DiabloFans

WC4 definitely needs to come before they decide to do something drastic. I mean lets look at it:

Diablo 3 --> Follows series' formulaic approach to hack'n'slash-type action, standard online RPG with single player, no monthly fee

SC 2 --> Sequel to the most acclaimed RTS of all time. They try not to mess with the formula too much, and add maybe a few units as not to make a carbon copy of SC while keeping it easy to balance.

Unknown Next-Gen MMO --> Not much to say here, but just something to notice. The WoW team is the WoW team and they've got their own thing to do, at all times. There's developers who are responsible for the monthly material while some are strictly always working on the next expansion, and I'm sure the WOW team is extremely expansive by now. This MMO is being developed by yet a different team, we are told its not from an existing Blizzard franchise, so its new and "next-gen" is all we have to go on.

--WHAT'S NEXT?--

There next project can't be an MMO. With WoW at its peak (11 million subs?) and possibly still climbing, they can squeeze out like 10 more expansions before starting to feel a decline, but Blizzard isn't stupid. All their expansions have been pretty massive, and their not even going to put any serious pre-production development into WoW-2 until the numbers actually look like their starting to wince. 11 MILLION subscribers world-wide. MMO's that have like 250,000-500,000 are considered profitable and successful. WoW has 62.2% of the world's MMO market. Lineage and Lineage II together own 13% of the world share. Everquest I and II have only 2.3%. So forget WoW-2, because WoW is simply too successful to start diverting resources to WoW-2.

WC4: Warcraft-3 is also one of the highest rated RTS games. Its still played competitively worldwide. Of the average 150,000 users still playing on battle.net at any one given time, half of those are on Warcraft III: Frozen Throne. In a few years, when D3 and SC2 are both out and done with, WC-4 I think has to be the logical move for Blizzard. With WC4, they have top-notch games from their 3 franchises along with the world's biggest MMO (by a LONG shot) with another MMO in development and pretty much the freedom to do anything they want. Diablo 3 will rejuvenate the old D2 crowd. SC2 is the sequel to a still-popular RTS thats 11 years old. You can bet anyone who has ever played Diablo will be interested in D3. Tons of ex-WoW'ers (like me) are looking forwards to playing it. It will likely draw tons of new-comers as well who were maybe too young during the D2 prime and will discover the series.

After WC4 you say? Probably the release of the Next-Gen MMO they're working on (MMO's have huge dev cycles). After that? I really can't even speculate.

I'd say if you forget about their Next-Gen MMO, and you take into account the WOW expansions are handled by a different team, it probably has to be Wc4. After SC2 is released and D3, the next game is gonna be War4. By the time War4 is out, WoW is probably gonna be starting to slightly decline and then post-WC4 their going to be doing pre-production on WoW-2.