New Blizzard MMO can co-exist with WoW, says Morhaime

Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime's told GT the company's second MMO is one that can co-exist with its current massive multiplayer title World of Warcraft.

Speaking at Blizzcon last weekend, he added the new MMO won't "replace" WoW.

"We are working on a second MMO. We're thinking of it as sort of a next-generation MMO," said Morhaime. "It's not a sequel to World of Warcraft, we want to do something a bit different.

"We're not trying to replace World of Warcraft, we think that World of Warcraft can continue co-existing with our new MMO and some people might prefer the new one, some people might still prefer to play World of Warcraft."

He added: "But I think after building World of Warcraft the first time, we're so much smarter now. We have a lot of expertise that we didn't have before. And I think we also want to sort of... every massively multiplayer game doesn't have to be similar to the ones that exist today.

"We think you can go in different directions and still have a great massively multiplayer experience and we want to sort of experiment with what that might look like."

Blizzard's EVP of game design Rob Pardo told Geoff Keighley at Blizzcon that any reveal of the MMO won't be until 2012 at the earliest.