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Blizzard Has Canceled Titan, Its Next-gen MMO

Posted by Soulskill on from the summer-2016-now-free-on-your-calendar dept.

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.

6 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. I'm happy about it by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:The luxury of money by halivar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."

  3. What where they copying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What where they copying? by torkus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
  4. Re:The luxury of money by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:The luxury of money by crioca · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.