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Blizzard Has Canceled Titan, Its Next-gen MMO
Ptolemarch writes: Blizzard never officially announced it, but now it's gone: Titan, the next-generation MMO that had been in development for seven years, has been canceled. Mike Morhaime said, "[W]e set out to make the most ambitious thing that you could possibly imagine. And it didn't come together. We didn't find the fun. We didn't find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that's the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no." Polygon adds an article detailing everything publicly known about Titan (which wasn't much). MMO-Champion's report mentions rumors of a new project at Blizzard called Prometheus.
Activision-Blizzard recently bought itself independent. Can they really afford to write off the couple-million-and-change Titan undoubtedly cost to make?
"We're not trying to replace World of Warcraft with this new MMO," Morhaime told Wired at the time. "We're trying to create a different massively multiplayer experience, and hopefully World of Warcraft will still be going strong when that one is released."
So the execs didn't let the new thing cannibalize the old, but still profitable thing?
I'm sure that'll work well for them.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Zeus is the one who killed the Titans. Including his own father, who to be fair, tried to eat him.
Everything blizzard has done that's been online only has just completely disinterested me. I miss their games that were designed to be games, rather than continuous profit centers.
Starcraft 2, was probably okay, but online only DRM, changed out for online only multiplayer was still enough to sour me on the idea.
Maybe this is what you should have done instead of the steaming steamer that is Destiny.
It's nice to see people that care about doing it right.
There are so many awful MMOs out lately that are little more than designers frankensteining bits from MMO A , B, C together, then tossing bits of warcraft and calling it something new.
World of Starcraft?
So Blizzard sunk it like the Titanic when it hit frozen water...
Just make Galaxy of Starcraft and call it a day.
Blizzard is perfectly aware WoW has a limited shelf-life, and I don't see any indication from the announcement that they canned this product because of a fear it would take resources or marketshare from WoW.
Seems to me that it just wasn't that good...
I admire Blizzard for insisting on maintaining its unique run of fine games. However, it ain't all a customer love-fest. If Blizzard is going to put years into a project, it's going to have to pay out for years, too (exactly to support costly experiments such as this).
How many games have we seen splash for a single weekend or two, then disappear in a puff of disinterest as soon as players tuned into "the grind," douchebags map-hacked and trolled without apparent restraint, bugs prevented easy interface and play, and on and on? It seems as if most new releases have to survive a weeks-long "broken" period in which savvy gamers wait to see whether a support staff exists for the game, or just a marketing department. A weekend splash pays for itself, maybe, but it doesn't solidify the foundation, as most Blizzard releases eventually do.
It seems to me that the still intractable problems of MMOs are 1) It's difficult to evoke decent behavior from anonymous players--most of us have an a-hole in our souls; 2) It's difficult to make progression over long periods of time "fun;" 3) Nobody has figured out how to generate infinite, unique, and yet meaningful content for years at a time. Thus you have to rely on the players to create the re-playable game-scape, some proportion of the players are incurable buttholes who will degrade gameplay; and thus grinding up to an elite level is no fun and sometimes futile.
Blizzard does great games.
But every new game they put out has been an iteratively improved copy of a lower-tech game with great gameplay put out by someone else.
Dialbo is Nethack (and variants). Warcraft was Dune 2 (and arguably goes back to Empire). World of Warcraft was EQ (which came from DikuMUD).
Now, they made significant improvements to them. All 3 of them have lineages that go back to pure text games, and they where addictive as hell even as text games.
Blizzard has the ability to take such a game, and amp it up hugely -- well polished, with lots of iterative design evidence. I haven't seen reason to believe that they are great at creating new types of games, however.
Forget MMOs for a while and work on some good single-player games.
