Technically, Blizzard never announced its long-in-development MMORPG Titan. It was always one of those big open secrets. And now, seven years later, the game is cancelled, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime tells Polygon.
“I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again,” Morhaime said to Polygon. “But I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time.”
This comes in the wake of last year’s news that the project code-named Titan went back to the drawing board after close to a decade of development. Rumours once suggested that the project was to be a sci-fi multiplayer game not unlike Destiny, which Blizzard’s parent company Activision released earlier this month. But the company behind World of Warcraft never even gave so much of a hint as to what its next big MMO would actually have been.
And now it’s gone. Polygon’s got some more quotes and explanations from Morhaime, so head on over there for some more specifics on just why they cancelled Titan. (“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.”)
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23 responses to “Blizzard Cancels Titan”
I was looking forward to the Duke Nukem MMO! :p
They didn’t find it fun, they couldn’t find the passion…i.e. After a decade WoW, they’ve grown afraid to fail and played it safe instead. So they released another WoW expansion.
Until someone can release an MMO that is truly different to what’s out there at the moment, there’s no point. There’s been so much iteration, and not enough of anything truly ground breaking in the MMO space for a loooong time. With constant content patches etc, there’s no reason for a sequel to an MMO. This is probably why WOW is still so sucessful, because there’s more charm and content in a game that’s 10 years old then newer games that just offer one or two small features and prettier graphics – but lack the overall scope of the game.
AS they’ve demonstrated before, they’re perfectly willing to cancel a game at any stage of the production if they feel it doesn’t meet their standards. See Starcraft: Ghost and Warcraft Adventures, which were both before WoW and both nearly finished when they got ditched.
The Art of Blizzard Entertainment books shows even more scrapped projects.
Man, Starcraft: Ghost. I really wish that got completed simply for the multiplayer. Infiltrate a Command Centre, order it to pack up and start flying to your base while fending off the enemy team trying to also infiltrate it and fly it back to theirs. it’s a unique mix of capture the flag/king of the hill that I haven’t seen anywhere else. 🙁
“They didn’t find it fun” – Kind of like 75% of the playerbase of Destiny. It’s understandable why they pulled out seeing how bad Destiny flopped.
“Can we release it without upsetting our core WoW subscriber base?”
“No.”
“Can that shit!”
Oh well, they can get to work on Warcraft IV now, right?
… right?
I wish…
I remember reading last year that they are at least working on a remaster of Warcraft 3, so I guess that’s something.
What I heard was that War 4 will begin production once Legacy of the Void is wrapped.
I hadn’t heard about either of those two rumours, but both excite me!
Give me more RTS warcraft! Nom nom nom.. hmmm delicious RTS….
I can respect that they didn’t want to release a sub-par unfun product. But… Diablo 3 was exactly that at launch.
Exactly, but that would give them more reason to make sure they get it right. I love D3 since they made all the changes, but it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth after launch.
well we can rest assured they will keep pumping effort into wow with Titan out of the way 🙂 (I love my wow haha) but i always hate to see a Blizzard project get cancelled. i love the worlds they create. I still wanna see Starcraft ghost.
Great now they can finally concentrate on Warcraft 4 right guys? right?
*crosses everything* We can only hope!
As long as they return to the gameplay from Warcraft II and not the turd that was Warcraft III. But that’s not gonna happen as it’ll probably overlap with Starcraft too much.
wc3 was the pinnacle of RTS, To this day many people still play the custom maps, which is what I’m really interested in.
What’s so bad about wc3?
I wouldn’t call WC3 the pinnacle of RTS. I’d call Starcraft: Brood War the pinnacle of RTS. Possibly Total Annihilation too. The original Dawn of War would be right up there as well.
When you introduce hero levelling and creeps, you start blurring what the definition of an RTS is.
You answered your own question really. You said people mostly still play the custom maps. It’s not actually real Warcraft 3. It’s custom maps people have made that modifies the core game experience. That’s what was bad about WC3. When players are more interested in playing mods than the core game, you know something’s a bit iffy with the core game (counter strike not withstanding).
World of Warcraft worked because it already had a well followed lore and the art style worked well with the technology. Even if they make another MMO it will probably fall down for the same reason most other MMOs fail, not having a solid lore. If they played to Starcraft, it might work.. But they need to either grow a pair and make somthing new and hope it works or give in to what the fans want the most (probably warcraft 4 or something)
WoW was a perfect storm of novelty, polish, and brand recognition that exploded the MMO market and once it had, it stayed ahead of the curve and built on that with a solid foundation of player loyalty, providing a virtual ‘home’ over a decade.
It’s one of those things you cannot repeat. It’s like Facebook vs Google+. It didn’t really matter how good Google’s entry was, because everyone was on Facebook. And anyone trying to compete with WoW doesn’t have to angle for what WoW did ten years ago, or even doing better than what it does today, it has to be better than what WoW is doing tomorrow, because believe they’re adding, refining, reiterating, and stealing other peoples’ ideas. (Compare most custom UI packages to the default UI today. Almost anything incredibly popular has been absorbed.)
When they set aside time and money to make Titan, I have no doubt that they wanted to recapture that once-in-a-lifetime magic. And they couldn’t. I don’t think they got anywhere even near programming or modelling or any other implementation…. I strongly doubt they even got off a whiteboard for design. They would have been workshopping with psychologists and statisticians and designers and trying to figure out what way they could possibly progress, what way could possibly revolutionize the industry such that it didn’t release as a weak clone cannibalizing their existing subscription base or ignoring the recent trends in payment models and player numbers.
And they realized they couldn’t.
(And possibly… that they shouldn’t? Tinfoil hat time: MMOs are skinner boxes, everyone knows it and it’s not really in dispute. The reward-per-action is carefully manipulated to keep you attached and playing in pursuit of that dopamine hit. But some folks are starting to ask… what happens when this artificially-induced high becomes too regular? What long-term effects does this have on the normal production of these brain chemicals and our tolerance to them? And, as a consequence, our ability to enjoy ANYTHING.)
My feeling is that even though it was “in development” for seven years, Blizzard have had quite a number of other projects they would have been concentrating on in that time: Starcraft 2 + expansions, Diablo 3 + expansions, WoW expansions, Hearthstone and of course Heroes of the Storm. I’m willing to bet that, given the amount of other projects they had going on, they would not have had much resources dedicated to Titan. Seven years might sound like a long time, but if you only had a few guys on it sporadically, then there wouldn’t have been much progress made.
There’s also no reason for them to release another MMO and basically be competing with themselves when WoW still has life left in it. Yeah, it’s slowly losing players, but not at a rate that’s alarming for them.