f13.net

LOL
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/28/blizzard-delays-unannounced-mmo-until-2016-resets-whole-project-exclusive/

Blizzard gonna Blizzard.

So Blizzard broke the news that "Titan", the next MMO they've been working on literally since WoW first launched sucked bad enough that they have just completely "reset" it.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/28/blizzard-delays-unannounced-mmo-until-2016-resets-whole-project-exclusive/

Welp. I'd like to see what pile of shit they ended up with.

I'd assumed it was pretty much mature and they were just waiting for WoW to collapse to the point where cannibalizing the population wasn't an issue. I guess not, how very blizzard.

That said with a game that's been in development so long, and doesn't really have that much pressure to release, I could imagine a lot changing under them.

Man I'm blind. I could've sworn I reloaded to see if anyone had posted it.

This sucks. I was hoping for something in 2014.

Probably a Diablo MMO.


 :why_so_serious:

It was in Useless news thread.

I think they are scared of Wildstar.

The question now is can WoW bridge the gap that far to provide meaningful income in a 3 year period instead of a 1 year wait time?

I think in one of the most recent Q&A sessions for WoW Ghostcrawler or whatever flak was answering mentioned that major patches might start getting dungeons again because the WoW team "has been growing". So possibly WoW has gotten some of its team back.

I imagine Blizz took a look at the market with the recent craters/F2P conversions and decided that their vision from 5-6 years ago was absolutely out of whack with what the reality is now.

World of Starcraft anyone?

I really hope they're keeping whatever engine/tools they made because lol @ the idea of Blizzard cranking out anything MMO-shaped in a 2 1/2 or so year period.

I'd be willing to bet this is at least 70% what it is.  Their vision from 5 years ago would have included subs, to be certain.

However they would have also expected a fantastic SC2 and D3 release and a player base ready to embrace the next Blizzard MMO. Not a landscape where: SC2 sees a spike and a decline, (has it reached the sales of the original, considering how they've strung out the campaigns?); irritation over the Kalganization of the story; a playerbase disgusted with D3 in general, wishing for D2 with new graphics; and while WoW still has millions of subs, the player base is certainly tired of Blizzard's vision of an MMO. (That's turned in to the same vision as EQ before it. Raid or GTFO.)

Yeah, I can see looking back at the last few years and going, "Well, shit.. "

It might be a good thing. If the move means WoW gets the attention it's needed after being milked by what can only be described as the B Team, maybe getting people back into the system that actually know what the fuck they are doing will help steer things back to stuff players actually want to do. Not daily hubs and faction grinds.

If Blizzard say 2016, let's say 2017 or even 2018.

It may have just been kinder to outright kill the project, or turn it into some kind of MOBA. Maybe they will.

Blizzard already has a MOBA in production IIRC.

That thing is due out after Titan. Christ, by the time their Blizzard All stars gets released, MOBAs are going to be a quaint niche played only by nostalgic hipsters.

My thoughts as well.  Considering that Wildstar has some of WoW Vanilla's devs on the team vs. WoW's current "B Team", they probably didn't want to risk clashing and splitting their wins of subscribers.  They'll let NCSoft win this round, while they start planning for the future.

Also, Lum's FB status said it best: If this was any other dev house, such a "reset" would have crushed any hope of producing anything.  Such is the power of Bliz.

It's definitely a good thing. The game industry would be in a much better position if more houses were willing to take an objective look at what they're working on and say 'this thing irrevocably sucks, lets stop wasting our time'.

Blizzard is, after all, known primarily for polishing things. Remember what Romero taught us about polish?

I doubt more dev houses have the financial ability and reputation to completely reset a project so long in construction without completely dissolving the company.

I think it's Wildstar too but not in the way you've stated.  I very much believe Titan was going to be a wow in space type deal, new ip maybe but space for sure and most likely that cartoony look so with wildstar coming out and likely to be popular, they'd look like they were simply copying it.

Most dev houses don't have the financial ability to keep a project this long in construction to begin with. But just look at the mmo churn we're seeing. Shit like SWTOR, TESO, and Autowhatever keep getting shoved through production with hundred million budgets that they can't actually afford, only to bomb and cause various problems for the developers.


When has Blizzard ever tended to shy away from copying something?