MMOs are played-out. The biggest problem with them is you have to engage with other gamers and that's never a good thing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I feel like the appeal of the MMORPG genre has been going steadily downhill for a while now. It's been done so many times in so many different ways, and none have found a way to make it work like WoW did. The audience just isn't as large as it used to be. Blizzard has some really talented employees and I have no doubt that this influenced their decision to scrap Titan. There's just not a profitable market for these kind of games anymore.
Let's face it - things have changed a lot since 2004. The MMORPG was a unique and exciting experience back then, but it's long since lost its novelty. People are no longer interested in shelling out $15/month when they can jump into a game like League of Legends or DOTA 2 for free. The accessibility of these games has given rise to huge competitive scenes and communities that are growing larger by the day. Blizzard has experienced the same kind of success with Hearthstone, and I would guess that they realized this model is much more profitable than another MMORPG would be.
What I miss are the casual games that I could just enjoy a) by myself b) with friends c) occasionally online.
What happened to these games? I tried playing SC2 online, and it was impossible to have fun because the level of competitiveness was so high online that it stressed me out. Casual WoW? No chance in hell. Same with D3, none of them feel like the just "pick up and play whenever and enjoy" games.
And not one single fuck was given - ignoring the billion of dollars we gave them to fund development of that game via WoW subs before most of us realized we're idiots.
This isn't the first time Blizzard has scrapped a project. They did it with StarCraft Ghost as well. They even officially announced and released videos for that game.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
...when's Diablo 4 meant to arrive?!
The bulk of the cost is still the assets (terrain/npcs/scripted behaviors/testing - all the specific data needed for the game) - bug staff needed for that and farming it out/managing it.
Working on the engine and server/client to be able demonstrate/prove the advanced features (whatever they were) could be likely (and for a median hardware target) would be only a fraction of the complete development cost (and of the subsequent marketing/royalties/operational costs which can be as much as the development costs).
So 20-40 million over a bunch of years could still be likeley (2 million - doesnt go that far - barely starting actual design )
They probably found that whatever it was they had planned just wouldnt work (even with all the internet/hardware improvements over the intervening years) and it would have to be dumbed down and still be too close to what all the other MMORPGs are. (thus nothing radcal to attract the 'big score' the company would want.)
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When a project like that gets cancelled, where does all the material go? Does someone just do a rm -rf ./project, or does it just get rebranded into something else?
Yea, the FPS Ghost. It looked amazing, and they scrapped it for no reason.
It was scrapped for the very same reason as Titan and other game scrapped by Blizzard. It was not shaping up to be a #1 best seller. Shaping up to be a good or a successful game is not enough, it has to absolutely be on track to be a massive success or it will get canceled. This has happened again and again and again over the last two decades.
I was really interested in reading about this blizzard that cancelled an entire planet...
You don't understand. It would have been a #1 bestseller because it would have extended starcraft, the best game of all time.
Sadly, with SC2 they destroyed starcraft
This reminds me of talking to a Blizzard recruiter. She was telling me about the grueling interview process and how Blizzard wants "passionate" developers who have personal game projects to show them.
I was thinking, "Are you nuts? Blizzard hasn't made a notable game since WarCraft I. If I were willing to go through your rigmarole, I'd just start my own gaming studio. I'm just looking for a job."
Now, I'm reading that they can't even complete some of their shitty games after seven years. What dipshits.
You don't understand. It would have been a #1 bestseller because it would have extended starcraft, the best game of all time.
Sadly, with SC2 they destroyed starcraft
Actually as a 10+ year Blizzard veteran I understand very well. By #1 bestseller we mean on its own merits, a game that will have its own sales inertia and actively player community for years.
And people just looking for a job create crap games.
And people with only passion get emotionally attached with ideas and games and stick to them even when they are wrong, and create crap games.
What is different about Blizzard is that it has passion and brains, brains enough to step back, make an honest appraisal, and say this isn't going to turn out to be as much fun as we wanted. We have to rework this to a large degree, or maybe admit our initial plan was flawed and we need a new one, and that new plan may be a different game.
