There are a few reasons we could consider Blizzards new MMO being released on consoles.

• On all the programmer and artist job listings they have mentioned having shipped console titles as a plus.
• Blizzards Rob Pardo has confirmed that he is in talks with Microsoft over the sucessor to the xbox 360.
• All known software engineers working on the next-gen MMO have experience with development on consoles.

However, here is what Rob Pardo had to say about bringing MMOs to consoles:

Blizzard Quote: (Source)

Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it – that's all that was. But as far as MMOs on consoles, there's a lot of challenges. I'd say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you're going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That's a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we're always pushing out more content. That's something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that's a lot to deal with. You'd have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don't have hard drives. So that's a big issue.

Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that's something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it's not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. ... Then, the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it's subscription-based, they're going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there's definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it'll be much easier.

It's safe to assume that if Blizzards next-gen MMO is to come out on consoles, it will not be on the xbox 360 or the ps3.

Extending upon my previous post I have the names of two additional people working on Blizzards new MMO.

Firstly, Marc Brunet who is a concept artist specialising in 2d and 3d art. He goes by the name Bluefley on deviantart and you can see a gallery of his works at http://bluefley.deviantart.com/.

Below are three samples of his work:

The second person I will be mentioning today is a web developer called Miles Johnson. We cannot be completely sure that he is working on the website for Blizzards new MMO but it is a distinct possibility. Miles describes himself on his blog as “...a 22 year old gamer, developer, dreamer and lover. He's also a fan of talking in third person. “

You can follow Miles on twitter at http://twitter.com/gearvOsh.

I have managed to track down a couple of the 3d character artists currently working on Blizzards Next-Gen MMO. Vitaly Naymushin and Renaud Galand. Both of them have impressive resumes, having worked on other sucessful MMOs including Everquest II, Guildwars and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Here are a few examples that show what they are capable of, remember this is not artwork from the Next-Gen MMO, but it is made by the artists that are working on it.