WoW still generates over 1 BILLION dollars in subs alone per year. That makes the idea of buying them now for a few tens of millions of dollars seem completely out of kilter with economic reality.
Titan has been in development hell for too long. Chances are the world outside has overtaken the original remit that Titan had.
Titan, to MMO players, was scotch mist. A game with no subject, no gameplay, no concept. I'm sure somewhere in a dark room someone knew what it was - but in the real world it was never more than just a name.
The idea of it being a "casual MMO - drop in drop out" put more people off than anything. Most MMO players are as far from "casual". Even those that claim they are casual tend to put in 8-10 hours a week. Titan in that respect began to look like a free Facebook game.
By the time it comes out - the chances of it living up to it's legend (and it is already almost a legend - amazing for a game we know so little about - but maybe that's at the core of all the best legends...) it will not live up to expectations. It may be good - but it won't live up to hype.
I reckon they were thinking of funding titan using the real money auction house. The failure of this feature in d3, and its effects on the game, such as crappy itemisation and making it a gold grinding chore, followed by the backlash have led them to have to rethink how they will fund the thing.
logically the game's been in development quite a long time and though it was built from the ground up, the mechanics probably look and feel dated. Honestly I am sad in this development, but it is probably the best for blizzard at the time. Since there is some huge competition upcoming this year such as EverQuest next, Elder scrolls online, and wildstar. I believe blizzard did this in a cool calculating way allowing these titles to flush out new ways of doing things and new mechanics. To be quite honest I believe we will still see the return of tab targeting and the holy Trinity since the great reception of neverwinters class mechanics reinvigorating the holy Trinity. Now to speak about subscription base I personally hope for a hybrid pay model to succeed all of these free to play games. Reason being is that it allows for much more updated contents and a tighter grip on the handles of gold sellers and account security. I don't believe a strict by the box and subscription-based model is feasible at this time but a subscription base is needed due to so much money going into account security and eliminating so many cheats as this has become big business these days. Though disappointed with blizzard's decision to pull off so many developers I am 100% behind blizzard in not forcing a game to release, we definitely have seen way too many of these push to release for the greenback and the gamer suffers due to poorly developed content and large payments for a game that just cannot stay around long.
I have played World of Warcraft since right about launch. I love it. I've tried other games, but I always come back to WoW.....but I can safely say this......if EQNext is anything like the original EQ, with perhaps some of the town/crafting elements of UO, I would be outta there in a heartbeat. EQ was my first love. I have gone back to play it several times. The only reason I ever quit is because endgame wise, it is far too hard to attempt to catch up to the cutting edge raiding guild there at this point. If they made it as easy to catch up as WoW did, I probably never would have come back to WoW at all. If EQNext launches and is good, it will finally put down WoW......and let's face it.....to all of you saying WoW beat Everquest.......you obviously never played Everquest.......because WoW IS Everquest, just dumbed down and oversimplified. The problem is now, you cannot make another EQ, because people want epic gear handed to them on a silver platter with barely any real input from them.
I remember playing EQ back in the Planes of Power days. I was in a Time raiding guild. It literally took you weeks and weeks to level a toon to top level, and once you got there, you could de-level dying in raids. There was a real sense of "If you're gonna be here, you need to know what you're doing, because if you fail, we all suffer". We need that again. That should weed out the 14 year old d bags. Real fast.
Im currently playing Darkfall because you acualy need to work towards higher end stuff such as boats and cities, not to mention there no instancing at all which is a major + for me, Will be playing this till EQNext comes out i reckon.
I suspect they just got in over their heads with Titan, so to speak. It's like when a 6 year old describes their ideal make-believe toy. They start with a basketball and end up with a basketball that can fly, gives you superpowers so you can slam dunk, comes with a complete wardrobe, and makes you waffles when you're sleeping. 9 years is a long time. After 9 years of brainstorming and adding ideas, I suspect the game was looking a lot like the Winchester mansion with doors that lead to nowhere and a maze of misshapen corridors. Maybe they lost focus and needed to get back to basics to streamline the game and get it back on track.
