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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."
They tested the hell out of that real money auction house, thank you very much. Then they wrapped a game around it.
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.
God spoke to me
"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!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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.
Good-bye
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
StarCraft 2 took 12 years and was great.
Diablo 3 also took 12 years to release, and it most certainly wasn't great.
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
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.