blizzard-mmo posts

Blizzard's next major game announcement will likely be the reveal of its next MMO title. But the developer behind the biggest subscriber-based MMO game of all time, World of Warcraft, is still keeping details about the game close to the vest. However a new chat with Blizzard's COO Paul Sams at Gamasutra does give a couple of very general hints.

Sams admits that its next MMO game is " ... the most ambitious thing we've ever attempted." He added, "We're playing it already. It is a total ball to play. We think that the reach of that product is greater than anything that we've done before." However he also believes that World of Warcraft will still have a long life after the new MMO is released, saying, "I see World of Warcraft as having many more years in front of it."

The next MMO game from Blizzard Entertainment (which we know goes by the internal code name "Titan") is still a long ways off but during this week's DICE Summit the president of Blizzard Mike Morhaime gave some general hints about what the next MMO from the company behind World of Warcraft would be like.

According to Ars Technica, Morhaime repeated that the MMO won't be a World of Warcraft sequel but one that will take all of the lessons that Blizzard has learned from developing its first MMO title. He stated, "So we're kind of taking a step back with all that knowledge to make something that's completely new and fresh." He added, "To break the mold, sometimes you have to start over." Morhaime hints that the new MMO would have more of a social-friends aspect to it but then added, "That's probably all I can say."

Activision Blizzard didn't mention anything about layoffs in today's financial press release but during today's Q&A with investors at its weekly conference call, execs for the publisher finally admitted that it would in fact be saying "good bye" to about seven percent of its work force. That means 500 people will soon be looking for work. The layoffs were caused in part by the decision to shut down its Guitar Hero division.

Activision execs tried to spin the bad news, saying that hiring was ramping up in other divisions of the publisher including its Call of Duty business and at Blizzard for its upcoming and still officially unannounced MMO game. The execs stated that by the end of 2011 its work force numbers will not be "materially different" than they are right now.

There are PC games on the immediate horizon that are close to being released. Then there are games that have been officially announced but will take years to find their way to our hard drive (BioShock Infinite is due out in 2012, for example) And then there are the games that are completely under the radar. These are titles that developers are working on very hard but haven't been officially announced or in some cases even admitted as being in production.

Big Download has covered these games over the years. In the past we have called them "Black Ops" games but since Call of Duty Black Ops has become so well known we didn't want to confuse you when we decided to do our yearly look at these games. So from now on we are calling these super-secret titles "Code Black" games.

The last time we did an article like this we mentioned several games that have since been fully revealed such as BioShock Infinite, FireFall, Bulletstorm and others. But there are still tons of games that we know are currently being made that haven't seen the light of the public eye yet? Which titles are we talking about? Check out the first part of our current list of Code Black games for yourself.

A few weeks ago a "leaked" document hit the internet that is supposed to be Blizzard's future game release plans. While other web sites ran with this story we chose not to since Blizzard would not confirm this document to be for real and the source of the document was unknown. Now it looks like at least one part of the info contained in the leak was correct.

That part was the mention of "Titan" which Blizzard's Senior VP Frank Pearce admitted in a video interview with Destructoid was the name of Blizzard's next MMO project. It's likely that Titan is a code name rather than the game's actual title but that's still one more thing that's actually confirmed about this still mysterious project. About the only other things we know about the game is that it's not a sequel to World of Warcraft and it won't even be officially announced until at least 2012.

It was yet another busy new day here at Big Download, where every week is We Love PC Games Week :)

• Microsoft will officially shut down its Massive in-game ad service by the end of the year.
• Blizzard reveals its next gen MMO at BlizzCon 2010 (Ok, not really but it's funny).
• Steam has a new Worms Reloaded patch update available for download.
• Dark Horse Comics has release an original Mass Effect comic book online at the USA Today web site.
• The third and final behind-the-scenes video for the upcoming Back to the Future game is now on YouTube.

If you have been waiting patiently to see what Biizzard has in store for its next MMO game project, then you will have to wait even more patiently. Speaking at BlizzCon 2010 during the official streaming video-DirecTV coverage (and as reported by VG247.com), Blizzard VP Rob Pardo indicated that the new MMO won't be revealed until at least 2012.

Keep in mind that we are talking about the official reveal, not the actual launch date for the game. Blizzard has been hiring for a while to generate a team to make its World of Warcraft follow-up in the MMO space. Pardo said that the team is comprised of 50 members now and it is currently working on the prototype stage of the game. However that's all the info about the game that Pardo was willing to give out this year.

We are not sure why 2010 has started with a ton of anonymous game rumor stories but it certainly has. The latest one comes from French language web site NoFrag.com which claims via their own unnamed sources that they have a little more info on the next MMO project from Blizzard Entertainment.

It's been known for some time that the World of Warcraft maker has been working on their second MMO game for some time and that it will not be a sequel to their mega-selling debut game in the genre. NoFrag.com's story says the second Blizzard MMO game will be a sci-fi first person shooter based title that will also have some kind of social element. Naturally none of this has been officially confirmed by Blizzard and likely won't be for a while.

[Via Blue's News]

It's been an interesting last 12 months for games on our "Black Ops" list. These are the games that we know are under development but officially unannounced. A few months ago we talked about the Black Ops games that were finally brought out into the light in 2009.

But there are still a ton of games that are being made under a cloak of darkness (or at least under a very grey coat). We decided to go back and remind you of at least some of these games that will hopefully get their day in the sun . .. somday.

Click on the image above to continue reading Black Ops PC Games for 2010

Many folks thought that Blizzard might reveal the details about their next MMO at BlizzCon 2009. Unfortunately, Blizzard "only" announced the next World of Warcraft expansion pack. However Blizzard's Rob Pardo gave some tiny hints about their process for making their next MMO in chatting today on the DirectTV BlizzCon pay-per-view broadcast.

Pardo, the head of Blizzard's game design, stated that they started their process on the next MMO by having meetings on what ideas the team might have for the game. He admitted that they discussed ideas like StarCraft-like MMO or a Diablo-like MMO as well as ideas like an MMO RTS game or an MMO FPS game. Eventually Pardo said that as a result of these meetings they leaned toward ideas that everyone involved agreed would be best for their next MMO. Pardo said that they are now past the technology and art stage and are now developing actual game prototypes for the MMO. Naturally there's no word on when Blizzard will reveal any concrete details for the game, much less a release date.