With Sony Online Entertainment planning on bringing its future MMOs not only to PC, but also to the PS3, the console could become the next big battleground for massively multiplayer developers. We've yet to truly see a blockbuster success in the MMO space on consoles, but Blizzard is hoping to change that at some point in the near future. Just don't expect World of Warcraft on your PS3 or Xbox 360.

"Well, we definitely aren't adapting World of Warcraft to the console at this time," WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan told MTV Multiplayer when asked about MMOs on consoles. "So I don't think World of Warcraft would really work that well on the console, but that's not to say that other MMOs couldn't. And we have a pretty savvy group of console developers — a lot of the guys we inherited from Swingin' Ape really know what they're doing on next-gen consoles. So we might have a few tricks up our sleeves in that regard."

In the meantime, Blizzard is working on a "next-gen MMO," which Kaplan said is still very early in development and it's "going to be a while" before we hear or see anything about it. Kaplan believes working on WoW, however, has given his team a leg up on MMOs in general, and he's not worried in the slightest about a new Blizzard MMO cannibalizing WoW. "I think the great part about a new MMO from Blizzard is that it doesn't have to be WoW," he said. "There are a lot of lessons we learned in making World of Warcraft, and some of those you can take and do things better than you ever did before."

And while high fantasy MMOs still dominate the landscape, Kaplan thinks other genres can and will succeed, as long as there's a balance in the game so it's accessible for a broader audience but still appealing to the hardcore gamers. "Once people figure that out, your game world is going to attract a lot of people," he noted. "But a lot of it has to do with art style, too. Are you going for realism or an inviting world? And once you learn those lessons, I think any type of [intellectual property] can survive. I'm shocked we haven't seen more sci-fi, near-future, post-apocalyptic, historical MMOs; there's all these completely different fantasy settings beyond the traditional high fantasy ones."

Photo credit: MTV