Originally posted by William12 Didn't D3 sell MILLIONS of copies and was one of the most sold PC games ever ? how is that a failure ? If you can't write unbiased articles do not write them at all.
Because most sold copies where pre-orders and trough a year sub on WoW. A game can sell millions and still be a failure. D3 is a failure as it didn't manage to deliver to the expectations. Its not him being unbiased, its how the community received the game. Many people where very disappointed with the result and how Blizzard had made some poor choices with the game. Aliens Colonial Marines sold very well too, still it was a huge failure for the many bugs, a total different engine then was shown to the press and in screenshots/trailers, etc.
About Titan, i wouldn't expect to see any information, screenshots and trailers before they released the last expansion for WoW. The news that Titan was in development was there before Diablo 3 was even announced or around the same time. Blizzard for now wants people all to focus on the MMORPG they already have and sell as many expansion copies as possible. WoW also has a 10 year life span as they said when WoW was released. So untill next year or the year after i wouldn't exspect to much info. In all these years we didn't hear a thing about Titan beside that it was being made and that it wasn't gonna be WoW 2, Starcraft online or a Diablo MMORPG.
I guess they hit the reset button cause its been in production for far to long meaning the engine is probably way to outdated and the MMO genre has shifted. My bet is that combat was pretty much like WoW where these days people want more real-time action styled combat. Though I'm slightly worried, cause they also said that Titan was gonna be more social focused. I wonder what the reset will have as consequences. Cause with more focus on the social aspect i imagined that the players had more influence on the world.
Originally posted by Hrimnir My guess, they're shit scared because they know that wow was a fluke and if they dont deliver something with similar sub numbers it will probably spell the doom of the company. Personally i think its delicious either way. Why? Because it indicated failure.
Yeah because it is the only one game WOW which contributes to their profits as a company right?
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.' -Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid." -Luke McKinney
Blizzard's development process is so slow that the entire MMO landscape has changed since they started writing the game. F2P wasn't a major payment model, LoL and DOTA weren't the most played games ever, even considering a sandbox feature, much less a sandbox game was stupid and MMOs were not a gamble. Blizzard rewrites and shelves things when the market doesn't really change, it's amazing they haven't rewritten or changed Titan before now.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Blizzard's development process is so slow that the entire MMO landscape has changed since they started writing the game. F2P wasn't a major payment model, LoL and DOTA weren't the most played games ever, even considering a sandbox feature, much less a sandbox game was stupid and MMOs were not a gamble. Blizzard rewrites and shelves things when the market doesn't really change, it's amazing they haven't rewritten or changed Titan before now.
yea, or it is amazing how little you understand
depends on the point of view imo.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Originally posted by Thane Originally posted by lizardbonesBlizzard's development process is so slow that the entire MMO landscape has changed since they started writing the game. F2P wasn't a major payment model, LoL and DOTA weren't the most played games ever, even considering a sandbox feature, much less a sandbox game was stupid and MMOs were not a gamble. Blizzard rewrites and shelves things when the market doesn't really change, it's amazing they haven't rewritten or changed Titan before now.
yea, or it is amazing how little you understand
depends on the point of view imo.
How so?
Blizzard's development cycle is slow.
DDO converted to a F2P system around 2009, about five years ago. Titan has been in development since 2007 or so. Between the time Titan started development and today, F2P has gone from an astounding thing that merits a great deal of media coverage to the expected result for most games.
LoL wasn't even released until 2009, a couple years after Titan's development was started. LoL has more concurrent players than any other game.
Sandbox games consistently did not meet developer and publisher expectations. Even today there's not much evidence that developing a large scale sandbox game would be financially viable. But then again...
MMOs in general don't seem to meet the expectations of developers and publishers. Hind site being what it is, sandbox games didn't really do that bad after all, but that doesn't mean building an MMO is a guarantee of success. Blizzard had every reason to suspect they could write whatever they wanted starting in 2007 and the money would be guaranteed. The market has proven this wrong.
