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Blizzard Cancels Next-Gen MMO Titan

I'm kind of glad they never showed any of it or allowed a playable demo version to exist.

I played some Star Craft Ghost at E3 2005, and it still bugs me to this day I never got to play the finished game.
 
Damn. Really does make you wonder what the future of the MMO landscape looks like now.

And Blizzard probably doesn't care, they've made serious bank with Hearthstone after all and have HotS coming up too.

And there's still the third chapter of the StarCraft II trilogy, Legacy of the Void.
 
You'll be stuck with WoW-level graphics until the end of time.

"Wow-level graphics" aren't even a thing. Compare beta/launch models and environments to more recent stuff. They don't even look like the same game.

hydraskinsilver.jpg


thunderhydra_red.jpg
 
Well, that sucks. I'd love to hear what it was going to be, though.

Smart move, mmos are failing left and right.

I don't know about that. Most of the new ones that pop up are F2P, so I guess it's probably just the "fall" of the traditional MMO? With subs and everything.
 
I'm shocked, and shocked at all the people who aren't shocked.

I was sure that as WoW winds down over the next couple of years (and it surely will, looking at their subscriber bell-curve) that they'd be financially obliged to have an MMO to take its place. That could be WoW 2, could be World of Starcraft, could be a new IP, could be anything. Could be subscription, could be F2P; I just thought that they'd have to have one ready to go.

A Realm Reborn is proof that 'a prettier WoW' backed by strong IP is more than enough to get subs in and make money. Blizzard would have a much stronger pull than Squeenix, too. Remember, the objective isn't to 'beat WoW'. That phenomenon is never happening again. The objective is to create an engine of sustained profit, which with Blizzard's expertise they should be able to do without too much difficulty.

Yeah, I'm just shocked. Happy they cancelled it if it wasn't working, but shocked.
Nah, they don't have any financial obligation at all. Hearthstone proved that smaller budget games are probably the future of Blizzard. Stuff like that and Heroes are the more likely future.

Not to mention what is going to happen when they eventually make WoW F2P. That's gonna inject plenty more cash into Blizz.
 
I wonder if that means we'll see Jeff Kaplan again soon. He was in charge of Titan I'm pretty sure. Will be good to see him again.
 
Not that I was looking forward to it (not a WoW fan), but I'm REALLY curious what they had planned for this. I find it amazing that Blizzard of all people couldn't bring it together, but maybe it was a fundamentally flawed concept (whatever the concept was). Hopefully some development/concept/info stuff leaks out eventually.
 
My god, I feel gutted. Feels like I've been eagerly anticipating any news of this game for years now, praying for the slightest hint on what it is, what IP, hell anything. Every year at blizzcon thinking maybe this is the year where they tease us and give us something. Bah. Always holding out hope that it would be something incredible. Man, what a disaster. All that time and nothing to show for it.

Also, ugh at their emphasis in the future on being smaller games ala Hearthstone and Hots. I mean, obviously, it appears to be a sound business move as those don't seem to have huge teams or costs, but are racking in the profits. Its just that those are not the games that made me a huge Blizzard fan, as I've always loved their huge, massive games that are big in scope and production. What a shame.
 
WoW2 will likely never happen. What would be the point? They've been upgrading the WoW engine over time, they have a massive amount of content in the game, and people are invested in it. What would WoW2 let them do that WoW can't already do? Better graphics? The game has been getting graphics updates over time and some of it's success is due to how much it can scale. If anything WoW2 would just do damage since it would split the playerbase, and WoW2 wouldn't have the massive backlog of content that WoW has.

It's a shame Titan got canned. The MMO landscape is such a weird place now that i'm not sure they ever know where to go with a new MMO. World of Warcraft took ideas from other games and polished them, but what games do they have to look at now? WoW is THE mmo. They've shaped the MMO landscape. Maybe one Everquest Next comes out they'll get some ideas and consider doing another MMO, but I think they know that, as it stands, lightning won't strike twice.
 
It's also a no brainer that pretty much every big MMO since WoW has flopped or at least been a disappointment.

Plenty of post-WoW MMOs have been met with some level of financial success, but the landscape of online games in general is so different now. It might be that Blizzard couldn't make Titan fit into that new paradigm.
 
Blizzard can afford to waste shitloads of money given all the subscription cash that flowed in over the last 10 years. That being said, I have a sneaky suspicion some games released over the last year or two really stole their lunch in terms of whatever concept game they were going to release with Titan. But in a way this also saved them from releasing a game that may have only been met with lackluster response.

I'm not confident Blizzard will ever release another classic like the original Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo games. But they definitely know how to make sales (HEARTHSTONE) and how to improve a product post launch (see: Diablo 3). I'd expect about that level of quality from them in the near future, whatever product they choose to create.
 
Nah, they don't have any financial obligation at all. Hearthstone proved that smaller budget games are probably the future of Blizzard. Stuff like that and Heroes are the more likely future.

Not to mention what is going to happen when they eventually make WoW F2P. That's gonna inject plenty more cash into Blizz.

I'm not saying they need the cash, I'm saying that with their MMO pedigree and expertise surely they're just leaving money on the table by letting WoW wind down?

