Warcraft new version of the launch, the future Will push Warcraft 4?

"World of Warcraft" The latest information film "King of Draenor" in a few days will be launched. Obviously, this is an important moment, but where is the future of the "Warcraft" series? Are we never going to see "Warcraft IV"? Will there be "World of Warcraft 2"? With these questions, foreign media kotaku.com an exclusive interview with Blizzard executives.

First of all, World of Warcraft will not change, even after the king of Draenor, we will (as usual) in the next few months ushered in a series of patches. This time, however, Blizzard is hoping to give the orc a little more of a new world to haunt. If all goes well, the new documentary will be available within one year of the launch of King Draenor.

"Our goal is to launch the film faster than ever," Chief game designer Ion Hazzikostas in an interview with BlizzCon. "I know the topic we've been talking about for years. You can go back and look for what we said 2008 years ago-we want to roll out a piece of information every year. But in the end it didn't work out, ' Well, we're not going to publish a piece of data that we don't think has reached blizzard standards. The cycle of the information film is closer to two years. However, we have increased the size of our team and we feel we have been able to make progress faster than before. Therefore, our goal is to send the data to the player's hands faster. ”

Naturally, new pieces of information are in the process of development, and even the next one is under development, albeit more slowly. Blizzard also hopes to better fill the gap between the two pieces of information. The gap between the two large patches is shorter, providing more tauren to the werewolf, the Germans, whatever the confrontation between the people and so on. Whether it's good or bad, Blizzard seems to want to keep the World of Warcraft, so that the cash cow Evergreen, in the game content of the alternation between the players will always leave and join. This means there will always be ebb and flow, prosperity and depression intertwined.

Hazzikostas that this acceleration also means that blizzard will focus on new content, not on the old. So while fans have been clamoring to transform Outland (Wow's 60-70-level region, where many feel like a symbol of Warcraft) and to join the nostalgic server to play the authentic Warcraft before all the data, these hopes may be dashed. Especially the latter, will encounter very harsh technical problems. After all these years of love, World of Warcraft has changed a lot, both in terms of gameplay and game engine. "It's not as simple as that," in some old drive loading an old version, throw it on the server OK, that's not going to work, "he explained.

So what about the World of Warcraft? In previous articles, RTS fans tried to get Blizzard to launch a new Warcraft theme. Even the strategy game, such a kind of pure desire to believe that Blizzard is also empathy. So is it time to consider Warcraft IV? After all, Warcraft III pushes the instant strategy game into an interesting direction and creates a lot of good memories in the process. At the same time, World of Warcraft gives orcs, humans, and all living creatures of the battlefield a more vivid personality, where everyone has the potential to be heroes (or jerky ganker, or exotic herbal collectors). It sounds like a new RTS a very interesting background, right? Although Blizzard says "no comment now", it seems they are tempted.

"It certainly has a lot of cool possibilities to put ' World of Warcraft ' and ' Warcraft IV ' In some way," Hazzikostas said. "Everyone in the Warcraft team is deeply influenced by the Warcraft RTS series," he said. I'd love to see that happen, but it's up to the other team to do it at different times and places. ”

So I put my question to Blizzard's immediate strategy team, who are carving out the last "nothingness" of the StarCraft II trilogy. According to some reports, they have been working on StarCraft since 2003, and you can imagine that they might be ready to replace the Protoss crystals with orc toil. Of course-although there will still be some work to be done after the release of the Void, chief game producer Tim Morten told me it was an attractive project.

"Wow IV is coming, especially the player community is interested in the Warcraft series," he explains. "We are now focused on making the void, so we won't promise to say, ' Of course, what we'll do next is X,y or Z. ' [but] it would be great to get us back to the World of Warcraft, and I'd love to see that happen. ”

He added that the development team was about to add a stack of official Warcraft resources to the StarCraft II MoD tool, allowing players to create their own Warcraft scene under the game engine. These are based on Warcraft III, not imaginary Warcraft IV, which is ready to be released early next year.

So, the Future of Warcraft is in World of Warcraft, there is a (although not announced) but can be a new strategy game, but will have a third choice: Another online game, "World of Warcraft 2"? I decided to joke about it because Blizzard seemed ready to withdraw from the big game. Titan was replaced by the watch pioneer, a small game of similar size to the furnace and storm heroes that now dominates. There is no doubt that World of Warcraft is still a big meal at the Blizzard table, but another MMO is not the most likely thing to happen at this time of day, but Hazzikostas told me it was a plausible guess.

"We can reshape World of Warcraft by patching up the main elements of the combat system, but we don't want to," he said. "This is one of the limiting factors for a 10-year-old game: You can't fundamentally reshape the entire rule." It is impossible to redo the underlying content without having a bad impact on the player. ”

"If there's a time when Blizzard has a lot of people and we think we have a different vision for a new game and some new core mechanisms that we can't try because of the innate limitations of World of Warcraft, then that's certainly one option we can explore," he said. ”

Now, however, World of Warcraft is still the mainstream of future planning. While the 12 million of users in their heyday have become the past, the endless wars in the blizzard world have been fought. So, let's hope hopefully, it's at least a full and fun experience.