All the hoopla surrounding the new WoW expansion got me thinking about Warcraft. Many moons ago, I played Warcraft on my Nintendo. I still have the game and the Nintendo, but the old cartridge doesn’t work any more.
I’ve been searching around for a new Warcraft III for my computer-- used I’ve found plenty of, new-- not so much.
My son insists that the storyline would not support a WCIIII. There are no more armies just groups of 5 or so adventurers going over to Outland. I say “bullquacky”. There’s a real time strategy game in there. What say you?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they did so. Frankly, I think it’s likely they’ll need to blow up WoW in one more expansion, or maybe two - at a certain point, coming up with a new continent full of challenges to characters who have already defeated two different leaders of the Burning Legion in combat will start to strain credibility. An RTS would give them a bridging story to WoW II.
(My vaguely-envisioned end story involves someone, maybe the Naga queen, resurrecting Sargeras. Even a successful mission to kill the dude again would probably shatter continents, etc.)
He’s wrong, the players ARE the army, “Heroes of the horde and alliance worked to quell the forces of Ahn’Qiraj.” It happens every day in the game, it happened once in history and as far as history is concerned every player was a soldier in the effort. Illidan is even smoother, because Maiev, Akama, etc helped so they can say “Alliance and Horde forces, led by Maiev etc defeated Illidan Stormrage.”
Also, they managed to give us the biggest reset button in history. Arthas died? Behold, the first 6 missions of the undead campaign… securing the Caverns of Time.
The canon can absolutely support another RTS - the issue isn’t the canon, it’s logistics. Starcraft II is still in the works, and Diablo III is coming after that (no release date). At some point, we’re also likely to see another WoW expansion as well.
Blizzard takes a long-ass time to release games. We’ll see another Warcraft RTS in all likelihood, but I’ll lay odds it won’t be for about five years. Diablo III I expect no sooner than a year to year and a half from now, and Blizzard supports its titles, so between the WoW team, the Starcraft team and the Diablo team, they’re going to have to wait a bit to start a whole new extra team.
Blizzard also has another MMO (with a brand new setting) in the works.
It’ll be a long time before we see a whole new Warcraft game. Lore-wise, it might be helpful to have an RTS revolving around a Fourth War and then a time lapse if Blizz ever wants to make a WoW 2 (here’s hoping gnomes go extinct during the Fourth War). Before then, there’s still a lot of world left on which to craft new and exciting wars; the Maelstrom, the Emerald Dream, Pandaria… the list goes on.
It’s not so much the amount of world left, as the amount of power escalation left to the characters: does it really make any kind of sense that the average critter in Pandaria is tougher than Illidan? (Though actually I expect Illidan to make a return appearance whenever they get around to doing the Emerald Dream/Nightmare).