Spooncraft

So here’s some speculation. Blizzard (Vivendi Games) has stated that Wrath of the Lich King is going to be released in the second half of 2008. Now if this is the case then I’m pretty sure the Beta Key that you’d get for attending Blizzcon (goody bag) won’t be for WOTLK. Starcraft 2 has already been in production for a while now and if you follow their forums and Karune’s FAQ posts (he does these question series things, really neat) then you can tell SC2 is about neck and neck with Wrath in regards to readiness.

In June the WWI08 is going down and as usual something will be announced there. Last year’s WWI was where Starcraft 2 was announced. So what could possibly be announced in October of this year? It’s close to the very end of the year for starters and there really is a toss up as to which theory holds the most water.

Some people are saying Diablo 3 might officially hit the lineup. They just recently snagged the URL of www.Diablo3.com but then again that could mean nothing at all since Blizzard has the right to do so whenever they wanted. Though I can’t imagine the higher ups at Blizzard would make a move like that and NOT know what would happen with the hype. Blizzard as well has been hiring for kind of a long time now for positions involving mobile technology (games and applications for cellular phones) and Vivendi reps have said in a few interviews that a watered down version of WoW would be great for a cell phone, where you could only check your auctions, game mail, and maybe do some chatting in guild or a mini-game that would give gold or reputation.

What’s more interesting is that the 2nd “Top Secret” project Blizzard has been hiring for is dubbed “Next-Gen MMO” and they’ve been snatching up coders, programmers, and 3D Artists left and right. Now the other theories behind this are that Blizzard is just going to hit us with another expansion pack for World of Warcraft. I’m almost done with a series of articles that explore this a little further as we can probably see some really interesting stuff in the near future (there’s been talk of a revamped graphics engine for a while now)

Finally there’s the Ghost theory. I know I’m not alone when I came up with this one, but if you have the Collector’s Edition of the Burning Crusade and watched the Making of DVD then you’ll see in game video of Starcraft: Ghost. You’ll also see one of the most freaking incredible trailers for a Starcraft game in existance. It’s the opening cinematic to what I assume would be the first level of the game (or the demo). Blizzard essentially had a fully operational game up and running when the unexpected success of WoW shifted focus and Ghost was dropped. My idea is that the big announcement is going to be a World of Starcraft (expect the unexpected with Blizzard) and the reasoning behind it is that Blizzard tested the possibility of making a Starcraft MMO with Ghost. Brining everything to scale like they did with WoW. Taking an overhead view RTS game and turning it into a properly scaled and sized first person game is a daunting task. Perhaps they had the engine working, they had the game concepts working, but they didn’t ave the story. So they instead hit us with Starcraft 2 so they could set the stage for the MMO.

Who knows, but we’ll find out in June and October this year for sure. Not much time left folks.