Blizzard's Unannounced 'Titan' MMO Rebooted, Development Team Reduced

An anonymous reader writes "VentureBeat reports that the next-gen MMO Blizzard Entertainment has been hinting at since 2007, codenamed 'Titan,' is getting restarted with a drastically reduced development team. It was originally being built by a 100-person 'dream team' of developers that had their roots in other popular Blizzard games. Many people were expecting an announcement about Titan at this year's Blizzcon, but now that looks unlikely. 'Blizzard's development teams aren't known for their speed. The publisher often cancels projects that have been in the works for years if it believes that those games don't meet its standard of quality.' VentureBeat's sources say the game is now looking at a 2016 release at the earliest."

Comments

Where have I heard this before?

[Dutchmaan]

Didn't they already release Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[flayzernax]

Blizzard did not. But it was released and went silently into the night without much fanfare.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anubis IV]

There's a bit of a difference between what happened with DNF, where the developer publicly announced the game and presented images and video for gamers to salivate over, along with promising an imminent release, before they sat on it for 10+ years as they twice (I think) scrapped the game engine in favor of something newer, and what Blizzard is doing here, where they're rebooting a game that's only been confirmed publicly to state that it is indeed an actual project in development and that it's an MMO based on a new IP with no release date ready to be announced. You can't have vaporware until something is first promised, but Blizzard hasn't promised anything at all here, unless you want to take things like that game release schedule that leaked a few years back as an implicit promise that they would carry through on their plans.

I'm not nearly the fan of Blizzard that I once was, but I've always respected their willingness to cancel projects, rather than push them out the door for a quick buck if they don't think that the games are fun or that they meet their standard of quality.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

StarCraft 2 took 12 years and was great.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Luckyo]

This is a game they didn't even announce. Can't really "delay" something you didn't even announce a name for yet, can you?

All in all, this is understandable. They laid foundation for this game when MMOs and social integration were the hottest thing. Neither is all that big now, and trying to shake their WoW gravy train at the time when it's slowly losing subscribers in the time of F2P MMOs is unlikely to result in anything good.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[IllogicalStudent]

StarCraft 2 took 12 years and was great.

Diablo 3 also took 12 years to release, and it most certainly wasn't great.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Gr8Apes]

which you'd expect from a game that was envisioned in the 1950s with 1940s gameplay today.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

Yes, but blizzard excels at RTS's, not RPGs... this is why they hired half the everquest staff for the warcraft launch, whom then all left once the planning and most of the design was done for the burning crusade and its been downhill ever since. Diablo and Diablo II were more god-mode RTS's with one all powerful character and instead of 10+ different units, each with their own abilities, this one character had everything required.

Diablo 3 was built by current crop console dev and tester idiots. They have no idea who their market actually was for that game.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[smartr]

StarCraft 2 took 12 years and was great.

Diablo 3 also took 12 years to release, and it most certainly wasn't great.

It was still a well polished game that probably brought you over 20 hours of entertainment compared to the shovelware feeling you get everytime an EA game crashes your console.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[sneezinglion]

How was it great?

I was a huge fan of StarCraft, and was disappointed with StarCraft2.
Why?
Because to my eye, it was the same game with better graphics.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[painandgreed]

Mod points expired yesterday or I'd +1 this. StarCraft 2 seemed to be the same as Starcraft 1 prior to its expansion. I'm sure there were minor differences but there seemed no new units, missing units I was already used to, and no new game play. There was a story, built in online play, but lacked lan play. I played it for about a week before deciding to wait for an expansion.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find these digs against Diablo III interesting since most people who complain spent 20 to 100 hours playing the game, which is unfortunately longer than a lot of other AAA titles. Diablo III also happens to be the 3rd best selling AAA PC game of all time.

So from Blizzard's point of view, it did just great. Now, whether their next game will suffer a backlash due to upset fanboys remains to be seen.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[znanue]

Bullshit,

Diablo 3 was a fantastic game taken in a very narrow scope. What it failed at was to deliver longevity, but the actual act of leveling up the first time was wonderful. The core gameplay was very addictive the first week. I got my money's worth when compared to the average money in, enjoyment out ratio of other games purchased. What I didn't get was the same ratio I got with Diablo 2.

D3 is, in so many ways, a very polished experience with absolutely wonderful mechanics. It got some major things wrong in a meta design sense that will be talked about amongst game designers for quite awhile. Still, the actual gameplay is an unparalleled experience. The engine is so much smoother than D2 and less buggy, and its way more enjoyable than Torchlight 2. Yet, Torchlight 2 is a better game because it's meta design (how you acquire upgrades, the ability to play offline, the lack of a universal AH, and on and on) is better.

I still think D3 is quite an achievement and Blizzard still has an opportunity to fix what is wrong so that it can enjoy the ongoing success of D2. I am not confident that they will do this, but they are intending to release an expansion. D2: LOD also dramatically raised the bar on D2, so lets see if Blizzard's typical iteration will show improvement. I have some hope.

I often think the reason people "hate" on Blizzard so much is simply because of how successful they are and how much hype they have to live up to with each release. Yet, they still are putting out amazing games (with flaws) and that is what they released originally, too. This move by Blizzard causes me to believe they're still maintaining the Blizzard philosophy, not the activision philosophy. I hope that Titan is every bit the awesome MMO. Even if it fails to capture the magic of the design elements that make WoW so good, I have faith that I will take enough value from it to justify its initial purchase price and first few months of play because it is Blizzard and every game Blizzard has released was worth the money.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[freeze128]

In the immortal words of Kratos: "What game?"

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[flayzernax]

You mean they spent 11 years drinking beer and thinking about it waiting for the skill and technology to develop to execute in one year... while they probably played table top wargames.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[flayzernax]

Bah lol nvm my earlier post I read star craft 1.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[coniferous]

World of warcraft begs to differ. That was a great RPG.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Starcraft 2 is not great. It will forever live in the shadow of the far superior Brood War while also being eclipsed by Dota 2 and LoL.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

The warcraft I referred to was world of warcraft. I also explained that one... most of the lead devs and half the dev team were actually everquest devs.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

*/made/ WoW so good.

Its been nothing but downhill since TBC. Diablo 3 was a continuation of a lack of understanding of who they're actually selling to. MoP took WoW down the Diablo 3 route too.

People actually LIKE complexity in the stats and make game characteristics. Even if sometimes the devs feel like its an illusion of choice, leave the choice in. I liked everything about Diablo 3 except the terrible terrible skill system and the horrid itemization. Items are slowly being fixed, but the horrid skill system will take a lot more.

People may have ended up only using 3-5 skills in Diablo II most of the time, but most liked having different things to try out on the fly, being able to use ALL of your skills like a swiss army knife than being handed a swiss army knife and then being told "Ok... now using any more than 4 things is dangerous! So its locked up so you can't do that."

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[znanue]

The way I remember D2 and the way you remember it must be totally different, because I felt in D2 you ended up spending most of the time heavily talented towards a very small subset of your skills and the way I spent most of D3 was using every goddamn skill I had to stay alive while running around screaming my head off. Of course, it helps that you can just totally wtf pwn Baal at level 90 in D2 and teleport through the instance like nightcrawler. And, my fond memories of D3 come from before you could reliably and cheaply overgear all same level content via the AH such that you felt permanently undergeared. I'll give you one thing, D2 was just a lot harder for (in my view) stupid reasons, like 100% immunities to a school of damage which you could only use the god mode synergy spec against if you had this one very hard to acquire piece for your companion otherwise you were totally fubar.

Also, wow easily requires more buttons than ever for most specs, has far more variation in execution, and has much more complex rotations. They have increased the complexity of stats over TBC and vanilla (mastery, spellpower being split from int, expertise becomes spell hit) and itemization (you always have more than set to choose from, trinket choices are fight by fight), and we could have a long argument about whether the new talent system is better or not, but the game as a whole is more complicated, easily. As a hardcore raider, I really do suspect the loss of subscriptions is more due to the barrier to entry into the hard core raiding scene, the added complexity of the end game, the longer leveling time for new accounts and lack of communal interest in that activity, and the natural attrition as people lose time to making new families, starting time-consuming careers, or adopting new lifestyles that exclude WoW.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Rakarra]

Its been nothing but downhill since TBC. Diablo 3 was a continuation of a lack of understanding of who they're actually selling to. MoP took WoW down the Diablo 3 route too.

I disagree... mostly. I felt Wrath and Cataclysm definitely hurt of the game, but MoP is definitely the best the game has been for a number of years. Maybe even better than TBC, only time will tell that much.

I like the skill system in Diablo3, but the free respecs made it way too easy to try all the builds I was interested in and then get bored.
The item system in Diablo3 is just horrid, and since the series at its core is an item hunt with items fueling character progression, that's a big part of the game that is broken.
That the upper reaches of the game are fueled by the auction house is a big mistake; Blizzard devs called the auction house an experiment that didn't pan out.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

You haven't been PLAYING WoW for quite some time. Cataclysm and MoP SIGNIFICANTLY reduced all complexity in WoW.

I 100% agree on your points about WoW, except for the TBC thing. The changes in Wrath were side-swaps for other things and there was some simplification in the talent trees etc. that I didn't like. TBC was the same amount of complexity as wrath for number crunchers.