Things have changed since 2007 and a lot of expectations that people would have based on a 2007 perspective have changed. It makes sense that this would have an impact on such a long running development process. Blizzard also adjusted the development team for the project, scaling it back. Whatever they are building now won't be as big. In other words, they aren't gambling as much on the project as they were before, because the market isn't as favorable to MMO development as it looked in 2007.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
AS allways nothing but the best from Blizzard, they are prolly the onl+y company in the world that can pull an almost finsihed product from release and shelve it indefinately. So this is obviously only a minor setback
Personally i think recent MMO developments must have shown Blizzard that they need more then an improved version of WoW to repeat the success... they need to develop a fundamentally new virtuall world not alike anything we have seen so far..
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Tons of hatred and opinion flying about. As far as Blizzard being a flash in the pan or one-shot success... even by a stretch of the imagination, this isn't true. They have at least 3 successful franchises. Not games, but franchises. I'm no Blizzard fanboi, but they make fun games.
As far as D3 being a "failure", that's totally false from a financial standpoint. I work with about 100 people. Out of those, 60 are gamers. Every single person working at my company purchased D3. Not a single one failed to purchase. That's a retarded amount of purchases out of a small subset. Hell, even the owner of the company (age 40) was playing the damn game. While most don't play it now and have moved on, the sheer amount of money from box sales alone made it a success.
As far as Titan, 90% of this article is pure surmise. Development schedules do tend to run like this, especially when a base re-work occurs. Re-assigning people to a different project usually happen when base code reworks occur. Will this be another SC:G? Perhaps, who knows?
TLDR; Article has no information of value save for the vague Blizzard response.
the game is in development, restarts are all part of it and also NEVER seeing the light of day. It happens. More so with titles that really are not officially announced.
By the sound of it seems mostly the engine engineers/programmers and a few artist stayed.
But I can't help but think this has something to do with blizz now wanting to get more into the console market... Titan was always been develop as a f2p game, blizz themselves said it would be silly to launch another sub game in today's market (but then again they could have gone the hybrid payment model)..
Blizz which now has to answer to shareholders, maybe got asked to release titan on console as well and seeing Sony console is more open to the likelihood of mmo, why not take the time and retool it to launch on ps4 also.. Blizz fan won't go away on the pc (not by the look of the selling of there games) but why not try to reach a different crowd. I don't think Sandbox style mmo is the future, and honestly I don't know what is, because most (not all) mmo players nowadays just move on to the next "IT" mmo, even if the mmo that comes has good stuff going for it.. the market is much more unstable now than it was when WoW launch, and seeing this I think blizz decide why not pegged titan to also launch on consoles and see if they can strike gold again.
@whoever says the parent company wants to dump Blizzard since they become lazy and don't innovate enough. Well of course you would look to dump them, because you generally sell a company when they are worth something more than you pay for and if your looking to rid yourself out of the gaming biz which they have been wanting to do ever since they got there money worth. Blizz is still a sure fire (as sales of there game speaks for themselves), the major problem is and I think it will always be that way until Ea buys them out, it's that they take there sweet time to release stuff...
These guys have it easy thanks to Wow, d3 and SC2.. after all they are in business to turn a profit and while we as long time gamers feel they have lost there way/drive. It seems they have picked up more fans than they have lost, as there games continue to move millions of units.
Tons of hatred and opinion flying about. As far as Blizzard being a flash in the pan or one-shot success... even by a stretch of the imagination, this isn't true. They have at least 3 successful franchises. Not games, but franchises. I'm no Blizzard fanboi, but they make fun games.
As far as D3 being a "failure", that's totally false from a financial standpoint. I work with about 100 people. Out of those, 60 are gamers. Every single person working at my company purchased D3. Not a single one failed to purchase. That's a retarded amount of purchases out of a small subset. Hell, even the owner of the company (age 40) was playing the damn game. While most don't play it now and have moved on, the sheer amount of money from box sales alone made it a success.
As far as Titan, 90% of this article is pure surmise. Development schedules do tend to run like this, especially when a base re-work occurs. Re-assigning people to a different project usually happen when base code reworks occur. Will this be another SC:G? Perhaps, who knows?
TLDR; Article has no information of value save for the vague Blizzard response.
Blizzard is the only company that can say that every game they have ever created has been a success... ever since Warcraft 2, Diablo 1 and Starcraft, they have been named the most succesfull PC gaming company, and thats been long before the succes of WoW.
