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 Adventures: Lord of the Clans
After his week at Blizzard's main office, Meretzky returned to Massachusetts and finished the job remotely. His time on "Warcraft Adventures" ultimately totaled around two weeks. Soon after his visit, Wooley reported that Blizzard had enjoyed its work with him and might hire him again. Roper later echoed this praise for Meretzky's contributions, which he said left the game with "a much, much stronger series of puzzles that tied in much better to the storyline." Meretzky also signed Roper's copy of "Superhero League of Hoboken" during the period. In 2016, Meretzky stated that even the planned revisions to "Warcraft Adventures" would have resulted in an average adventure game. However, he enjoyed the title's story and voice acting, and its core idea of rendering the "Warcraft" universe in finer and more intimate detail. Despite Meretzky's redesign, Blizzard did not initially project a delay for the game, which remained set for a summer 1998 launch.