The only problem with my 100% agreement is you can't be a current hardcore raider. Every class plays the same and uses a total of 6 buttons max with the exception of healers and cooldowns. Shit lights on cooldown all over the place and its become whack a mole for the flashy button and when nothing is flashing whack one of two other buttons. Its entirely artificial complexity in most cases and if the flashy buttons aren't the ones being wacked due to some theorycrafting blizzard just instantly nerfs whatever IS being whacked or buffs the flashy button.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[kiddygrinder]

lies, they reduced the illusionary complexity in cata, like everyone else i just chose cookie cutter specs and "did whatever i wanted with the last 3 points". "for number crunchers" - exactly, both of them probably really enjoyed working that out for everyone else to copy. if you're only using 6 buttons you're a terrible player, even on my ret pally i'm messing around with 11 buttons i'll use at least every second fight and another 4 situationally.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

AC here. The reason I didn't say "Diablo 3 and SC2 took 12 years and were great." was because I didn't feel like making this argument and wasn't sure how to articulate it. Thank you for doing it for me, and much more clearly than I could have.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

11 buttons IS 6 buttons + cooldowns for a ret pally.

Wings, and at least 2 more dps cooldowns that I can think of get you down to 8 normal use buttons immediately and I'm certain there are two more 30 sec+ damage cooldown abilities on that 11 button list. Buttons that you use every second fight are not normal rotation buttons.

Shit, I can get up to 11 buttons that I used every other fight on a Vanilla hunter off the top of my head. I'm sure there were more.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

I should also mention that the best players often didn't follow the cookie cutter builds. They were smart enough to tailor their builds to their own play style. This became next to impossible in Cata due to reduced options and is now entirely a situational list of abilities.

I admit the tailoring wasn't as possible on some classes, the paladin being one of them, but the stupid "balancing" has gotten rid of fun things, like the old Holy Mage priest build that could do shocking amounts of damage, good hybrid bear tanks/dps, Hybrid tanks of any sort really... you can't swap specs mid fight and you can't spec for both so that you can fill an off tank role and still DPS because off tank isn't needed for all of the fight.

As I've mentioned previously, they're removed the majority of the fun for high-end players. The loss of subs has taken the largest toll on this group of players. There are servers that used to have top 10 world guilds that can barely finish clearing content now.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Shalian]

Do you have a source for that? From mobygames ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-warcraft/credits ) more people WoW people worked on FEAR 1 than on Everquest. What is this 'most of lead devs' and half of the 300+ dev team from EQ?

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

Holy crapnuggets though the correlation between Diablo 2 and WoW.

I may have just been perpetuating something wrong that was told to me by someone who paid way more attention to that stuff than I do years ago. If I am, my apologies.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Ironhandx]

and the EVEN BIGGER correlation between all wow related development up to WotLK and Diablo 2 and the lack thereof for Cataclysm and MoP. No wonder WoW jumped the shark.

My original point stands, the correlation is apparently just to diablo 2 staff instead of everquest ^_^.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[drsquare]

Yet it sold 12 million copies in less than a year. If that's not great then I wonder what is.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Meski]

It was a dog. Got a couple of hours of gameplay before I tossed it.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happened with Diablo III? Because that was quality beta testing at its highest!

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

They tested the hell out of that real money auction house, thank you very much. Then they wrapped a game around it.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

often cancels projects that have been in the works for years if it believes that those games don't meet its standard of quality

HAA AhAA AAhAhAAhAA AAhHHaHHaHHH HA HAHA

i played d3 free trial once for 20 minutes. prompted me to reinstall d2 again for the first time in years.

Re:Really?

[smash]

I know its cool to hate on D3, but it wasn't actually a *bad* game. I got about 50 hours out of it, which works out to be about $1.20 AU per hour. Cheap entertainment. Sure, nothing like as much as I spent on D2, but I don't have the free time these days either.

Re:Really?

[ganjadude]

agredd. I played it and enjoyed it for a good amount of time, but I also can still put in D 2 and enjoy it, the same just isnt true with 3 thats where my issue is.

Re:Really?

[spire3661]

Overall, DIII is a badly engineered game. It focuses way too much on a long tail of revenue. If they had not insisted on always online and a Real Money Auction House, the game would have been a better playable game.

Re:Really?

[sjwt]

And still they botched it with 2BEEZ

Re:Really?

[halivar]

It was fun enough for me to play twice. I got to the highest difficulty, hit the brick wall, and called it quits. I definitely feel like I got my money's worth, though. And the gameplay was pretty frikkin' fun.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not *bad* and good or excellent are very different level of standard.
Of course, "quality standard" doesn't equate to "good quality".
Does ISO9001 rings a bell ?

Re:Really?

[MachineShedFred]

I stopped playing when the money-for-bits scheme was patched in. It was obvious that all the good items were going to cost me real money that I'd much rather spend elsewhere, and all the sub-standard garbage items were going to end up on the in-game currency auction.

Between that, and the ridiculous balance issues that had one class easily wiping up the maps on the highest difficulty levels, and another class getting completely tooled in about 2 seconds by the exact same creatures, both equipped equally, I stopped playing and forgot D3 existed until just now.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had not insisted on always online and a Real Money Auction House, the game would have been a better playable game.

I never used the real money auction house and fortunately never had connection problems that prevented me from playing. While those issues can make it suck for some people, for most, they don't interfere or directly impact the rest of the game at all. They could have taken those features out or not, and for many people, it would not have changed the game at all. The problem wasn't those idealistic conflicts, but that the actual game itself was just mediocre.

Re:Really?

[Kazman20]

If you want a game that was everything DIII should of been and more you should try path of exile, http://www.pathofexile.com/ .

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the biggest problem with people is to have fun with games. Always where I see fun games, other people only see grinding, imbalance, auction houses and stuff like that. I've enjoyed Diablo 3 and for me it is the best Diablo so far released. The story is told like to a 13 year old, but man... Sure there is also some imbalance - the barbarian is useless compared to daemon hunter on normal mode and the daemon hunter is useless compared to barbarian on hardcore mode. But this game has the best gameplay mechanics in the Diablo series.
I have played hardcore with only ingame money auction house - I beat The Butcher on inferno. Then I got stuck for a while, got bored with rerolling after death and then I played normal with 2 rules: 1) no auction house; 2) highest difficulty (you can set it from 1 to 10 now). I started dying a lot at nightmare already, but I had fun all the way. I love the challenge. I understand, not all people do. But you gotta put some rules for yourself to have fun with the game. Not all games make sense, when playing to win.

I wont make a car analogy, but let's try counterstrike. Auction house is like if Valve released a counterstrike mod, where you get an aimbot, but you can only play against bots. And I look at it and see it's stupid, so I play against people, because it's more fun. And the forums are full of people crying, that that patch has killed counterstrike. The game is boring and everyone is quiting. I say to them - but guys, you can play the game the old way - against people without the aimbots. And they only look at me like and say - you noob, with an aimbot against bots you have alway better score. To play against people is inferior! ... Well, that's like I see you today.

If you don't use the auction house, you get the same old Diablo experience like before with polished mechanics. "But other people will have better equip than me!" - you say. Dude, you are logging to one server with all the people, but they are not in your game. You play the game alone against the computer controlled monsters. You can have some friends join in who can play by your rules or they can be stronger if you don't really mind. You decide. It's your game.

I bought my game to have fun. People look to me like they buy a single player game to compete with others. They never put in the 16 hours a day needed, to be the best. So it's like they don't care to be the best. But they cry if other people can buy stuff for real money and perform better in their single player game. Well you were never gonna be the best, you will not be the worst with this mechanic, so even if you accept it, I still don't understand, why you are angry.

Maybe you are only different and you don't enjoy "self created fun" in the games. Maybe it's only "fair competition" vs "boring game" for you. I wouldn't know. I just tell you how it looks from my perspective.

tl;dr: You don't loose to players with money. You loose to you own ego.

Re:Really?

[smash]

Yeah, I had fun and played through the first difficulty levels until inferno.

I didn't touch the real money auction house at all, and barely touched the other auction house. I played in games only with people I otherwise know.

I can see how if you were involved with the real money auctions or playing with people who were it could be a massive problem, but I didn't, and it is optional, so...

The game is what you make of it. No it isn't perfect by any means, but I played it (end enjoyed it) more than most of the games I've purchased in the past 5 years or so. The only thing I've put more hours into since is Borderlands 2. Similar deal - only play with people I know.

Essentially I treat them like LAN games, without the LAN... to catch up with friends I used to go to LANs with back in the early 2000s.

Re:Really?

[smash]

Installed it, spent an hour or two with it, haven't loaded it since.

Not sure why, but it just didn't grab me the way the diablo series has. Ditto for torchlight.

Maybe its because I'm more interested in the Diablo series story, the background, etc. and the other games just feel like a hack and slash for the point of it... I mean i don't even remember/know what the point of Path Of Exile was, ditto for torchlight.

Maybe that's not the game's fault and D3 is getting by with me on the basis of prior involvement in the series back to Diablo 1, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter to me. My time is limited, i have a few hours to kill now and then and for that purpose, diablo 3 worked just fine for me.

I'm not interested in getting to the top of the Battlenet ladder, getting the perfect kit, doing PvP, etc... so the minor imbalances don't really bother me so much. I just hook up with a few mates and go kill stuff co-op.

Re:Really?

[smash]

You can happily ignore the real money auction house and play it the way most people originally played D1 and D2 - with a bunch of peeps you know.

I didn't touch the RMAH at all.

You say D3 is a badly engineered game, but maybe the glasses are a bit rose tinted, because D2 was pretty laughably imbalanced originally and went through heaps of nerfs over the last decade and a bit.

I guess if you're looking to compete on battlenet then yes the RMAH introduces a bit of "pay to win", but I don't do that so it doesn't affect me.

The only problems I had were a couple of connection issues in the first couple of weeks after release, other than that, no complaints.