The only company in the world delivering allways straight AAA+ Quallity
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
It's taken them 10 years to learn that another Theme Park isn't going to cut it. People are sick of them; thus, the reason for all the flops. I mean... even WoW itself is losing massive numbers as time goes on.
Why would I care about Titan when Blizzard's track record of late has only emphasized how little their ideas interest me? Heck at this point they could say they are closing down Blizzard and I couldn't care less. They aren't selling me anything I want, so why should I even care?
LOL, they skipped Blizzcon last year because they had nothing to discuss... this time they are having Blizzcon and they have nothing to discuss...
Seems like a whole lot of nothing coming out of the company anyways... admitting they have nothing certainly isn't ground breaking news.
What about valve? Bethseda too (although personally I'm not keen on oblivion)
As for blizzard, yeah every game they've made was good, UNTIL RECENTLY, can't talk about the newer wow expansions as I never played them, but d3 is decidedly average, nothing like as good as d2.
Comments
WoW still generates over 1 BILLION dollars in subs alone per year. That makes the idea of buying them now for a few tens of millions of dollars seem completely out of kilter with economic reality.
Titan has been in development hell for too long. Chances are the world outside has overtaken the original remit that Titan had.
Titan, to MMO players, was scotch mist. A game with no subject, no gameplay, no concept. I'm sure somewhere in a dark room someone knew what it was - but in the real world it was never more than just a name.
The idea of it being a "casual MMO - drop in drop out" put more people off than anything. Most MMO players are as far from "casual". Even those that claim they are casual tend to put in 8-10 hours a week. Titan in that respect began to look like a free Facebook game.
By the time it comes out - the chances of it living up to it's legend (and it is already almost a legend - amazing for a game we know so little about - but maybe that's at the core of all the best legends...) it will not live up to expectations. It may be good - but it won't live up to hype.
I reckon they were thinking of funding titan using the real money auction house. The failure of this feature in d3, and its effects on the game, such as crappy itemisation and making it a gold grinding chore, followed by the backlash have led them to have to rethink how they will fund the thing.
They are going to clone Age of Wushu.
/fingersCrossed
Im currently playing Darkfall because you acualy need to work towards higher end stuff such as boats and cities, not to mention there no instancing at all which is a major + for me, Will be playing this till EQNext comes out i reckon.
Wouldn't that be ideal, give us something we actually want?
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
That is absolutely false.
Yeah because it is the only one game WOW which contributes to their profits as a company right?
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
Blizzard's development process is so slow that the entire MMO landscape has changed since they started writing the game. F2P wasn't a major payment model, LoL and DOTA weren't the most played games ever, even considering a sandbox feature, much less a sandbox game was stupid and MMOs were not a gamble. Blizzard rewrites and shelves things when the market doesn't really change, it's amazing they haven't rewritten or changed Titan before now.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
yea, or it is amazing how little you understand
depends on the point of view imo.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
This 100%
depends on the point of view imo.
How so?
Blizzard's development cycle is slow.
DDO converted to a F2P system around 2009, about five years ago. Titan has been in development since 2007 or so. Between the time Titan started development and today, F2P has gone from an astounding thing that merits a great deal of media coverage to the expected result for most games.
LoL wasn't even released until 2009, a couple years after Titan's development was started. LoL has more concurrent players than any other game.
Sandbox games consistently did not meet developer and publisher expectations. Even today there's not much evidence that developing a large scale sandbox game would be financially viable. But then again...
MMOs in general don't seem to meet the expectations of developers and publishers. Hind site being what it is, sandbox games didn't really do that bad after all, but that doesn't mean building an MMO is a guarantee of success. Blizzard had every reason to suspect they could write whatever they wanted starting in 2007 and the money would be guaranteed. The market has proven this wrong.
Things have changed since 2007 and a lot of expectations that people would have based on a 2007 perspective have changed. It makes sense that this would have an impact on such a long running development process. Blizzard also adjusted the development team for the project, scaling it back. Whatever they are building now won't be as big. In other words, they aren't gambling as much on the project as they were before, because the market isn't as favorable to MMO development as it looked in 2007.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
AS allways nothing but the best from Blizzard, they are prolly the onl+y company in the world that can pull an almost finsihed product from release and shelve it indefinately. So this is obviously only a minor setback
Personally i think recent MMO developments must have shown Blizzard that they need more then an improved version of WoW to repeat the success... they need to develop a fundamentally new virtuall world not alike anything we have seen so far..
