Waterworld.
It's going to cost 175 million and several years to make?
Then again, I really would not mind playing a Waterworld MMO.
Player: Alright, raid on the Smoker Oil Rig at coordinates 400, 320!
This is an awesome idea.
My prediction is, it's not going to be WoW, the
sequel, it's going to be WoW,
reloaded. I.E. a bottom up rebuild of the exact same game.
The core element of an online game is the playerbase. The more players already joined in, the more likely other players will want to join, in the vicious circle that is word of mouth advertising and crowd enticement. There's a reason WoW has like two or three times as many subscribers as all other direct-fantasy-RPGs put together, and it's not all quality, it's that no one wants to pay for a multi-player game with no other players. Also important, notice that the playerbase size has plateaued at about 10 million. Combined with the 5 million or so other people playing subscription based WoW-like games, and that's about as big a market as there's going to be of people willing to pay for something like WoW.
That's why I think it's just a rebuild of WoW, because Blizzard would be throwing money away if they made a different game to compete against themselves, just like Tabula Rasa, Conan, Hellgate, and all the others from the past couple years. Of course, that's probably exactly what they're doing, because Activision is hoping that billion-dollar-a-year lightning will strike twice. It'll be fascinating market research to watch this play out.