Re:Really?

[MachineShedFred]

You missed my point.

I was having fun until the difficulty scaled in a vertical line that was unsurpassable, and I had no desire to completely reroll a different class because it was the only way past due to the defects in design.

I played a Monk that was unkillable in Act 1 of Inferno, and then got completely smashed in 5 seconds by garbage bugs in the desert right outside the city in Act 2. No amount of retooling of abilities was going to get me by - it was going to be gear or quit.

Gear wasn't an option, because I couldn't farm anything better than what I'm already wearing, and anything better than what I had on the auction house was going to be for actual dollars, and an amount which totaled more than I paid for the game to begin with.

The challenge became one of how much I was willing to spend, rather than how much I was willing to alter my play to get past it. That's not fun - that's attempting to bleed your customer's wallet. Instead, I choose to have fun by playing other games from publishers that don't view me as a piggy bank to be cracked open whenever possible.

Re:Really?

[smash]

So you played the game twice through with one character (I'm guessing 30-60+ hrs?), and then feel hard done by?

If you beat inferno I'm sure we'd be hearing about how blizzard made the game too easy, blahblah...

Just treat hell as the final difficulty level?

Re:Really?

[DKlineburg]

PoE lost interest when I made it to the jail. Just overly dark for no reason. I never equate can't see to hard game. Just seemed overly hard, just hard for no reason. Not sure I can tell you other than light why though.

If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Asheron's Call 1 was a great game and had an update every month. Players were very happy playing it. The developers(Turbine) wanted better graphics, so they decided to make an entirely new game: Asheron's Call 2. It was being developed at about the same time as World of Warcraft. The developers decided to rush it out because they were worried WOW would compete with AC2's numbers and whoever got the players first would retain them. The problem is that Asheron's Call2 was a failure in terms of game mechanics:Armor didn't work and there were ways to make sure you never got hit at all. Asheron's Call2 was rushed and as such, it took away most of the Asheron's Call 1 players :( People quit Asheron's Call 1 to play AC2.

So Blizzard should be careful not to make the same mistake. As long as you have the leading MMO on the block, keep updating that. Keep making content for WOW and expansions. All the while, make a great project on the side in case WOW gets dethroned. I almost got a game design interview for World of Warcraft, and my big suggestion was for them was that they make enough money to create a lot more content than they do now. Aside from content, what they could do is explore end game content such as player housing and kingdom simulation. If they're worried this will screw up their subscribers in case something unpopular happens, they should run WOW experimental beta servers with different rule changes they're working on.

I see no big problem with Titan being delayed. The longer a game takes to develop is generally a good thing. And the last thing Blizzard wants is a chunk of its WOW players to come to a sub par game, then leave for something else that is new.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[autocannon]

I see no big problem with Titan being delayed. The longer a game takes to develop is generally a good thing. And the last thing Blizzard wants is a chunk of its WOW players to come to a sub par game, then leave for something else that is new.

I whole heartedly disagree with this statement. There is a sweet spot of time spent for game development. My guess on that is 18-36 months. Once game development hits 3 years, the graphics engine on which it is built is old enough to be noticeable compared to the newer content. Now, not everybody cares about that, but why does it matter so much? Because the original timeline was already within that time frame. That means the game is getting grossly overdue. Grossly overdue games are in that state because the devs cannot get it to a releasable state.

Most recent example in my head. TOR. You may have heard of that incredibly expensive, overdue boondoggle that EA put out. I bought it. Was excited to play it. Until I played it. There are many problems with that game. I won't even blame the devs for them, because IMO it's fundamental flaws in the game's design.

Duke Nukem is another. Or the recent Blizzard offering, Diablo 3. Look, once a computer program (any program really) goes too far over schedule there is something wrong with it. Titan being delayed and large scale developer changes means that game is fatally flawed and they're probably looking to push it to any functional state possible so they can sell a crappy ass game to as many unsuspecting fools as possible.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[flayzernax]

Sort of but not really. They should have focused on making AC2 as much like AC1 as possible. But updating the game engine and playability with better UI design. Like doing things they would have in hindsight if they weren't locked into the feature set that AC1 had only.

So the point I disagree on is having to have the same engine and client. If they can release content semi-annually. They can upgrade the engine and code semi-annually too. Beyond patches, or widget like features.

No MMO has done that though.

Though WoW could maybe use a core rewrite. The assets are not bad looking still. For the audience in question.

But the people who liked MMO's are done with them. The new generation is not inspired by last generations toy. I think we should give MMO's a rest for awhile as a species.

The next big thing will be a SIMULATION. That is multiuser. And user generated.

Re: If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[O('_')O_Bush]

Runeescap is actually one a more aggressive development cycle than the one you describe, which is why it still has millions of players (the vast majority fairly new) despite being over 12 years old.

Re: If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[flayzernax]

Cool I didn't ever dabble with Runescape. Glad to know my idea is not completely unfounded =)

I was a die hard EQ player. Which updated from Directx6 to 8 with Luclin. And had a big client side UI update with Velious. Nobody much liked the Luclin content. But I think almost everyone universally liked the upgrades to the client.

And the Shadows of Faydwer client was another big re-write which was popular. So I think that might be where I got the idea in the back of my head =)

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[fast turtle]

Guildwars did that. Released new content and slight changes on a semi-regular basis until the GW2 release. Now it's in automatic maintenance mode and only critical issues (game stoppers will be fixed) but hey, at least they didn't shut the servers down so I have a chance to complete the damn thing.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably didn't help that EA forced a buggy alpha version of Hero Engine on the dev team.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[CodeBuster]

Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[windwalkr]

Major problems can be found after the ramping-up stage that you mention. The team decides that they can fix the problem, but only by changing some fundamental assumption upon which the whole game is based. This causes a lot of rework and can blow budgeting and scheduling out of the water. Worse, gp is fairly correct about a practical life cycle for a game engine- so if you bump the schedule like this a few times, you may need to start making "upgrades" to your underlying tech before you've even released the product. That can be a vicious cycle (see DNF.)

"Data storage / retrieval, mechanics" are often the smallest part of a game. What's really expensive is often the art assets, sound, levels, and polish. And a change to any of these can mean updating everything else to suit (oh, we're going with an egyptian theme now?)

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[ShakaUVM]

>Or the recent Blizzard offering, Diablo 3.

Which blows out of the water their claim the delays have anything about waiting for games that set a high bar for quality.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Your timeline is generally alright, but your reasoning is completely wrong. The reason 18-36 months is optimal for most kinds of games is because if it's any longer than that it means your development is probably suffering from scoping issues or fundamental design issues. It means you weren't willing or able to cut down to the core of what was fun in the game and are just adding features for the sake of adding them, not to actually improve the game. You're also refusing to give up on features that seemed good in theory but didn't pan out in gameplay testing.

Games that bank on graphics generally only fall into two categories: ones that don't care about the gameplay or are just blindly iterating on a known successful gameplay paradigm, or ones that are having millions of dollars thrown at them anyway and can just afford to hire a billion artists.

Also, Diablo 3 is fine. It's better than most modern action RPGs, and better than most games in general that came out last year. It just wasn't the smash hit that Diablo 2 was. It's like a 8.5/10 game instead of a 10/10 game (and has risen to a 9/10 game in patches).

Re: If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

In my mind, the jump the shark moment for EverQuest was when they changed the ogre and troll models from their cool designs and turned them into tall, mildly misshapen humans. And then turned that on as the default model.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[ravenshrike]

Or that the dev team couldn't even apply the updates directly to the servers. They had to send patches to the guys at HeroEngine, who would then look over them and 'correct' them before applying. Then there's also the fact that EA forced it out before they had gotten around to properly testing and designing large scale high-level PVP, which turned a shitload of people off.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Anonymous Coward]

"They had to send patches to the guys at HeroEngine" is false, you can read in interviews with the people from HeroEngine that they never saw the code after BioWare got their alpha version (and in separate interviews you can find that BioWare had about 100 developers working on their fork, which imo explains a lot).

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[higuita]

ok, a good graphics engine is good to start selling, everyone likes eye candy BUT.... ... after some weeks, all what matters is the game, the history, how everything works... eye candy only last a few weeks (look at crysis games) , a good game last years (WoW have weak graphics for today standard but still a good game) or even never die (look at nethack, plain ASCII interface and its still one of the best game ever, with thousand of players)

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[mellyra]

Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?

that's exactly what they are doing - first they put a very small team on the project to develop the engine, backend technology, dev tools, ... while the game designers do their magic. then they ramp up the team size massively and start to develop actual art assets, start to write content, design levels, ... (which takes much longer than 6-12 months).

My understanding is that in this case Blizzard had already started production when they decided that they need to go back to phase 1 and rework the game design and the technical underpinnings. So they scaled the team back down (no point wasting money on creating e.g. art assets which later have to be laboriously ported to the rewritten engine, or creating dungeons that will have to be trashed because core game mechanics were rethought in the meantime, ...).

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Charliemopps]

Because the graphics are 90% of the work.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Thruen]

There is a sweet spot of time spent for game development. My guess on that is 18-36 months. Once game development hits 3 years, the graphics engine on which it is built is old enough to be noticeable compared to the newer content.

Starcraft 2's release timeline is longer than that, and I don't feel the graphics are noticeably worse than newer MMOs, although to be honest I'm such a Starcraft fan it wouldn't matter and I'd keep playing SC2 anyway. Development on that started in 2003, so it was still 7 years before the first third of it was released, and some would argue the whole game hasn't even been released yet.