I don't think they're worried about it looking too much like other products.  Blizzard isn't known for their innovation anyway.  They've built their business off of taking ideas that are already in circulation and refining the hell out of them.

Ideas, not the entire look and feel of a game. Wildstar looks to be everything a next gen blizzard mmo would contain, only they got there first cause blizzard didn't want to kill their cash cow.

Blizzard's never given a damn about what other people do in relation to their products getting made. They will steal from their ideas if they pan out, but it's not going to stop them from competing. They care about making their products functional, polished, and profitable.

Where they've fallen over lately is letting profitable get in the way of fun. This move seems to be traditional Blizzard noting that their product was not going anywhere, and they won't shovel something out the door after the D3 missteps with AH and Itemization, WoW shedding subs due to neglect, and the LolLore storylines in all their games but most notably SC2 and D3 lately.

At some point, they were going to have to reign this stuff back in. I think they dumped entirely too much into Titan at the cost of their other products, and they are now thinking that the eggs in one basket philosophy was a bad idea.

Remember that last report were they say F2P is eating them. My guess is Titan wasn't built f2p.  Instead of just bolting f2p on, they are doing major redesign to include f2p at its core.

This sucks.  I was really hoping Titan would be unveiled at blizzcon and maybe even start beta late this year.  I am so very tired of Azeroth, I only stll play because I like my raid team.  Going to go sign up for that wildstar beta I guess.

Blizzard could still get away with charging a monthly fee for whatever they do so long as it is at least as good as WoW.  They might have to include both WoW and the new mmo for $15 though, at which point they would probably make more money by haveing the new one be f2p.  I spend way too much money on f2p games I like, I would rather have a sub.

I don't think they care about Wildstar. More likely they care titan was not differentiated enough from WoW, or it was possibly too different.

Makes sense, but I don't think it's just that issue. My guess is they were trying to make a full-blown twitch FPS MMO and it just wasn't working.

From what I hear (from a clanmate who is fairly well dialed in to this Texas scene stuff, but still 3rd hand... ) the current playtesters have just been giving it terrible reviews. It has stinker written all over it and looking at a high chance of a SWTOR style bellyflop if it hit the market. I think the main problem is just that it's a bad game, fee models can be sliced and diced but if the actual gameplay is non-compelling you won't gain any traction. WoW's gameplay blew away all other DIKU style MMORPGs, and this game needs to do similar things in the FPS genre competing with well polished major franchises CS/TF2, CoD, BF and even lesser franchises but with followings and great gameplay like Mount & Blade. Mediocrity probably will not cut it (looking at recent D3/SC2), let alone a crummy game. Playtesters/devs can tell right away how it stacks up to their FPS competition, they must know it would get blown out.

The word is they are also taking a bit of a market risk cuz want it deeply interconnected with twitter/facebook. You  can send a tweet for a microtransaction or something and whenever you ding up it spams your facebook I guess. I mean this kind of stuff makes sense in theory, you have tons of vertical marketing opportunities, and in the long term this sort of thing might become more acceptable, but when myself and some guys in my m&b warband clan were discussing it last night the big initial reaction was basically  "I don't want my nerdy gaming secrets splashed all over my Facebook".

If you're going to pull this social integration crap, you REALLY need your core game to be superb, so I'm guessing it was not even close and warranted this complete overhaul.

It took Blizzard nearly a decade to finish both Starcraft and Diablo.

They work slowly and iteratively.

Speculation is sort of a waste of time on their projects.

Agreed, but then again we're all wasting time until September and some games get released.

I wish people would realize facebook has already hit it's peak and it's downhill from here.

I would hope that Blizzard's focus group/playtesters were decent gamers and not idiots who don't know what good games are.

For example, I've heard that when Rift was "Heroes of Telara" before they went dark in 2009?10? the game was essentially a single faction game, with no class structures (you could access any soul in the game) and souls were dropped like loot. The Rift system was more widespread and created more of an ecosystem that created different game play elements every time you logged in.

They focus tested the game and that led them to make a game that was quest-hub driven, with four classes and two factions. The focus group wanted another WOW and in the end that made the game worse off.

I have to imagine that Blizzard is better than that, hopefully.

edit:
Rift already did the social media thing, and it was stupid and no one cared then.

The advantage Blizzard has when looking at focus testing a game is they know they don't want to copy WoW.