That's not being a prima dona. A prima dona would not admit to having made a mistake, a prima dona would have arrogantly doubled down on the original idea.
Blizzard's routine major reworking of a game under development, or canceling it, proves the opposite of your claim -- not a prima donna.
So tell me, gaming mastermind. How often does a new genre of gaming get created? How many gaming companies are regularly creating NEW types of games? Really? Seriously, I often hear Blizzard criticized for not being original enough, but how many others games companies are creating TRULY new genres or types of game. It happens VERY rarely, as in every other art-form. A huge part of art is building on what came before, do you think any musician creates new music without basing it on something else they heard. How often does a new style of music come into existence? It's not quite as simple as you make out, all art is about standing on the shoulders of the people who came before. WoW may have "copied" bits of Everquest, but Everquest also build on previous games like Ultima Online and D&D and various MUDs.
Actually this kind of 'disaster' cancelling occurs quite often in other companies as well. Typically it goes something like:
The company reaches a point like: "We made a few games, we know our trade, we have the cash, now let's do something interesting." Then they throw all their best ideas onto a huge pile, and the game-design sanctioned people try to make sense out of it. At this point, a lot of creativity is already out of the door, since of course, the huge undertaking has to play safe ball to ensure success, and who knows better than anyone else how huge games work except game designers, right? In parallel, work starts on pre-production, concept art, prototyping, level design, game play mechanics, effects, you name it. After a while, it turn out that the really fun bits are not fun at all, no matter how much you tweak them, and everything starts to look like a tech-demo, because everyone is focusing on just a small fraction, and there's no coherence whatsoever. How could there be. Of course by then we're 2 year after the project starts, and canning it is starting to sound expensive. In the end, it comes down to a financial gamble: releasing crap can mean the end of the company (ahum: Destiny). You can sell crap once with success and maybe break even or profit, but you shit most of your loyal fans in the face, and usually they tend to not take that lightly. Or you can cancel, and swallow the loss and work on something that holds the promise to bring more grit (of which, of course, there is no proof yet).
If there's one team that has the money and the minds to work on very ambitious projects, it's Blizzard. And apparently the teams values their future productions and fan-base as more important than selling Titan. That said, Titan did look impressive from the setup, so I hope the tech and team survives.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Translation: Holy crap! EverQuest Landmark has fully destructable landscapes, digging and tunneling, and construction that makes Minecraft look like, well, Minecraft.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Good we don't need more MMO's we want a quality game like Warcraft IV, etc...
Masters of OrionCraft? :)
A simple reporting of stats for MMO like asset backed security prospectus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset-backed_security) would un-distort the MMO financials reported by Blizzard.
Helpful stats like: ...) broken down by job category
- Median account age (today - account creation date)
- New accounts created in last 3 months
- Trial/Free accounts
- Trial/Free accounts converted into a paying account in the last 90 days
- Accounts paying dues = 2 years and revenue generated by month and % active within the last 30 days
- Accounts closed per month
- Accounts closed per month which were paying dues = 2 years
- Support fixed costs per month (servers, electricity, rent)
- Support variable costs per month (person costs including shared portion of back-office/HR functions)
- Number of support personnel
- New development fixed costs per month (servers, electricity, rent)
- New development costs per month (person costs including shared portion of back-office/HR functions)
- Number of new development persons (developers, artists, managers,
Showing a growing number of users or a slowly declining base of long term users would throw MMO financials on its head.
A similar tact of showing console game title units sold per month per title would let EA securitize Madden 2015 for example upfront the day it is shipped....
Lifetime game title units sold per title too...
This would make it much harder to report 'we signed up over 250,000 new users in the last quarter' without disclosing 'we lost 249,500 paying users in the last quarter' ....App stores too....since they like to report we have 5,000,000 apps but not 'of the 5,000,000 apps, 2,500 apps made over $250 dollars last quarter'...
The tech/game media fails to ask these questions
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