WoW took 4-5 years initially, and was buggy at release just like every other MMORPG ever has been but it might be the most successful game in history. Not the most loved, but quite possibly the most successful single title ever.

D3 took 11 years, and while it takes a lot of flak (rightfully so) over the AH and the DRM, the actual game is a fun hack n' slash, true to the titles that came before it. Those two big flaws would've been there regardless of development time.

DNF is a bad example, the game was terrible regardless of graphics, people were willing to give it a go knowing full well the graphics would be outdated but the game itself was just awful. Development time had nothing to do with that failure, either, it was just a bad game that people were really excited for.

TOR was an MMO made by people who put out great single player RPGs, the result was a great single-player RPG that had some MMO "features" added in which ruined it, and that was another mistake dev time had nothing to do with. Less time would only have resulted in a buggier release with fewer features and the same frustrations.

Nothing you say actually suggests a link between development time and the quality of the resulting product. If I were to go on listing games with 18-36 months of development time that came out bad, I could go on for days, any long-time gamer with Google's help certainly could. That doesn't mean that's a bad timeline either. The fact is, Blizzard rebooting the project will have no real effect we'll ever see on the outcome.

Look, once a computer program (any program really) goes too far over schedule there is something wrong with it. Titan being delayed and large scale developer changes means that game is fatally flawed and they're probably looking to push it to any functional state possible so they can sell a crappy ass game to as many unsuspecting fools as possible.

There was no schedule, the project was not announced yet. They said they're rebooting it, which suggests they're starting over, and they're going to take much longer than they expected to develop it. Nothing that's happened suggests they're actually trying to "push it to any functional state possible" to rush out crap, it's the exact opposite. They're going to take longer with it because they think it's not good enough. If Blizzard thought it was fatally flawed, they would cancel it, as they have in the past.

It seems like you've developed a bias against longer development times for no real reason. You're complaints don't even match up, longer development time would never suggest an attempt to sell a crappy game, it'd be easier to duct tape it together and release it if they think it'd be bad anyway. You, sir, are little more than a troll.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Thruen]

Also, I know SC2 is an RTS, I just didn't realize I did that until after I hit submit. Who needs proofreading?

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Chris Mattern]

I whole heartedly disagree with this statement. There is a sweet spot of time spent for game development. My guess on that is 18-36 months. Once game development hits 3 years, the graphics engine on which it is built is old enough to be noticeable compared to the newer content. Now, not everybody cares about that, but why does it matter so much? Because the original timeline was already within that time frame. That means the game is getting grossly overdue. Grossly overdue games are in that state because the devs cannot get it to a releasable state.

So true. World of Warcraft was in development for five years, and we all remember what a flop *that* was!

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Anonymous Coward]

DNF - how long?

Diablo 3 - how long?

Games taking this long is usually a sign of the director not having a clear idea of what s/he wants to make, and a producer too weak to rein him in and force him to make choices.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[sandytaru]

Sounds also like Square Enix's botched release of Final Fantasy XIV. Unlike AC2 though, 14 was so bad that it didn't lure many players away from XI. Once SE went into damage control mode and decided to rebuild XIV from scratch, they threw the XI players a bone and give them a new playground in the meantime. So while XIV languished, XI went through a bit of a renaissance.

I've been in the beta for the new version of XIV (ARR), and they've fixed all the crap that made the game so horrible the first go round. Also gave it a modern graphics engine. It's a considerably better game this time and actually worth playing. Maybe Blizzard saw what SE did with XIV and realized they'd better do the same with Titan before they released it to the market.

Re: If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[flayzernax]

The Luclin models were outsourced out of the country. it was one of the first big mistakes SoE made. And they were extremely poly in-efficient compared to what they needed to be. Not to mention the animation was shoddy. They could have updated the models to a 2 x higher poly count and went with the same art styles. And they would have been a big hit.

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[Osgeld]

dont make your sequel a totally different game when the original is still at its peak?

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[autocannon]

At what did I say that hitting that development time guarantees a good game? I didn't. Going over that does have an effect. You can choose to ignore it, and in that case we are in disagreement.

Let's start at D3. 11 years is a horrendous joke. We can ignore graphics. Let's just talk COMPILER. You think they are still using the exact same compiler over those 11 years? Same development environment? Same freaking server versions and desktop versions to run it? Or even using 11 year old graphics cards as their model? Hell no. Those types of upgrades and migrations cost additional time and money.

WoW was announced in 2001, and released in 2004. That's 3 years. Not the 4 to 5 you claim.

StarCraft 2 started in 2003 and not released until 2010. Is it a good game? Sure. Is it as well received if it isn't the sequel to the biggest RTS ever? That's debatable. That's it's now split into 3 separate releases doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. Similar to the Hobbit short story getting split into 3 long ass movies for the sole hope of making more money. Blizzard needs to recoup 7 years of development.

So while you will blindly say I'm wrong, it's more a case of you don't wish to acknowledge the truth I'm presenting.

Nothing you say actually suggests a link between development time and the quality of the resulting product. If I were to go on listing games with 18-36 months of development time that came out bad, I could go on for days, any long-time gamer with Google's help certainly could. That doesn't mean that's a bad timeline either. The fact is, Blizzard rebooting the project will have no real effect we'll ever see on the outcome.

Again, hitting the timeline is no guarantee of greatness. Missing it is definitely linked to seeing games rushed out. Hmmm, the latest aliens game comes to mind.... Anyways, Blizzard rebooting the project means there is a very real effect: that what they had been working on is crap and they're starting over. They do not have the luxury of another 3 to 10 years hoping WoW holds on while they restart from scratch their new MMO development. You think I'm wrong there??

Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2

[autocannon]

And if they had not continued their heavy development after the game was released, it would have been a flop.

Cause and effect

[girlintraining]

"VentureBeat reports that the next-gen MMO Blizzard Entertainment has been hinting at since 2007, codenamed 'Titan,' is getting restarted with a drastically reduced development team.

This wouldn't happen to be because World of Warcraft started hemmoraging cash and players recently, would it?

The cash cow is sick -- quick, buy more cows!

Re:Cause and effect

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be curious to know what, if any, shift in the makeup of the dev team occurred during the 'drastic reduction'. Was it roughly proportionate, just the hive tyrants at Vivendi responding to bad numbers by reflexivel cutting costs?

Was it the project getting more or less thrown away and rebooted? Was it the entire art team busy modelling pet zergling DLC for 'World of Starcraft' being sacked and the remaining developers told that they'll have to actually develop a new game, not a WoW mod?

Re:Cause and effect

[osu-neko]

If by "sick" you mean still the healthiest, fattest cow in the field, several times stronger than the next biggest cow, then yeah, you're right.

Re:Cause and effect

[halivar]

2007 was well before their peak of 12 million subs during Wrath of the Lich King, so no, it wouldn't.

Re:Cause and effect

[antifoidulus]

Huh? That statement makes no sense. They started out in 2007, when WoW was expanding rapidly and thus may have based a lot of the games mechanics on WoW. However WoWs sudden contraction over the past year should definitely give them cause to re-evaluate the direction Titan is going.

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

This wouldn't happen to be because World of Warcraft started hemmoraging cash and players recently, would it?

Has it? No, seriously, has WoW really been hemorrhaging cash and players?

I'm aware of the recent loss of a million subscribers, but as I understand it, that was a one-time event that can be almost entirely blamed on a Diablo III cross-promotion and a change in Chinese laws.

Even so, that leaves WoW something like five times larger than its largest competitor.

Now that doesn't mean that WoW isn't shrinking or anything like that, I just question the choice of the word "hemorrhaging." WoW may be shrinking, but it's not in any immediate danger, and Blizzard doesn't have to worry about only being four times larger than their nearest competitor any time soon.

Re:Cause and effect

[LordLucless]

Except the OP is saying Blizzard is "buying more cows". It's not. It's cutting down its existing herd, exactly the opposite of what she said.

Re:Cause and effect

[Pubstar]

Did you mean WoW was released in 2007? Because I remember it was released my senior year of high school (204-2005)

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW is still an incredibly profitable product.. Saying it is "hemmoraging cash" is not just a 'perspective', it's unequivocally wrong.

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK WOTLK was the most popular subscribed to expansion to date. The problem with looking at pure numbers is that they fluctuate greatly based on content patches.

You have a lot of people who will log on for a new content patch, play for a few months to smash their way through the top end content and then unsubscribe until a new patch arrives.

From what I have read, the most recent dip in subscribers was from the Asian market. It appears to be a combination of different playing styes (one of which mentioned above) and more competition in the MMO genre there.

Re:Cause and effect

[AlphaWolf_HK]

WoW is indeed losing subscribers. Not a little but a lot. It's still very profitable though, so I'm not sure where the "hemorrhaging cash" comes from, but indeed it IS hemorrhaging players, to the tune of about 1.1 to 1.3 million every quarter for the last 3 consecutive quarters (prior to that they were losing in the low to mid six digits per quarter.)

Eventually it will reach the point where it starts to become unprofitable until they scale down their servers, which they are still running as if their subscriber base was about 50% larger than it is now (presently at 8.3 million whereas it peaked at 12.7 million.) 8.3 million is a lot of revenue (I can't say how much exactly given that the monthly subscription cost isn't the same in every region, which is what this 8.3 million figure includes, and they don't provide that information in their quarterly SEC filings.)

