I think that might be a bit of 20/20 hindsight, as at the time I would have thought it was more of a "we have a popular game on our hands, let's make a sequel to it using a lot of our pre-existing material, so we don't have to spend time developing all new stuff for it." You can look back NOW, after they merged the two things into one and say they should have gone in another direction (as we always did when we lamented them wasting time on creating the AE, an archetype we didn't like, post-50 grinding, you name it), but I'm not sure that's historically accurate to say about CoV. Maybe I'm wrong.