WoW won't last forever, it simply won't. ARR and others will continue to take market share from it piece by piece as it ages. No game would be more likely to take the dwindling number of MMO subscribers from WoW than a Blizzard developed WoW sequel. There's still a lot of money there and I don't see how you can turn that down as a publicly traded company.
 
Not that I was looking forward to it (not a WoW fan), but I'm REALLY curious what they had planned for this. I find it amazing that Blizzard of all people couldn't bring it together, but maybe it was a fundamentally flawed concept (whatever the concept was). Hopefully some development/concept/info stuff leaks out eventually.

This game had nothing to do with WoW. It was rumoured years ago to be an MMOFPS and confirmed to be a new-IP.
 
Now please spends all those resources to make the Legacy Of The Void good. Please....

Kind of expected this after last year news. I wonder what's next for them.
 
This game had nothing to do with WoW. It was rumoured years ago to be a new-IP MMOFPS.

I don't even think it got as specific as "MMOFPS," there were just some vague implications that its basic gameplay would be more action-oriented and its setting would be fairly different from the fantasy fare of WoW.
 
I'm not saying they need the cash, I'm saying that with their MMO pedigree and expertise surely they're just leaving money on the table by letting WoW wind down?

WoW won't last forever, it simply won't. ARR and others will continue to take market share from it piece by piece as it ages. No game would be more likely to take the dwindling number of MMO subscribers from WoW than a Blizzard developed WoW sequel. There's still a lot of money there and I don't see how you can turn that down as a publicly traded company.

The cost for developing a WoW sequel would be insane, not to mention the infrastructure cost required for running two MMOs. And what do they get out of it? They already have the most popular MMO out there. If people aren't subscribed to WoW now why would they subscribe to WoW 2? Yeah, you'd get the initial bump of everyone who ever played WoW trying out WoW 2, but why would they stick around?
 
Blizzard can afford to waste shitloads of money given all the subscription cash that flowed in over the last 10 years. That being said, I have a sneaky suspicion some games released over the last year or two really stole their lunch in terms of whatever concept game they were going to release with Titan.

I'm not so sure. Blizzard is less about the competition, and more about putting out a quality game that they find fun to play.
 
Damn...I was hoping Tigole would help develop another god tier game that will suck years of my life again.
 
This was unexpected, I wonder what their life after WoW is going to end up being, and how old am I gonna be when it arrives? Don't get me wrong, I don't consider WoW to exactly be on it's way out, I can easily see another expansion or two after this next one, but at some point they have to move onto to something new right?
 
Wow. I really did not see that happening, but if anyone can afford to pull the plug on something of that scale, it's Blizzard. I really wonder what's next for them.
 
Groundwork on Titan was laid no later than 2006, so for some people, this is 8 years of their life with nothing to show for it.

Fun fact, when the first iteration (if I guess that's what we want to call it) was being worked on, the idea was that MMOs were going to be the hotness for quite a while, so the plan was to offer something similar to the SOE StationPass. For some amount of money per month you got access to WoW, Titan, and certain features in SC2 they were going to hold back from non-subscribers.

The market clearly shifted since then, which would be my assumption why Titan was cancelled. That it couldn't be adequately reworked for a post subscription based world while still being any good.
 
No game would be more likely to take the dwindling number of MMO subscribers from WoW than a Blizzard developed WoW sequel.

He's talking about a non-subscription based WoW.
If WoW went f2p it would see a rapid surge in players again, once again taking people away from other MMOs. In the short-term, Warlords of Draenor is looking promising for bringing new and old players into the game because of the improvements to its presentation as well as bringing things that long-term players will appreciate.
 
Now please spends all those resources to make the Legacy Of The Void good. Please....

Kind of expected this after last year news. I wonder what's next for them.

Again, they freed up those resources last year. We went from a 100+ person team in Fall 2012 to 70% of those people being reassigned to other projects in May 2013. The question changed from "How amazing will Titan be?" to "Will Titan re-materialize," and now we know the answer.
 
I'm not saying they need the cash, I'm saying that with their MMO pedigree and expertise surely they're just leaving money on the table by letting WoW wind down?

WoW won't last forever, it simply won't. ARR and others will continue to take market share from it piece by piece as it ages. No game would be more likely to take the dwindling number of MMO subscribers from WoW than a Blizzard developed WoW sequel. There's still a lot of money there and I don't see how you can turn that down as a publicly traded company.

No it won't last forever. But right now it still has the most subscribers of any MMO by far. It still brings in $1B a year. That game easily has many more years and many more expansions left in it as a subscription MMO, and even more than that as an F2P MMO.

But the MMO landscape is different now than it was 10 years ago. There will never be another WoW. Blizzard knows that. Even they cannot repeat what they did a decade ago.
That's why I see them going more towards small budget games, especially with how well Hearthstone is doing and how much money it's bringing in. It's easier to put a risk on a smaller title than a blockbuster MMO. The trend of "spend more to make more" just isn't working as well now as it did a decade ago.
 
I'm not really into Blizzard's smaller F2P projects so this is pretty disappointing.
 
Damn, sad to see this happen. I'm not even a Blizzard fan
yet
and I've been interested in seeing what this was. They should let people know what it was all about.
 
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