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Activision-Blizzard-Q1-2013-World-Warcraft-Loses-1-3-Million-Subscribers-55474.html

Their SEC filings (which detail their financial status according to GAAP, as required by law) for both annual 10K and quarterly 10Q can be found here:

http://investor.activision.com/sec.cfm

I'm sure that if they could keep their subscription numbers secret from the players, they probably would (and I don't blame them, because if I were a games developer I would want to keep real-life issues out of the game itself for the sake of avoiding effects on the actual gameplay given that it is a social game) however that information is very pertinent to investors so it needs to be disclosed there. But if/when they start downscaling their servers, you can expect player drama, so I'm betting that they'll avoid that as long as they can.

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

no, he means that news of Titan was released in 2007.

Re:Cause and effect

[ildon]

They've been losing subs, but I SERIOUSLY doubt they've been losing cash.

Re:Cause and effect

[Pricetx]

Whilst I'm not a very active WoW player, I can tell you that there is an increasingly large number of servers, or "Realms" as they're called, that are very empty (200 players online at peak time). This doesn't just have a negative effect on the social side of the game, it also causes a whole host of issues for the in-game economy, and the ability to party up for dungeons and raids.

I think from a player point a view, downscaling their number of actual game servers would be a welcome move (albeit tricky to carry out due to potential player name / guild name conflicts when multiple realms are merged).

Re:Cause and effect

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Well, if WoW is hemorrhaging players, then they timed this new game poorly. The time to release is soon.

Re: Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

In a way they have been merging them for quite a while. Anything you queue for is a shared queue between servers, and I think they have made some zones shared between servers also. Doesn't fix the economic or actively organized group problems, but it does show that many of the server blades likely have been removed and are shared already. Just sneaky-like.

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

It took you 1801 years to complete your senior year? That must be a record.

Re:Cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you mean WoW was released in 2007? Because I remember it was released my senior year of high school (204-2005)

It took a while but I'm glad you finally graduated.

@2016 release date

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha that's gotta be a joke.
This isn't even a simple RPG, MMOs are notorious for their development time...considering Blizzard. 2020 would be "soon"

Re:@2016 release date

[CronoCloud]

This isn't even a simple RPG, MMOs are notorious for their development time...considering Blizzard. 2020 would be "soon"

Really? In the same time period that Blizzard developed ONE MMO, other companies have done 2 or more and sometimes also developed several single player games alongside the MMO.

Blizzard at tone time was a console developer and in that world if you can't do a quality game in 5 years or less, you should just give up. But of course, in the PC development world there's more tolerance bfor being slack and lazy. If Blizzard was a console dev we'd be playing Diablo IV by now. AND it would be a better game.

Compare D2 and D3 to the spate of console Diablo clones sometime and you'll see that Blizzard lacks competency. In fact D3 reminds me of all those Snowblind engine games. which were themselves inspired by the original Diablo.

They need something to replace WOW

[Billly Gates]

I was really hoping SWTOR would be that next gen game as I actually liked the huge improvements over wow with companions, voice driven quests, choices, and companions doing the dirty profession work for you.

Wow seemed so primitive in comparison yet was bashed on slashdot for some unkown reason by Wow loyalists and other gaming sites. Sigh.

Of course I grew up but I want to see more than just wow but the fact of the matter is it is very very expensive to make a MMO. In time you run out of ideas like Kung Fu Panda in Wow. Man it rocked when Arathas was still around and Wow for me died when he was finally defeated.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

SW:TOR rushed to release. If they had just waited another 6-12 months to polish out their end game and pvp game play the game just might have done well. Developers really seem to only get one chance to release their game. It needs to do very well on release to get over that critical number of retained subscribers initially and then hope that those subscribers build enough hype to attract new players.

On topic: If Titan has any chance of success it will need to do something different and it will need to get it right the first time.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[halivar]

It was a perfectly serviceable KOTOR 3 single-player game. Then you got to level 50 and you were done. Not quite a replacement for WOW though.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

With your self diagnosed bawwtism I'm surprised you have time with all the Minecraft you surely play.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[flimflammer]

It always amuses me when someone comments on the latest expansion being "King Fu Panda in WoW," as if Blizzard actually didn't already have these creatures and their style many years before that movie was even a script being pitched to a studio.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[ShakaUVM]

Yep, a lot of people don't give SWTOR enough credit. The level 40s drag for a bit, but it's a really fun single player game that just happens to be an MMO.

I don't think I bought more than one or two items on the auction house on my way up to 50, as opposed to Diablo 3, where spending even a small amount made your character six billion times more powerful and had a much worse storyline.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[runeghost]

I'm a long-time Warcraft and Blizzard fan, and I don't recall the classic Wacraft Pandaren being bouncy food-lovers. Yet those attributes were given to them when they were included in World of Warcraft, well after the release of a certain film containing an anthropomorphized panada who was an elastic glutton.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[ildon]

It was a serviceable KotOR 3 with 60 hrs of MMO grind tacked on for no discernible reason.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Mike Frett]

The same way people swore up and down that Guild Wars 2 would be the WoW killer?. Instead they turned it into a P2W Game and now people have just given up on the MMO Genre. If anything, 'Titan' will be a 'buy once, play for free' game with a shop; like GW2. Blizz has already mentioned the F2P model in their future plans.
To be quite honest, I can't see a success for Titan in the way WoW was. The best days for an MMO are gone, the market is too saturated.

Blizzard does/did make great Games, and I have much respect that they want to get it right and not throw it out the door unfinished. Me and my brother bought D3, I played for a few days and he played for about a week before realizing the huge role the Cash Shop played in advancing. It rendered the game unplayable and not fun for us. Thankfully Blizz admitted the Cash Shop was a bad idea, that doesn't mean we'll never see it again.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Chris Mattern]

I don't recall the classic Wacraft Pandaren being bouncy food-lovers.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Xpress

Three years before Kung-Fu Panda.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a long-time Warcraft and Blizzard fan, and I don't recall the classic Wacraft Pandaren being bouncy food-lovers. Yet those attributes were given to them when they were included in World of Warcraft, well after the release of a certain film containing an anthropomorphized panada who was an elastic glutton.

Though they didn't have full character arcs in Warcraft III to really flesh them out, they most certainly had personalities that would support a conclusion of "bouncy food-lovers". The pandas always had an Eastern flair to them and were given voices and appearances that were lighter-hearted than the rest of the game (plus, being pandas and all, they were generally rounder than the normal races), so it's a very short path to go from that to what they are in WoW.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I resubbed to SWTOR so I could enjoy and finish off some storylines while I can. With games like Wildstar, ESO and others coming soon, I kinda doubt I could return to SWTOR so easily after that - time constraints and all.

I do hope they add new content to SWTOR NOW vs later, opposite of a new MMO release as I do not think they have enough community confidence to pull players back into their game with even more competition out there.

Re:They need something to replace WOW

[tyrus568]

Maybe D3 was "unplayable" for some players... I don't know, but it was fun for me. I got D3 for my birthday the month after it came out (May 2012) and played for about five months or something. At the beginning I struggled up to lvl 30 or so before I found out a friend I had found from an unrelated forum who also played Diablo3 and started grouping with him... he already had a lvl 60, and quickly got me leveled up to 60 as well. Then we just did tons of runs looking for good equipment. It was slow to find good items, but we did find them.

I also made quite a bit of money on the auction hall - given that I was not working at the time, it was my only source of money for a while. I played a total of about 80 hours and I sold 2 $25 items, many $10 items, and a $40 item (cash into my paypal after fees). At the end when I stopped playing, I had found a $250 item... I sold it for $190. I never spent a single dollar on the RMAH... not even a small purchase, not even $1. I made out like a bandit otherwise and had lots of fun, to boot.

Although, doing the runs could be repetitive and it took a lot of time and luck to find anything, really... I stopped playing shortly before that huge patch that was going to change so much, I suppose fall of last year or something.

If I wouldn't have found a friend that helped me and was someone to group with every night and do many dozens of runs, I probably would have taken forever to get to lvl 60 and then stopped after that, I dunno if I would have even made it that far.

The game overall was quite a disappointment for me, but that's only because it's in D2's shadow. I still got my time's worth out of it and a profit.. the first time that's ever happened to me. I never win prizes or find anything good, not ever since I was a kid... so it was a real boon for me - I used it to pay bills.

9 years?

[Brawlking]

9 years in development by the time it comes out? People will have forgotten about it by then, the next piece of vaporware from Blizzard. With WoW going very stale, it's time for them to do something, something before 3 years from now.

Re:9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly was their last piece of vaporware?

Re:9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Diablo 3.

Re:9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://diablo.incgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/I92NZOGURTC913690923826751.png

2.1 million players per day does not a vaporware make.

Re:9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghost

Re:9 years?

[Brawlking]

They talked and talked about StarCraft: Ghost, never happened. I guess it's technically not vaporware.

Re:9 years?

[chromas]

Nope; much like Gnome 3, the Star Wars prequels, the Matrix sequels, d3 never happened.

Re:9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were sneak-peak previews and gameplay videos released back in 2002/2003 and was expected to be a Gamecube release but it soon was forgotten and abandoned shortly after. I was spewing too, looked good to me.

Re:9 years?

[CronoCloud]

They've been talking for 5 years about how "Diablo gameplay" might work on consoles...and h inting about a console Diablo game. Ha, "might work" didn't they play the PSone port of Diablo? Darkstone? BGDA 1 and 2? Champions of Norrath and it's sequel? X-Men Legends 1 & 2, Justice League Heroes? Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 & 2. The 3 Untold Legends games? Hunter the Reckoning? Sacred 2? There's probably more I don't know about.. not counting the ports from phones/tablets on PSN

Good!

[smash]

A "dream team" of 100 for a game is only going to mean design by committee, and you'll end up with something like the software equivalent of the MS Surface Pro. Something that tries to be too many things and is "meh" at all of them. And thus, crap.

