Do we need a World of Warcraft II?

The idea is basically the same game, but with way better graphics, new features, new NPCs/Items etc etc. It would be cool, because the skeleton would be the same, but the rest would be new.
But that doesn't sound like something that would require an entirely new game though, but of course that is just my personal opinion. As I see it, these things could just as well be upgrades to the current game through patches and expansions, much like what we have seen already in the game's evolution from its release until today.
I think something more would be required in order to rationalise the end of WoW in favour of WoW II :-)
When EverQuest II came out in 2004, its predecessor was the largest MMO in the world. One of the charges leveled at EQII was that it looked and felt so different from EverQuest itself that it split the player base and, since this happened just around the time that World of Warcraft was launching, left the door open for the upstart game to get a serious footing. It's possible that if it weren't for EQII, we'd have ended up with a smaller MMO scene where a game with a million subscribers was considered a rousing success.
Now, I'm not arguing that it's always a bad thing to have a sequel to an MMO. There are MMO's out right now which run concurrently with a sequel and seem to be doing fine. The question becomes, does World of Warcraft need one?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria






