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

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

[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

[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

[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, ...).

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!

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: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.

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: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.