Re:Good!

[flayzernax]

Yeah that is a bad idea.

R.I.P. Blizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

R.I.P. Blizzard - never forget.

Re:R.I.P. Blizzard

[flayzernax]

You mean Vivendi-Activision. Blizzard died a decade ago. It just took awhile to shake loose the last good employees they had.

Re:R.I.P. Blizzard

[seebs]

I would consider the death to be about the time of the Activision merger, so 2009-2010. Not really a decade yet.

Re:R.I.P. Blizzard

[flayzernax]

You are right. I thought it was earlier. I never bothered to look up the dates. And thanks for the correction.

Re:R.I.P. Blizzard

[flayzernax]

In December 2007, Activision announced that the company and its assets would merge with fellow games developer and publisher, Vivendi Games.

Well they were thinking of it as far back as 2007. But that doesn't mean the boat was rocking hard back then either. And that's still not a decade =)

hurray for World Of Starcraft!

[slashmydots]

Well, I can hope at least

Re:hurray for World Of Starcraft!

[flimflammer]

I was really hoping that was what Titan was going to be, before they announced it would be an entirely new bit of IP.

Learning from their own mistakes...

[FlynnMP3]

I hope this is Blizzard learning from their own recent mistakes. The cynic in me thinks that they are cleaning out the old blood, the ones who knew how to design games and what made them re-playable, and replacing them with developers who know and love the McWoW formula.

They've ruined their own market.

[Seumas]

WoW is still the biggest MMO several times over, even a decade later. Because of every game's attempt to mimic WoW in every aspect possible, the genre has made almost no progress in the last decade. They're all just re-skins of WoW and because of that, few are successful. However, because developers feel only a WoW type MMO can be successful, they're not willing to take steps to make bold new MMO games that are not just re-skins of WoW.

So, a decade later, the MMO genre is gasping. Clones of clones of clones. People aren't tired of MMOs as a concept, but are tired of their execution. Unless Blizzard has something amazing up their sleeve, they're just going to wind up releasing yet another WoW (though in space or whatever). They'll just be appealing to the existing WoW addicts they already have who are somehow so brain-numbed that they'll sit and play the same thing for a decade, even after they've gone through all the content a dozen times.

Though perhaps not directly, Blizzard has spoiled the genre and the audience. Their game sucked the air out of the room, making it difficult for others in the business who can only be bothered to poorly mimic them. And now everything is drying up.

I won't be surprised if it is completely canceled. Or, at least, postponed long beyond 2016, ultimately.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[mark_wilkins]

There's always EVE Online, which is about as far from a WoW clone as one can get. It's not an alternative to WoW, but a successful, different MMO model, and I think there's a lot to learn from the differences between the two of them. For the record, I've played both extensively.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always EVE Online, which is about as far from a WoW clone as one can get. It's not an alternative to WoW, but a successful, different MMO model, and I think there's a lot to learn from the differences between the two of them. For the record, I've played both extensively.

Except that the EVE Online player community is not very helpful at all to newcomers and generally push them away. Just as braindead as most of the McWow players but a hell of a lot more meaner and nasty.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am ashamed to admit that I fear Pathfinder Online will be just the same. It wants to be an EVE clone instead of a WoW clone. How embarrassing for Paizo. Oh wait, Paizo is an experienced cloner since Pathfinder itself is a clone of D&D 3.5...

Curse this age of risk-averse corporate-funded game design! Maybe the indies still have some hope of kindling innovation, but MMOs, due to their massive budgets, will never innovate again. At least, not in the foreseeable future.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[flimflammer]

I disagree with this assessment. Yes, there are an uncountable number of WoW clones out there, but there are many games that are trying to break the classic MMO mold that Blizzard essentially set the gold standard to, with varying degrees of success.

Now is an exciting time for MMOs with more and more of them taking on more action oriented combat and stepping outside of what we consider traditional.

I think Blizzard just created a target they are not even sure they can even beat themselves.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people actually like mean and nasty MMOs. To hell with flowers and happy colors. I want a dystopic neuromancer style MMO where people are nasty and dying is permanent, or at least hurts a lot.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Pubstar]

Can't leave out Tera's amazing combat system. That game was amazing. Stopped playing it because it was making me screw up in school.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are an uncountable number of WoW clones out there, but there are many games that are trying to break the classic MMO mold that Blizzard essentially set the gold standard to, with varying degrees of success.

I love how you state that yet fail to name any examples. Or, to put it bluntly: [citation needed]

Now is an exciting time for MMOs with more and more of them taking on more action oriented combat and stepping outside of what we consider traditional.

You mean MMOFPSes, don't you? OK, yes, those count as "not a WoW clone" but that's kind of cheating in that they're also not really in the same genre.

I'm interested in hearing an example of an MMORPG that doesn't try and clone WoW in some way, because that's a much harder - and likely impossible - task. I'm not aware of any current or upcoming MMORPG that can't be described as "like WoW, but..."

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[ravenshrike]

And yet, so much better than 3.5. The world's brighter, the content crunchier, and not nearly as much ability inflation.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to get into EVE Online, but then I realised the whole game is merely about efficiency, combinatorial optimisation.... why am I paying a subscription to essentially do busy work? I can do that in reality now and get paid for it.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Tridus]

There was a big market for continued development on the 3.5 system, and Wizards decided not to provide it in favor of the much reviled 4.0.

Paizo got to walk right into an open market and take it over. Smart business, really.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Tridus]

Sure, some people like that. Most people don't. You're not going to get to 10 million players with a game where the entire playerbase is jackasses that try to chase newbies out of their little private playground.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Nidi62]

Except that the EVE Online player community is not very helpful at all to newcomers and generally push them away. Just as braindead as most of the McWow players but a hell of a lot more meaner and nasty.

There's always EVEUni. They run all kinds of classes for noobs, and I think even Goonswarm is starting to go after new players. The problem isn't that the players aren't new player friendly, the problem is that EVE itself isn't player friendly. As one of my friends(who got me to play EVE and helped me out with it) described it, it's pretty much like "here's a spaceship, fuck you".

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between a game world and mechanics being mean and difficult, and the player base being dicks about things.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Starting? Their MO was always new players, that's why they are the 'goonswarm'. New players can be extremely good and helpful. One of the first real titan kills was because a 2 week old newbie bumped into one that was stealthed.

And lets be fair, the game is "Here's some spreadsheets without row/column headers, fuck you."

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[seanvaandering]

There's always EVE Online, which is about as far from a WoW clone as one can get. It's not an alternative to WoW, but a successful, different MMO model, and I think there's a lot to learn from the differences between the two of them. For the record, I've played both extensively.

Except that the EVE Online player community is not very helpful at all to newcomers and generally push them away. Just as braindead as most of the McWow players but a hell of a lot more meaner and nasty.

Exactly... tried EVE Online as a complete newbie. The learning curve is unbelievable, took me two days to figure out how "quests" work. Warping to another system through jumpgates took another half day to figure out - and don't get me started on how skills work. All of this with NO HELP from anyone in game (Yes - I did sign up to all the "newbie" friendly corporations and none accepted my application - most likely because i'm not a paid player). So I deleted my character and quit - I don't have time to piss around and re-learn a whole new game from scratch, not to mention the free trial only gets you so far then you can't train skills for a better ship which they DO NOT MENTION. That ultimately pissed me off.

EVE is for elitists - that will be it's downfall.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always EVE Online, which is about as far from a WoW clone as one can get. It's not an alternative to WoW, but a successful, different MMO model, and I think there's a lot to learn from the differences between the two of them. For the record, I've played both extensively.

But what if I wanted to play a fun game, not a heartless economic sim whose only outstanding difference from the real world is the exact set of people who happen to be on top (which, not-at-all coincidentally, are the same people who promote and cheer for said economic system the most, much like how the people on top of our real-world economy are the primary people who cheer THAT)?

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Eve because it safely corrals all the antisocial megalomaniacs, petty dictators, and the co-dependent sycophants that feed the egos of the previous two groups.

Eve is a game for people with damaged personalities, and I'm glad they play that game and not the ones I'm involved in.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[sandytaru]

FFXI was an EQ clone, not a WoW clone, and it's still going strong. Not really "current" though. Even XIV:ARR is getting billed by some pessimists as "Final Fantasy of Warcraft" although I think it's closer to XI in spirit than it is WoW.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

You tried to join a corp as a free trial player, and they turned you down. Really.

"Hey homes, I really want to join your gang, I know I'd be a good addition and bring all kinds of value and shit. Only thing, my folks are moving next week, so I won't be around. Hey homes, where you going?"

Are you really that stupid?

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

By "current" I really mean "anything released far enough after WoW to be able to clone it." MMOs predating it clearly wouldn't have cloned it, although they can have been reworked to mirror it. And if you've talked to anyone in the FFXIV:ARR beta - oh yes, it's a WoW clone.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait...so we're blaming Blizzard now for making the most wildly successful mmo of all time (I didn't say the best)? Interesting. So I suppose they should have had a better strategy going into the WoW project...maybe get a couple good years and then kill the cash cow so that other development companies could grab their subs and market share.

Come on. If you want to criticize Blizzard's quality, that's fine. But to criticize them for being highly successful and dominating a highly competitive market by setting the bar high is just irrational and silly.

