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.

Comments

What where they copying?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What where they copying?

[torkus]

I used to be a WoW fanatic even back before the first expansion. It was grueling in some ways until you discovered some of the shortcuts, easier ways, and ultimately found a good guild. You had to actually pay attention to learn...and typically were rewarded with a good experience if you have a group reasonably adept at the same.

Then all the easy-way-out things came along. Forget tricky shortcuts or easier ways to level or learning the pattern of mining nodes to run...now you could just throw gold at most of the problems and grind the others. I stuck around for 2 expansions if memory serves, left, came back a while, left again, came back to play a few hours killing time and realized it just wasn't fun anymore. Everything had to be equal like between squabbling children. Seemed like they painted an I-WIN button over the grind button.

Buy hey...keep paying! Buy this, buy that...etc. No thanks. Somewhere along the way I shrugged off the MMO world and found better games to play in RL (and no, not sports). I'll stick to hard but short-lived games games like the old 8-bit days (or kill some time with candy crush) and call it a day if I get bored.

Re:The luxury of money

[gnupun]

This is at least a $100m loss, likely closer to $200m-$250m

I was so wrong thinking a game like this requires only 50 developers. Here's what they spent/used for WoW:

Austin GDC 2009: Frank Pearce explains what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running.

http://www.gamespot.com/articl...

Re:The luxury of money

[crioca]

If I was going to worship any god, it would have to be Prometheus.

Dude decided to defy the gods and give humans the gift of friggin' technology just because he felt it was the right the thing to do. For his kindness he was chained to a rock and is disemboweled every day for eternity.

And what does he ask in return? Nothing. He's just like "Nah dudes, I ask something in return for it's not a gift. And this whole "eternal torment" thing? Don't worry about it, I'm not going to hold y'all responsible for my decisions." Total bro.

Re:Where does it go?

[Dutch Gun]

I can tell you from my own experience, having had a nearly-complete game cancelled on me once during my career.

Game source material tends to be highly game-specific, and even more so for MMOs. It's saved forever in archives, of course, in case someone wants to pilfer something, but as technology marches on and tools are updated, it becomes harder to keep the game in a working state - especially for MMOs, who have extremely complex building and deployment requirements.

In terms of game code (not engine code, which is designed to be reusable, of course), there are two basic approaches to starting a new game. If you're working on a sequel or have a similar game in the company library, you can branch an existing game and start stripping it down - this let's you start with a working game, and then you can swap out systems on the fly with whatever needs to change. If the game is distinct enough and wouldn't benefit from this techinque, you can start clean, working on top of whatever shared engine and libraries you have, but still may copy over specific subsystems, or use them as a starting point for new systems. This obviously occurs if it's your first game, but also if it's the first game within a new genre that wouldn't benefit from the copy-and-modify approach. For instance, when I worked on a turn-based strategy game and most of the company's previous games were 3rd person adventure games, it would have been pointless to start from one of those games' source code.

For artwork, it really depends. Sounds, textures, and music are easily reused in many cases. Models and animations are a bit more of a question mark. Animations typically are matched to a specific rig and a specific set of game code that utilizes them. More often than not, all the game art tends to be too game-specific to be re-used for anything but a direct sequel, and often by then the assets aren't appropriate for the current state-of-the-art technology.

So, in short, it's archived away somewhere and most likely, only parts of the source code will be reused as a launching point for a new product. Most of the art assets will probably never be reused, unless they're fairly generic environmental textures, sound effects, or music that happen to match a new product's genre and style.