"This is the building that contains the StarCraft II team, the Diablo III team, and people working on something we haven't talked about yet," we were told during our tour of the Blizzard campus last week at the Blizzard Community Summit.  Now we know of at least one person by name who is working on Blizzard's next MMO: Jeffrey Kaplan.

Kaplan has been a major influencer in World of Warcraft's success.  In the early days of the game, he was one of two quest designers -- yes, two total -- creating quest content for the game.  He's also responsible for such early gems as The Deadmines and Duskwood.  MTV Multiplayer recently sat down with Kaplan to talk MMOs at BlizzCon, and discovered that he is now also involved in Blizzard's secret project, which they're currently hiring for.

With the game being a completely new universe -- rather than one of their current massively successful IPs -- is this a show of Blizzard finally telling the nay-sayers that their claims of "Blizzard not being creative" or "Blizzard doesn't take risks" are a fallacy?

I asked if he was concerned about the new MMO potentially cannibalizing “WoW” subscribers. Kaplan said he wasn’t worried at all, and that the company was going to great lengths to make sure that the new game doesn’t directly cannibalize “WoW.”

This makes me wonder what exactly this new MMO universe will be comprised of.  It's a next-gen game, which means it's being designed with a higher system requirement than you'd expect in Blizzard titles, so that could be one potential aspect of it not cannibalizing WoW: it's designed primarily for high-end PCs... and maybe consoles, too?

He thought the secret to success was making a game that was both tailored to hardcore players and accessible to a broad audience. “Once people figure that out, your game world is going to attract a lot of people,” he explained. “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.”

This particular quote is rather confusing, though, considering Blizzard is calling this a next-gen MMO.  Are they going for something truly next-gen, with a more realistic art style, or will we see a similar art style to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III but with more polygons and improved lighting effects?

One interesting thing to think about from the quote, though, is the fact that Kaplan is the second to reinforce the idea that Blizzard's next MMO will not be fantasy related.  Paul Sams gave the impression earlier this year at the Worldwide Invitational, and now this interview with Kaplan gives another impression that Blizzard is looking beyond fantasy, to something else.

So, it's not StarCraft-related, nor is it something that will continue the Diablo or Warcraft stories.  What kind of game and setting would you like to see Blizzard create as an MMO?  Kaplan is behind it, so if early World of Warcraft is any indication, it's going to be a pretty good game.

To read more of the interview, head over to MTV Multiplayer.