Blizzard won't cancel Titan, but it will transform indefinitely until they get it right.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[znanue]

They are not reskins of WoW. Nobody has repeated the core end game. Everyone that I know that plays wow does so because of the instancing and the raids, and every MMO I've tried other than WoW has failed to deliver this epic experience. Leveling may be a solo endeavor, but slaying dragons in a team format is why I keep subbing. There is just so much depth to the way you play that end game and they've done a better and better job of making it easier to learn and nearly impossible to master. Many, many, many MMO's have rather faithfully copied the leveling and questing experience, but I think that misses the point entirely. On top of that, WoW is very convincingly its own universe and even LOTR managed to lose that feeling and dive into the most generic fantasy crap. Although, I give props to SWTOR for maintaining its sense of spirit, even if it royally screwed up the end game in the worst way.

To recap, these are the things people have failed to convincingly replicate: highly configurable programmable user interface, highly configurable default interface, fantastic team play at the end game, external services like JSON api, huge motivation to keep a guild together and stringent requirements for success as a team, well balanced need for solo play to support team play in the end game, convincing depth that is easy to learn the basics and nearly impossible to master. Show me an MMO that has copied these things well from wow...

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always EVEUni. They run all kinds of classes for noobs, and I think even Goonswarm is starting to go after new players.

i played eve for a bit, its less effort applying for a RL job than to join most corps, eveuni included. i prefer to spend my time playing a game rather than interview after questionnaire after interview after questionnaire. i love the concept of eve tho. dust was a nice addition to the universe too.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[drsquare]

Have you any evidence that people you know are representative of WoW's general player-base? I think the hardcore vocal minority players who infest internet forums overstate the importance of end-game.

When WoW gained most of its players, in the vanilla era, only 1% of the playerbase even did the original Naxx raid. That suggests that raiding really isn't anything to do with the popularity of WoW.

If anything, the increasing popularity of end-game instanced content, with the dungeon finder and raid finder, has coincided with a collapse in the game's population.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[znanue]

Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I meant the hard core end game. I meant LFR, dungeons, and the normal modes. Although, I admit that I fall under every reasonable definition of hard core raider. As to evidence, there was some graph that showed that less than five percent of active players were below the max level. I would say that pretty conclusively shows that people are playing the end game, where end game means what you do once you've hit the max level, no matter what it is you're doing. From my qualitative perspective, WoW does this so much better than every other MMO and the closest I've experienced was SWTOR which was still miles off of the quality and compelling nature of WoW's end game.

Using a word like infest is such invective and I believe that it weakens your ability to persuade others. So, to deal with your post hoc ergo propter hoc argument about the "collapse", not a word I'd choose for a 25% drop in population, being in line with the introduction of LFR, I will say that by the same line of specious reasoning, the population went up with the introduction of lower difficulty 10 mans in Wrath and the introduction of hard modes vs regular modes thereby creating a terraced difficulty system. Another graph I won't bother to find shows that the size of the population that actively raided went up considerably. As well, the number of people who raided Karazhan when it only required 10 men appeared to me to be quite quite common. There was many a guild that advertised its progression and status as a "Kara guild" in BC in much the same way that guilds would only raid the 20 man raids in vanilla. In other words, I think from very early on WoW was trying to increase the quality of the end game for all skill levels and demographics. It certainly appeared to have a very visible impact in BC, Wrath, Cata, and obviously now in MoP.

Finally, it can be argued that an obsessive minority going for truly hardcore raid status might be a required part of a vibrant community whose existence supplies a reason for more social players to login. I grant that this is mere speculation but it rings with plausibility to me.

Re:They've ruined their own market.

[Anonymous Coward]

> none accepted my application - most likely because i'm not a paid player

> most likely because i'm not a paid player

There's your problem. People use trial account for spies. EVE is hardcore. We're not elitist, we love newbies. A trial account is just fucking suspicious though.

Do 'Dream Teams' guarantee quality new games?

[Camael]

I question the logic. It seems to me that developers who reach that status have tired old ideas and/or have blown their creative wad, so to speak, and tend to coast by on past achievements. Luminaries such as Richard Garriott, Will Wright, Bill Roper, Chris Metzen etc... have they really created anything notable after their breakthrough games?

It might be better to throw the project to a team of fresh developers full of exciting, new ideas and give their vision a chance to live.

Old hands are safe hands, but make for a dull journey.

Re:Do 'Dream Teams' guarantee quality new games?

[Colonel Korn]

I question the logic. It seems to me that developers who reach that status have tired old ideas and/or have blown their creative wad, so to speak, and tend to coast by on past achievements. Luminaries such as Richard Garriott, Will Wright, Bill Roper, Chris Metzen etc... have they really created anything notable after their breakthrough games?

It might be better to throw the project to a team of fresh developers full of exciting, new ideas and give their vision a chance to live.

Old hands are safe hands, but make for a dull journey.

There are some. For instance:

Doug Church: Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld 2, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Portal 2

Ken Levine: Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite

Re:Do 'Dream Teams' guarantee quality new games?

[AuMatar]

The one true video game god, Miyamoto- Donkey Kong, Zelda (all of them), Mario (all of them), and half the rest of the nintendo catalog.

But these are few and far between. Normally when you see a game hyping their lead designer, its a doomed project. It means they don't have enough ideas to hype them instead. And at the same time it raises the expectation levels. Bad combo.

Re:Do 'Dream Teams' guarantee quality new games?

[ildon]

We'll find out when Hearthstone comes out. They basically took all of their top talent and made a tiny supergroup to try and make a small scope, short dev time game.

Re:Do 'Dream Teams' guarantee quality new games?

[CronoCloud]

Miyamoto has his faults, he's not perfect. He doesn't understand discoverabilty, he doesn't understand western tastes (navi, Tingle), and he should NEVER be let anywhere near a controller design team.

FFXIV:ARR is just that good

[Anonymous Coward]

They must have had some devs in the ARR beta to see how good a game SHOULD look with a huge dev team, and in less than a third of the time to boot.

/troll

What the hell?

[gstoddart]

This summary and article read like someone issuing a denial about actually making a video game.

Blizzard would like to announce it is delaying the release of a product it has not yet announced.

We at Blizzard are actively pondering creating the Next Big Thing, but we might cancel it, or we might not, but we're doing it with fewer people, starting from scratch, and won't have anything for several years. But don't panic, we have agile programming.

Applicable Quote

[DonnellCaballero]

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto

Re: Applicable Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

A delayed game isn't always guaranteed to be good. It can also mean incompetence. -anonymous

Re:Applicable Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto

Thus explaining Nintendo's militant and backwards policy against software patches.

What standard of quality ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of Diablo III ?

Genre-Specific Development

[some old guy]

Apart from the premature press release, I'd give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on going slow with their next MMO.

They have proven their prowess at MMO's with WoW, which like EQ and others will eventually stale for players and be rendered technologically obsolete by new engines, platforms, etc. They probably realize that an advanced 100% interactive sandbox world, perhaps like the rumored Everquest Next, will take a ton of time and effort to get right.

MMO players, especially RP types, tend to be very franchise-oriented. It is in Blizzard's best interest to have a next-gen WoW product in the wings while the original is still commercially viable and thus retain their core player base.

For all it's failings, Sony has gotten a lot of mileage out of the EQ franchise. EQ and EQ2 fans, even many who quit from burnout, will flock to EQ Next if it ever launches because of their familiarity and comfort with the lore cache and medieval/hobbit weltanschauung. Continuity has benefited the Final Fantasy franchise as well. Blizzard, I'm sure, has taken note.

Fantasy RP games, especially MMO's, cater to fan bases with certain tastes in game world, be it outer space, sword n' dungeon, infantry combat, what have you. Blizzard had a knockout with WoW. I don't think they want to miss out on a repeat.

Disclaimer: I'm not a WoW player, but I am an MMORPG fan.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[myowntrueself]

The thing is, theres barely any RP element in WoW. Nor any MMO.

Theres a bare handful of players who empathise with their character in any way at all, or have any kind of backstory for their character. Its just not part of the mindset; its more like "pew pew pew I get to blow stuffs up with ma lazors/lightning bolts/2 handed sword of buttkicking". Thats about how shallow it is compared to the RPG genre.

Notice how we refer to them as MMO now, not MMORPG?

But hey if you know an actual MMORPG please tell me about it.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[some old guy]

Sadly, I tend to agree. Hopefully the character-specific interactivity that comes with "sandboxing" will give individual characters an identity, and unique "life story" beyond "Level 99 Troll Ninja Paladin" or whatever. I don't know which publisher will be first-to-market with a sandbox MMO, but it should help make RP a viable experience in MMO's again.

The only real RP I've seen lately is pretty limited. There are still some active RP guilds on the EQ2 primary RP server, Antonia Bayle, but the server as a whole has devolved into casual grind-and-raid play. The only RP personality traits my main chars have is from being reborn after a 9-year original career on the now-defunct EQOA Frontiers.

I have a friend who tries to RP in Eve Online with limited success.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[towermac]

Wow used to be like that. It's still baked in, in little ways. All my characters were different, and they played their roles. From unkillable bears to a gay mage that died when a semi rattled the windows too harshly. I really enjoyed questing, and you are right to point out the importance of the RP element, and how it sucks when it's missing. Once, when trying to help a dead little girl's ghost who didn't know she was dead, to find her family, and they're monsters now .. ; I cried and left that zone and never went back. That's role playing, right?

But WoW has eliminated a lot of the backstory, a lot of the old quests; trimming it down for newbies. And yet the more they trim and streamline, the less people they have..

Note to self: When you have a video game, never throw away the good work of previous developers. Generally, more is better.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[towermac]

I don't think it has to get stale.

