News Project Titan - Cancelled

BloodOmen

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http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/23/6833953/blizzard-cancels-titan-next-gen-mmo-pc

"Blizzard has officially canceled development on its mysterious next-generation massively multiplayer game Titan. The company confirmed the news to Polygon in a recent interview.

This revelation comes after at least seven years in development and word last year that the developer was going back to the drawing board to reevaluate the project.

Speaking to Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime reiterated that the company has technically never officially announced Titan, though it hasn't been shy to talk about the game over the past seven years. "We had created World of Warcraft, and we felt really confident that we knew how to make MMOs," Morhaime said. "So we 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," Morhaime continued. "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."

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Chris Metzen, Blizzard's senior vice president of story and franchise development, called the decision to cancel Titan "excruciating." Morhaime agreed: "It's always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work."

"The discipline of knowing when to quit is important," Metzen said. "We were losing perspective and getting lost in the weeds a little. We had to allow ourselves to take that step back and reassess why the hell we were doing that thing in the first place."

As Metzen and Morhaime have looked back on the past decade at Blizzard, a major factor in their decision to pursue Titan was the immense success of World of Warcraft, the company's first MMO and still the most financially successful game ever released in the genre.

"IS THIS REALLY WHO WE ARE? IS THIS REALLY WHAT WE WANT?"

"We were trying to do the right thing and build the right, smart product, and keep it all moving," Metzen said. "The opportunity to get that perspective and dust off a little bit, scraped knees and all, stand back up and reevaluate as a team, as leaders, as a culture — it was a big blessing."

Metzen spoke of a "sense of inertia and obligation and identity that we hold in ourselves and the community may also hold toward us" that pushed Blizzard to focus development resources on a second MMO. "Is this really who we are?" he asked. "Is this really what we want? Is this really what we want to burn our passion and our work lives, our careers on, for years on end?"

"Are we the MMORPG company?" he added later, in conclusion to that line of questioning.

Morhaime answered that last rhetorical question quite simply: "We don't want to identify ourselves with a particular genre. We just want to make great games every time."

Metzen compared Blizzard's creative struggles with Titan to that of a band: "I'm not saying we're an old rock band. But you watch documentaries about The Rolling Stones or U2 or these bands that have lasted for a while. And there's times where they just drive each other batshit crazy. For as good as they are and the experience they have, sometimes you just don't find it, and you've got to get out of the damn studio and go have a beer and regroup."

"In many ways, Titan was that for us," Metzen said. "We took a step back and realized that it had some cool hooks. It definitely had some merit as a big, broad idea, but it didn't come together. It did not distill. The music did not flow. For all our good intentions and our experience and the pure craftsmanship that we brought together, we had to make that call."

The approach seems obvious if you look at Blizzard's history of canceling projects it doesn't have complete confidence in, but Morhaime made the company's philosophy clear: "That's for sure, that we'd rather cut out a game we put a lot of time and resources into than put out something that might..."

Metzen finished Morhaime's sentence: "Damage the relationship. Smash the trust."

"I wouldn't say no to ever doing an MMO again," Morhaime said. "But I can say that right now, that's not where we want to be spending our time."

Metzen clarified that Blizzard will continue supporting World of Warcraft. "My hope personally is that we'll support it forever," he said."
 

Ctuchik

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I know what they can do with all that money they will be saving. They can buy Games Workshop, sack every single one working there and then make a good 40k RTS game.
 

BloodOmen

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Calling it right now, they're going to announce WoW for PS4 and Xbox One at BlizzCon this year.
 

Cirventhor

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Probably for the best, considering the history of Titan.

Mighty curious what they'll use all those people for now though...
 

BloodOmen

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They said a few months back they want a bigger staff for WoW so they can release expansions a lot quicker rather than every 2 years, I suspect that's where the staff will be going, either that or let go. They probably want to aim to release expansions as quick as Everquest 2 has been, which is every 6-8 months or so.

The way I think they've looked at it is basically gone

Titan might flop, we can never recreate the success we had with WoW so why take people away from WoW with a possible failure, let's just can the project and put the staff to work on WoW content or other none MMO projects.
 
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Gwadien

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Meh, I reckoned they looked at some graphs and stuff and thought right, how many customers are we going to get -extra- from all the effort and money we're eventually going to put into Titan? Not a lot, I think if anyone would be long term players of a new Blizzard MMO would be those that already play WoW.
 

ECA

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Plus they can put wow on XB1/PS4, claim its groundbreaking and cash in da monie$$$.
 

old.Tohtori

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Fair dos though, rather then releasing some grud MMO on the market, they just throw 7 years worth of money down the drain to keep relations with their customers and the name of Blizzard.
 

Ctuchik

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Meh, I reckoned they looked at some graphs and stuff and thought right, how many customers are we going to get -extra- from all the effort and money we're eventually going to put into Titan?

They might have, but it doesn't really sound like something Blizzard would do. They can be quite anal about little things yes (such as taking fucking forever to realize that the AH in D3 were a shitty idea), but a whole game?

I mean they worked on it for 7 years and must have poured a shit load of money into it already.
 

Raven

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Many of the idea will end up in other games though, probably bits of any story too.

I doubt its been a complete waste of 7 years.

Out of interest it would be nice to know what they were working on though.
 

Ctuchik

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No it won't have been a complete waste. I'm sure some of the ideas from Titan will (or have already) ended up in WoW for example.

But there's still gonna be a lot of stuff they can't salvage.
 

Gwadien

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How many of those 7 years were they actually working on it, and how many were just discussions to hype it up, I don't know, I reckon it was an elaborate marketing move, realised it was not profitable, but I bet Wow customers have increased slightly
 

Raven

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Nah, WoW subscribers have been on a steady decline for years. It will jump up a bit when the expansion hits but slowly ebb away again afterwards.
 

AngelHeal

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If i remember correctly, Blizzard were hiring alloooottt of 3d artists a couple of years ago when 3D suddenly became very trending again. Now 3d in its current form apparantly isnt interesting at all.. they just hit the bo0m button.
My guess is they just wanne keep earning money till gaming evolves for those helmet thingys and just build World Of Warcraft 2.
 

SilverHood

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Nah, WoW subscribers have been on a steady decline for years. It will jump up a bit when the expansion hits but slowly ebb away again afterwards.

But the majority of the WoW work is already done. Servers, core game code, lore, etc. So in terms of return on monies invested, a WoW expansion is probably a lot better than a new MMO, where they'd need to buy hardware, train support staff, etc etc. As Gwadien said, if all they're going to achieve by releasing a new MMO is get the first 2 month surge all MMO's get, and then end up with just their old WoW customers, then it makes no sense to do Titan at the current time.
 

Ctuchik

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Oh you think the lore is done? It's not by a long shot because Blizzard keeps second guessing themselves. :)

They have rewritten such massive amounts of pretty important lore ever since BC that anyone who actually plays through WC1 - 3 won't have a shadow of a clue what's really going on when/if they start playing WoW because nothing lines up anymore.. :(.

And this fucking expansion takes the cake. :)
 

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