

The reason given to the public is that it grew too big and unwieldy and they decided it was better to cancel it - throwing away seven years of development investment and all potential future profits - rather than get it under control.

It seems far more likely that by 2013 Blizzard realised that no "WOW-killer" was going to materialise and Titan would primarily draw customers away from their own World of Warcraft.

Following World of Warcraft's runaway success, many developers entered the MMO business and tried to emulate it.

None came anywhere close and even 20 years later the game is still one of the biggest in the industry with an estimated 4.5 million subscribers.

That's down from their 12 million peak but incredible for a game which would have been profitable with several hundred thousand subscribers.

Titan's assets weren't just thrown away. Blizzard converted them into the massively online battle arena (MOBA) Overwatch.

MOBAs were also big money and they had no finger in that pie.

Overwatch was a big success and there's a sequel in development.

The New Game

What is it? In their own words.

Blizzard is embarking on our next quest. We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored.

Prior to their very recent acquisition by Microsoft, Blizzard had no finger in the immensely popular survival / building game pie, which as with MMOs is dominated by a very old and graphically modest Minecraft.

Minecraft is currently the best selling game of all time and has generated over 3 billion dollars in revenue.

What could we expect from Blizzard's new game?

It sounds like Sony Online Entertainment's (SOE) last announced new game, Everquest Next.

Prior to World of Warcraft, SOE had dominated the then much smaller online gaming industry, and in 2010 announced that they were working on an online RPG / sandbox building game in which players would build the world.

Much more graphically sophisticated than Minecraft which launched the following year, it was one of the first MMOs which had the potential to really evolve the MMO genre, which hadn't changed much since the original Everquest from 1999.

With the intention that player built structures could be copied into Everquest Next, their building tool was separately launched as a game called Landmark.

An interesting and some might say diabolically exploitative plan which might have worked had the building tool been easier to use. Some features / processes were horrifically convoluted.

Everquest Next never made it to launch. Financially troubled parent company Sony sold SOE in 2015 and this game was cancelled the following year.

If Blizzard's new game is an attempt to deliver on the promise of Everquest Next, that wouldn't be a first for them.

World of Warcraft is essentially a better (i.e. more fun) Everquest.

At the other end of the expectation spectrum, while "survival" games typically include a strong building element and qualify as sandboxes, that can't be taken for granted.

The mere need to eat food and drink water could arguably qualify any game as "survival".

Will It Be Sci-Fi?

Possibly but this is speculative.

We only have two pieces of artwork and neither looks sci-fi.

Both may show portals between worlds and one of those worlds (pictured above) looks like a current day Earth or Earth equivalent with skyscrapers in the background.

The other world and its character looks typically fantasy, but Blizzard describe the game as a "whole new universe" suggesting the possibility of multiple worlds and with different levels of technological advancement.

If some of those worlds are more advanced than ours, then we may have ourselves some sci-fi.

[ Main Image: Artwork for untitled game. Credit: Blizzard. ]

References

Blizzard Entertainment (January 25, 2022). Create a New Universe With Us.

Curry, David (January 11, 2022). Minecraft Revenue and Usage Statistics (2022). Business of Apps.

Microsoft News Center (January 18, 2022). Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device.

Statista. World of Warcraft estimated subscribers from 2015 to 2030. (viewed January 27, 2022)

Wikipedia. Daybreak Game Company. (viewed January 27, 2022)

Wikipedia. Landmark (video game). (viewed January 27, 2022)

Wikipedia. List of best-selling video games. (viewed January 27, 2022) 

Wikipedia. Overwatch (video game). (viewed January 27, 2022)

Wikipedia. Titan (Blizzard Entertainment project). (viewed January 27, 2022)

Ybarra, Mike [@Qwik] (January 26). I’ve played many hours of this project with the team and I’m incredibly excited about the teams vision and the brand-new world it presents for players to immerse themselves in together. Twitter.