Carbine Studios and NCSoft officially announced WildStar 2 today at a press conference held at the company’s Aliso Vejo, California headquarters. The sequel will take place on the same planet Nexus, 500 years after the events of the first game and is slated to launch in mid-2018.

Kim Taek-Jin, CEO of NCSoft commented, “WildStar remains one of our most popular franchises and we’re excited to announce the sequel to one of our most revered franchises.” WildStar 2 plans to build off the success of the first game while maintaining its core action combat elements. Unfortunately, not too much about the game has been revealed just yet, but we’ll likely learn more soon. No word on a business model just yet either, but I expect it will be free to play.

Despite previous reports of WildStar’s declining playerbase, according to Carbine the game’s playerbase is actually increasing. Matt Tobiason, lead game designer at Carbine explained, “WildStar continues to grow and we’re actually still adding new server capacity regularly.” The launch of WildStar 2 isn’t expected to impact the original game and they’re expected to exist together, at least for the time being.

Source: NCSoft's Press Conference. Clip from CEO announcing WildStar 2 (Translated by MMOs.com)