Today in 'wait really?' news

This one requires a little bit of backstory, most of which Todd himself explains in the video, but I'll recap - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the action-RPG sandbox game released recently, was originally aimed to be a stand-alone game not tied with the Amalur universe. However, when Big Huge Games changed hands from THQ to 38 Studios, Curt Schilling and his merry gang of troops (including Spawn artist Todd McFarlane and fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore) decided that releasing a single-played RPG set in the Amalur universe would be beneficial to introducing players to 38 Studios' Amalur-set MMORPG, codenamed "Copernicus." Thus, we saw the release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The MMO followup is still in development, and in an interview, McFarlane lets slip the game is slated for "later this year."

Wait, what?

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has been met with good to mixed reviews thus far, and it would be beneficial for a follow-up to take place, but in 2012? Even if it comes out late year, we've heard very little about the game, and this is the biggest news to land in some time. This also puts it - depending on Blizzard's timing - in direct competition with World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. This is a perplexing development, but is it just an off-the-cuff inaccurate comment made by McFarlane? We'll have to see.