Warcraft
In 2004, Blizzard Entertainment moved the series away from the real-time strategy genre and released "World of Warcraft", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Requiring a subscription fee to be paid to play, it also introduced regular additional content to the series in the form of patches. "World of Warcraft" gained popularity worldwide, becoming the world's largest subscription-based MMORPG in 2008. The game reached a peak 12 million subscribers worldwide in October 2010. "World of Warcraft" has had seven expansions as of 2018. During the production of "", Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce stated that "If there's a team that's passionate about doing another "Warcraft" [real-time strategy], then that's definitely something we would consider. It's nothing that we're working on right now, we have development teams working on "", "", "Diablo III", and when those teams are all off the projects they're working on, they'll be intimately involved in the discussions about what's next".
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
According to Pardo, Mike O'Brien, the game's lead programmer, originally planned a strategy game—tentatively titled "Warcraft Legends"—with few units to command, over-the-shoulder camera and no base building. However, after a year of work this concept did not work out and the existing framework was used to create "Warcraft III" instead. As a result of these design choices, the first version shown at ECTS 1999 had no notable interface, however it did have portraits for the heroes. In first previews, the game's design and gameplay was therefore compared to games such as "Myth" and "Heroes of Might and Magic". Various articles showed that abilities and items were used via right-click on a unit and an appearing icon collar. In the early stages of development, Blizzard emphasized the role-playing aspect and downplayed base building. Around January 24, 2000 a video from Korea appeared on the Internet; the video showed some aspects of gameplay along with commentary by Pardo. This version already had an interface concept, however most of the interface were placeholders. It had a map, icons for abilities and unit commands and an eye-shaped display for gold. Originally, the game was planned to be released at the end of 2000.