Anticipation

Either Friday night or Saturday, Blizzard is going to announce their next big game at a Korean games championship. Normally this wouldn't be much of a big deal, but this is Blizzard, and they're kind of the overlords of PC gaming, after all. Every game they put out is a hit, for good reason. There are basically three schools of thought.

The first is that the game will be Starcraft 2. I personally think this is the most likely. Blizzard bought the domain starcraft2.com and has it pointed to a generic countdown to their announcement. And, the announcement was timed to coincide with a Korean festival, and there's nothing Koreans love more than Starcraft.

The second is that the game will be Diablo 3. They've been saying for a while now that they're working on a new Diablo game, and that they don't want it to have been a decade since Diablo II. Since it will probably take another year after the announcement before it's released, they're starting to run out of time if they want it to follow Diablo 2 by ten years. Announcing Diablo 3 right now would be an interesting twist, as many of the people responsible for Diablo 2 left the company a while back and have been working on Hellgate: London, which is probably coming out early next year, and similar in concept to Diablo.

Finally, the third possibility is that the game will be World of Starcraft. They've stated that their next MMO won't be "just another WoW." They're definitely working on another MMO in some fashion right now. How far along they are is debatable. Just a few months ago they were hiring lead designers and engineers for a next-generation MMO, and those aren't the sorts of positions you fill right before you announce the game to the public. Plus, World of Warcraft has only had one expansion at this point, and they have several planned; I don't think they're going to release another MMO just yet. Then again, they are very lucrative...

I think that Starcraft 2 is the most likely, and World of Starcraft is the least likely. Personally, the one I'd like to see most is Diablo 3, followed by Starcraft 2, and followed by World of Starcraft. It's possible that they'll announce something else entirely, but that seems pretty unlikely to me. Whatever it is, it's pretty much guaranteed to be good...