Blizzard says their new MMO is cool, new, different and next-gen compared to WoW

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion PackBlizzard has discussed their follow-up to World of Warcraft, which will be a new, entirely different next-gen MMO.

“We want to create a great game,” he said. “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 endeavor.”

The game is already in the early stages of development. It’ll be interesting to see if it will be an entirely new leap forward for the genre of if it will mostly stick to genre conventions.

“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.”

Blizzard says they expect the process of getting the new MMO into the public domain to be a challenging one, but growing WoW has taught the company a huge amount.

“I think we’re going to get a lot of bumps and bruises along the way,” he said. “The good news is that we’re been able to do this with World of Warcraft, and so we have a lot of experience, so hopefully we’ve learned a tremendous amount. Not to mention that before WoW launching we were the world leader in online gaming with Battle.net. We have a lot of experience, and so hopefully that’s going to benefit us as [we bring the game to market].”

Via Videogaming 24/7