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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.
Unlikely it was only $20-40m. They were deeply invested in the game and it was nearly beta when they shitcanned it last year. Star Wars The Old Republic cost over $150m (est.), Warhammer Online was somewhere near $100m in 2008 dollar, etc. CCP reported a loss of $21m in R&D after shutting down the World of Darkness MMO development, and CCP is developing no where near the scope or cost of Blizzard. This is at least a $100m loss, likely closer to $200m-$250m. Bobby Kotick himself said that in order to challenge WoW a developer would need to make a $500m investment(to which John Smedley replied that $500m was too much, but $100m is the minimum).
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
Wrong, Minecraft was based on Infiminer
Pretty much every effect that can happen to a player or NPC in the game is counted as a spell. Things like potions, scrolls, mounts, item effects, boss abilities, all that kind of stuff.