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Tons of hatred and opinion flying about. As far as Blizzard being a flash in the pan or one-shot success... even by a stretch of the imagination, this isn't true. They have at least 3 successful franchises. Not games, but franchises. I'm no Blizzard fanboi, but they make fun games.
As far as D3 being a "failure", that's totally false from a financial standpoint. I work with about 100 people. Out of those, 60 are gamers. Every single person working at my company purchased D3. Not a single one failed to purchase. That's a retarded amount of purchases out of a small subset. Hell, even the owner of the company (age 40) was playing the damn game. While most don't play it now and have moved on, the sheer amount of money from box sales alone made it a success.
As far as Titan, 90% of this article is pure surmise. Development schedules do tend to run like this, especially when a base re-work occurs. Re-assigning people to a different project usually happen when base code reworks occur. Will this be another SC:G? Perhaps, who knows?
TLDR; Article has no information of value save for the vague Blizzard response.
I must be missing something.
How can you Delay a release that had NO release?
the game is in development, restarts are all part of it and also NEVER seeing the light of day. It happens. More so with titles that really are not officially announced.
But I can't help but think this has something to do with blizz now wanting to get more into the console market...
Titan was always been develop as a f2p game, blizz themselves said it would be silly to launch another sub game in today's market (but then again they could have gone the hybrid payment model)..
Blizz which now has to answer to shareholders, maybe got asked to release titan on console as well and seeing Sony console is more open to the likelihood of mmo, why not take the time and retool it to launch on ps4 also.. Blizz fan won't go away on the pc (not by the look of the selling of there games) but why not try to reach a different crowd.
I don't think Sandbox style mmo is the future, and honestly I don't know what is, because most (not all) mmo players nowadays just move on to the next "IT" mmo, even if the mmo that comes has good stuff going for it.. the market is much more unstable now than it was when WoW launch, and seeing this I think blizz decide why not pegged titan to also launch on consoles and see if they can strike gold again.
@whoever says the parent company wants to dump Blizzard since they become lazy and don't innovate enough. Well of course you would look to dump them, because you generally sell a company when they are worth something more than you pay for and if your looking to rid yourself out of the gaming biz which they have been wanting to do ever since they got there money worth. Blizz is still a sure fire (as sales of there game speaks for themselves), the major problem is and I think it will always be that way until Ea buys them out, it's that they take there sweet time to release stuff...
These guys have it easy thanks to Wow, d3 and SC2.. after all they are in business to turn a profit and while we as long time gamers feel they have lost there way/drive. It seems they have picked up more fans than they have lost, as there games continue to move millions of units.
Blizzard is the only company that can say that every game they have ever created has been a success... ever since Warcraft 2, Diablo 1 and Starcraft, they have been named the most succesfull PC gaming company, and thats been long before the succes of WoW.
The only company in the world delivering allways straight AAA+ Quallity
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
This.
Thank you based reader.
It's obvious.
It's taken them 10 years to learn that another Theme Park isn't going to cut it. People are sick of them; thus, the reason for all the flops. I mean... even WoW itself is losing massive numbers as time goes on.
Why would I care about Titan when Blizzard's track record of late has only emphasized how little their ideas interest me? Heck at this point they could say they are closing down Blizzard and I couldn't care less. They aren't selling me anything I want, so why should I even care?
LOL, they skipped Blizzcon last year because they had nothing to discuss... this time they are having Blizzcon and they have nothing to discuss...
Seems like a whole lot of nothing coming out of the company anyways... admitting they have nothing certainly isn't ground breaking news.
What about valve?
Bethseda too (although personally I'm not keen on oblivion)
As for blizzard, yeah every game they've made was good, UNTIL RECENTLY, can't talk about the newer wow expansions as I never played them, but d3 is decidedly average, nothing like as good as d2.