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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.
"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.
Prometheus was a Titan (gave fire to humans, suffered eternally for the slight to the gods)
So, I am willing to bet that some of that investment will live on
Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."
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.
So Blizzard sunk it like the Titanic when it hit frozen water...
Not until after the WoW audience shrinks significantly. They've lost a few million players in the last couple of years, but still have more active players than any other MMO by a good margin.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's probably near the $20-40 million range for seven years rather than $2 million. But that's okay since they make well over $100 million per year just from world of warcraft.
You forgot "and have another studio finish the rest of the planned features for release as DLC."
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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...
That might be hard to balance out different characters. Blizzard has enough issues with PvP and PvE balance for humanoid characters in WoW. For example, if you are an Ultralisk you can pretty much stomp on any other ground based character but completely helpless against some aircraft.
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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.
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).
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.
Activision-Blizzard recently bought itself independent. Can they really afford to write off the couple-million-and-change Titan undoubtedly cost to make?
That's the "Loss aversion" or "sunk cost" fallacy.
In any financial transaction your only questions should be:
How much will this cost me to do/complete?
How much will it make me when I'm done?
The entire act of "gambling" is based on people thinking about what they've lost rather than what they could gain. The fact of the matter is, what they have lost is irrelevant. Their future actions are what count and if they continue they'll just lose even more money.
I was so wrong thinking a game like this requires only 50 developers. Here's what they spent/used for WoW:
http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
Only 7650 quests in all of WoW, but 70K spells? These numbers seem wrong to me.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well rumor has it that Bungie bought what was complete of Titan, did some work, and released it as Destiny.
And how many people will want to play a game called "A day"?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."
Starting out, it sounded like Blizzard really had something with Titan. Or at least they made it sound that way. I wouldn't mind seeing a half finished product, just to see what they had.
This is what MOBAs are.
And MOBAs are making money without the necessity of monthly subscriptions(World of Tanks does have a subscription model for premium accounts, but it's not required to play). People are still playing the same thing over and over, but it's competitive and it's against other humans, just like playing Counterstrike or Starcraft or something.
They probably counted each spell multiple times, one time for each upgrade ... Fireball 1, Fireball 2, Fireball 3, etc.
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.
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...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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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.
Star Trek Online isn't bad for a free casual game.
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?
How about this, for an interesting concept... players could control multiple characters to balance it out. Not full sized armies or anything, but small swarms/squads
... just an off-the-cuff example, you could play as: 1 Ultralisk or 3 hydralisks, 4 terrans (Marine/Firebat), 2 Zealots, 1 Siege Tank, 3 Dragoons, or 8 zerglings, etc etc. (tweak as necessary)
The bigger units would play like a traditional MMO character, and the groups would play like a pet-class, with one of the pack designated as the lead (or some newly invented mechanic specifically for them).
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I was really interested in reading about this blizzard that cancelled an entire planet...
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.
Dude decided to defy the gods and give humans the gift of friggin' technology
It is actually even better than that, he defied the OTHER titans (titans being the level above even the gods).
For me, games are fun until they reach a level where I just feel like I'm repeating myself.
LoL died for me when the positions got locked so that you ALWAYS had the same teamups (not specific characters, but roles), for instance.
That, incidently, is why I prefer SP games since less repetition is needed.
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.
suffered eternally
today's eternities aren't what they used to be, built to last forever ...
Yeah. Colloquially also known as crying over spilt milk or sending good money after bad.
People who've been closely involved in a previous decision are much more likely to make this kind of error. Which is partly why in business it's good to have input from others - they won't have the same emotional involvement or concerns about being seen to have made a bad choice. Hence they are better able to abandon something when necessary.
Wasn't he saved by Chuck Norris err I mean Hercules eventually?
8mil subs times $15/month is more than $100mil/month. You should have said something more like "they make well over $1bil per year just from World of Warcraft".
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.
It's been a while since I read it, but I think it might have been Perseus.
According to Vivendi, (the original) World of Warcraft took 4.5 years to develop and cost $63,000,000 (63M).
I'm assuming Titan had similar production values.
Other people are estimating the same cost.
We never knew anything about it. What makes you think they "really had something"?
Speculation by websites desperate to publish "news" for ad impressions does not count.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Masters of OrionCraft? :)
That might be hard to balance out different characters. Blizzard has enough issues with PvP and PvE balance for humanoid characters in WoW. For example, if you are an Ultralisk you can pretty much stomp on any other ground based character but completely helpless against some aircraft.
Maybe, but even in WoW it's freely acknowledged by the developers that that 1 vs 1 combat is not balanced, that some classes will just be BETTER than other classes, but that together they achieve some sort of form of balance. Starcraft works along the same lines, though because of Starcraft's resource feature the 1on1 imbalances are more acute. An MMO would have to have a different style of combat system to make up for that, or scrap the whole imbalance entirely.
That sounds a lot like DotA. I haven't played it but that's what it sounds like.
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Maybe, but even in WoW it's freely acknowledged by the developers that that 1 vs 1 combat is not balanced, that some classes will just be BETTER than other classes, but that together they achieve some sort of form of balance.
Personally I found many of the problems that Blizzards runs into when to balance is self-inflicted when they to balance PvE and PvP on the same character. For a PvE raider they don't like it when their damage has been nerfed because of PvP balance that they don't care about. For competitive guilds, they may lose a raid spot through no fault of their own.
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Na. Dota is always just a single character per player.
Did you ever play WarCraft 3? Remember the hero units that would level up and progress with you? DOTA is basically *only* those. You pick one hero (the list has expanded to ridiculous levels) and fight in 5v5 with other people, in a top-down isometric view that can be moved independently of your character (exactly like Starcraft or non-MMO Warcraft) instead of the over-the-shoulder camera that moves with you in MMOs
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