Blizz should have realized that they would never top the Wrath Xpac of Wow, and moved it to a buy-the-game-once and subscribe for life model. Continual little updates, new content even (but that doesn't mean level and stat inflation), filling out areas rushed in the past; and maybe most importantly, keeping the game balanced for the best PvP on the internet. They really had it close to the perfect game at some point between BC and Wrath..

I'd still be playing if they had stuck with that. Titan might be finished by now if they had used the resources on it instead of destroying WoW.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[myowntrueself]

I think character levels is one of the worst things to have in an MMO, the way Eve does it is good but the backstabbing psychopathy in Eve really puts me off (its not roleplaying, its people being dicks). What I'd like to see is a game that encourages RP rather than a game that merely pays lip service to the RP in MMORPG.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[RKThoadan]

LOTRO sees a little bit of RP on the servers that encourage it. Much of it tends to revolve around the in-game music system, which is one of it's more unique features.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[IndustrialComplex]

This.

The feeling of the plaguelands and the stories involved, along with the feel that you were actually discovering things (often over a long period of time) really gave life to the zone/story.

It's interesting to note that early in WoW's life, almost everything was there for a reason. Later WoW seemed to forget that content on its own isn't sufficient. See: Checkov's gun

An example of a group that does it VERY right is Disney with respect to their core parks. You could go into one of their parks, look at a bucket in the corner, and later discover that not only was the bucket important, but the placing of the bucket. (ie: one of the characters tripped over the bucket in a scene or something like that).

The care and attention to detail that goes into that is what I got out of the original WoW. If you don't believe that, just look at all the 'conspiracy' theories that sprouted on the forums when someone discovered something in game that seemed out of place or unexplained. Alcaz island is one such example.

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[sandytaru]

I always get creeped out by the true role players in an MMO, especially when they stand around and talk in character. It feels more like actual human beings LARPing than it does people enacting a role. *shudder*

Re:Genre-Specific Development

[sandytaru]

XI actually had a lot of individual character development. Each expansion means you have to save the world from some different calamity. You get a pretty NPC girl as a companion for each story. (Really, the expansions are her story and you're just along for the ride, but she's part party member, part cheerleader, part heroine. So far we've had Lion, Prishe, Aphmau, and Lilsette, plus the new Danerys clone whose name I can't remember.) The Rank leveling quests (basically your military rank) put you in the middle of political battles for each of the three nations, and they are completely separate from your actual level. Same with all the expansion stories and the expansion ranks.

And since you could level all 22 jobs on a single character, you'd only have to do all that crap once.

Smaller team, less bickering

[fufufang]

This might get the job done faster, you never know.

Does not bode well

[wynterwynd]

It's going to be a monumental task for Blizzard to one-up themselves. They came out with the best and biggest game this side of the Call of Duty franchise, with subscribers who buy the game again every 4 months (@14.95/mo), with a bonus 4 months added with every expansion they pump out. They had the perfect formula and it came together beautifully.

And then they got lazy. They decided they were infallible. The very fact that you can claim to have a "dream team" of designers tells me that they weren't even considering failure to be a possibility. They were living a dream alright, and Diablo 3 woke them up.

How could Diablo 3 fail? The last game was a monumental success, it's been years since it came out, the fans are drooling for a sequel - it's a guaranteed winner... until it wasn't. They changed the magic formula. They added a corruptable cash house, they completely changed the art style, they streamlined it and dumbed it down in the name of a broader audience. The game itself predicates its play on you playing through it multiple times, which is harder and harder to get gamers to do with the plethora of options out there.

And dammit, it just didn't feel like Diablo - it wasn't dark, it wasn't gritty, it wasn't EVIL enough - for gods' sake, you had one of the Prime Evils leaving you diary entries. The Diet Coke of Evil - just one calorie, not evil enough. Path of Exile was and will be a success because it made that magical Diablo formula work, and in a F2P model at that.

Blizzard has realized they can't just poop into a mold and call it a birthday cake anymore. They can't just rest on their laurels. The Azerothian Empire will sustain them for now, but their dominion is on the wane and they need creativity and genius again to remain relevant. But they're not agile anymore, now they are 100x larger, with more suits than a Men's Wearhouse sticking their permanent pressed lapels into every aspect of the game design.

So I don't doubt what came out into Alpha from project Titan was a misshapen afterbirth of a marketing-mutated CHUD baby. At least they had the good sense to put a pillow over it and start again, but going back to the drawing board at this stage of the game does not look good. Inventive game design is born with an idea that drives the creative machine, that idea guides the hand of all of the design, mechanics, art, rules, and acts as the very soul of a truly good game. I have a feeling that there is no solid core to this project, and it will end up being a pasted together clone of other people's ideas. AKA, a beautiful, epic, heavily marketed mediocre game.

Re:Does not bode well

[drsquare]

Please tell me how Diablo 3, with sales of twelve million in eight months, was a failure. I'm all ears.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Blizzard keep on going with decade long development cicles, then they are going to delay Titan forever because when its is geting ready its already too old.

-.-'

Nothing is a good replacement for WOW

[Immerial]

The main issue is that everyone is competing against WOW that has had seven years to improve. Everyone's expectations are set to that. You've also got MMO pros (which didn't exist really when WOW launched) who already know how to play games like these. They blow through the content and go "That's it!!? WTF! This game SUX, I'm out of here!" Personally, I'm of the same opinion as Billy. I thought and still think SWTOR is actually pretty decent for a new MMO. They've had a couple years, things are slowly improving and it's starting to stabilize.

Wow...

[WillyWanker]

Virtually no one cares about Titan now, imagine how little we'll care in 2016.

Here's the problem with these stupidly retarded long development cycles; by the time the game actually comes out a majority of the code can be up to a decade old, and it shows, re: Duke Nukem Forever and Tabula Rasa.

But whatever. Blizzard isn't the Blizzard we all once knew and loved anymore, now it's just a corporate nameplate, shill, and underling for Activision. No vision, no breakthroughs, nothing new or exciting. Just stale old concepts with a fresh coat of paint showered with all the trappings of DRM, day one DLC, always-on Internet, and nickel-and-diming microtransactions that every single gamer HATES.

Did we play the same DIII?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's where a bunch of people disagree w/ you on D3. The first 5-6 hours were "fun", and then that all stopped. The AH and DRM are not the only issues - stale environments, stale enemies, bland weapon enchants, no skill perming, lack of customization, lack of quality sets, I could go on and all of these could/were impacted by the extended development cycle. It does not feel "True" to the titles before it. Torchlight II does, but not D3.

D3 is why I'm never pre-ordering a game from Blizzard ever again.

Re:Did we play the same DIII?

[Thruen]

I remember people saying the same thing about Diablo 2, though. Maybe D3 entertained fewer people, I still turn it on here and there but I admit I haven't been a regular in some time. The point is, had they put the game out after two years of development, there's nothing to suggest it wouldn't have had all the same problems along with a heap of new ones. I'll grant you that there's nothing saying it wouldn't have turned out better, but that's because development time doesn't mean anything in regards to the end result.

"Reboots" happen at Blizzard ...

[perpenso]

Where have I heard this before?

"Reboots" happen at Blizzard, that is why some games take so long. The first attempt gets to a certain degree of playability, they think the game is good but not great, so they step back and think about what "went wrong", what is missing. "Good" is not good enough for them. Adding a significant amount of time (varies with size and scope of the game) to the schedule to rework things is not a project killer, its happened more than once. I think this is one of the things that contributes to Blizzard's success.

Blizzard was making a new game?

[Kaldaien]

Just goes to show how irrelevant this company is. They have supposedly been developing this project since 2007, and this is the first I have ever heard of it. Hopefully they restarted the project to increase the difficulty and implement a system to prevent children (mentally) from speaking their racist garbage.

EQ Next has started over 2 or 3 times already, it is refreshing to see that Blizzard is having the same trouble even if their project has flown well under the radar.

Maybe they saw Destiny and realized...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are making nearly the SAME game? lol Ok yes throw some rocks but that is my first initial gut reaction (for fun).

Honestly, when they reduce devs on what should be the build and growth phase, that to me just says that their project just got derailed by other leadership or the design was actually flawed enough that it had to be scrapped.

I am glad they have the opportunity in such lean economic times to be able to hold off and I hope they will release something interesting and fun. We shall see. : )

Here's one right here!

[Zynder]

This AC right here is exactly the type of elitist douche nozzle people are talking about when you try to get any little bit of help. EVE players are total asshats, hands down worse than the most elitist PVPers in WoW.

Quality what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has recently played World of Warcraft already knows Blizzard has no quality standards. Their idea of game balance is to put everyone on a merry-go-round that lets off at the local class-buffer.

If you're into single player

[rsilvergun]

Starcraft 2 isn't very good. Not bad, but you can't approach each level in new and exciting ways. It's more a multiplayer trainer.

Reboot good

[stackOVFL]

Maybe the core team will go kick Ghostcrawler out and fix WoW so it takes more than one hand to play. click.. click.. click.. dead mob

cheap jordan shoes handbag store

[top replica rolex]

YOU MUST NOT MISS IT! The website cheap wholesale and retail for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan, also including the handbags,sunglasses,jeans,shirts,hat,belt and the watch, All the products are free shipping, and the price is competitive, after the payment, can ship within short time. the goods are shipping by air express, such as EMS,DHL,the shipping time is in 5-7 business days! http://www.sport3trade.net/ cheap jordan for $40, Air Max 90 for $41, air shox for $40, best handbags for $39, Sunglasses for $18, wallet for $19, belt for $18, T-shirts for $20, Jeans for $39, NFL/MLB/NBA jersey for $25, Top Rolex watch,jordan for cheap, http://www.sport3trade.net/