Transferred from paxdora.blogspot.com [LINK]
Original Post Date: 7/26/11
Ever since the Cataclysm mistake, the growing boredom of WoW, and the big chunk of subscribers Blizzard has lost to RIFT they're really going to have to pump out something unexpected and awesome.
They had originally planned on releasing X4 and X5 in 2012, as per the Product Release Slate, but because of Cataclysm they're going to have to change their plans quite dramatically to fix things.
They also have a lot of competitors coming up soon too. RIFT took away approximately 600k players, SWTOR will take away probably around the same amount, TERA Online will probably take away of 300k chunk, and the skies the limit for Guild Wars 2 but it could be anywhere between 2 and 4 million players.
They'll be able to distract gamers and investors for a little while by focusing on Diablo 3 sales and "subscribers", but WoW is still one of the biggest money makers for Activision and they need to do something drastic to attract players back. That is, unless, they're planning on retiring growth on the game within the next 2-3 years.
After learning from the Cataclysm mistake, X4 better not include a remake of Outlands. Remaking old content has simply not worked and I trust they've learned from their mistakes. They need to create awesome new zones, wrap up all lose ends, and push the main "story" into brand new territory. There needs to be a new focus for players, and some changes to gameplay to improve things. If they're really serious about keeping the game alive, X4 will have more than 1 new hero class, more than 1 new race, new quest types, a 3rd faction, mounted combat, at least 2 awesome professions, and a true expansion of everything.
