Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."
So Blizzard sunk it like the Titanic when it hit frozen water...
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...
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.
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.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
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.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
suffered eternally
today's eternities aren't what they used to be, built to last forever ...