So basically, Blizzard has been Blizzarded.

This is the only game I know of in September. F13 hype machine you've let me down again.

Rome 2, FIFA 14, GTA V, and Might and Magic X

There's just no way they were scared of Wildstar. They're especially not scared of being thought of stealing the 'look' of Wildstar, considering how derivative that look already is of WoW.

EDIT: We don't need to make up reasons for it. The game was probably having problems, and Blizzard isn't shy about murdering projects that have problems.

I doubt this was externally motivated.  Blizzard has been known to tank or reset projects that just aren't cutting it by their own standard.  I suspect this is just another case of that.

Well it's a bit different now than it was 10 years ago since Blizzard is a major revenue engine of publicly listed ATVI so they do actually have some responsibility to their shareholders and board of directors, I don't think the simple justification of not being up to their internal standards would cut it if it mediocrity could have made them 8-9 figures profit. This is why it must have been so bad that releasing it would have been running the risk of a huge market flop.

We just watched them totally redesign and otherwise delay D3 several times, it isn't like Ghost getting killed years ago is the only example.

They are going to have to reinvent the pipeline a bit. A lot has shifted in gaming, and they have never really done well with innovation. The question is what idea can they take and "do right" so to speak.

They've got Blizzard-DOTA and Hearthstone as new games, plus D3/SC2 expansions. And, of course, the most successful MMO of all time (reminder: EQ is up to nineteen expansions and counting so it's not like WoW's going away any time soon, frantic wishes of haters notwithstanding). Frankly, shitcanning Titan and shoving people back onto their actual live games is a blessing.

Oh I agree that's a better plan for the next 2-3 years. WoW will never go away if they actually put content development into the game, instead of just min/maxing subs with the least effort possible.

I'm really not sure I buy this whole "blizzard doesn't care about stealing the look or feel of other games" bit.  Aside from gameplay elements was wow really like any game that had come out before in terms of look and feel? was diablo?

I really feel like the "blizzard copies" is a meme taken too far, it's obvious to me they want their games to look unique even if the gameplay is found elsewhere.

Warcraft is Warhammer.

And Starcraft is 40k with hicks.

FINKLE IS EINHORN!   :ye_gods:

Diablo is one of the few legitimately innovative things they've done. That game reinvented how RPGs worked on the computer. That was almost 2 decades ago.

Warcraft was completely ripped off of Warhammer, and Starcraft is a rip off of Warcraft and Warhammer.

Wouldn't be surprised if D3's RMAH was a testing ground to see how the gaming community would embrace built-in real money purchasing and selling of items. I'm sure that bombing played a little part in Titan getting shitcanned and reworked.

Not exactly disagreeing with you, but Diablo 2 is where the actual innovation happened. Diablo 1 was just a shallower, arcade-y Nethack.

And Warcraft game mechanics were a ripoff of Dune 2, which were then further refined in WC2 and Starcraft.

Even Diablo has its roots in another game, having been pitched as "A graphical rogue-like".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28series%29#cite_note-10

This is the 'Blizzard Copies' meme. They take other systems and refine them and were known for doing it.  Their innovations in the MMO space have certainly since been copied but not seen further refinement.

The Diablo one is a shallow copying example, because it didn't invent the RPG. Yeah, well at some point we're all basing things off systems in place.

Well, yes. (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=10776/)

After the stumbles of SC2 and D3, Blizzard absolutely did the right thing in moving Titan back.  There's not much interest in me to go back to WoW, but I'd like to see Hearthstone be good.

I think this is the most likely explanation. Still shitty news. At this point it's more likely to turn out as another Starcraft Ghost than another WoW.

Warcraft is warhammer except, not.  I'm not talking about where games got their roots, what systems they are taking or who started it. I'm talking aesthetics and feel, the warhammer universe and warcraft are very different, so are the respective games.  I should also mention warcraft came out nearly two decades ago, I seriously doubt that blizzard is remotely the same company they were then. 

Maybe a younger blizzard could have gotten away with ripping off warhammer, maybe they didn't care about other games like theirs back then. They aren't that stupid now.  To release a cartoony space oriented mmo right next to wildstar would cause their project to get overshadowed and constantly compared to, not to mention that wow still exists.  Wildstar would directly cut into anything Titan offered and Blizzard can't be so delusional to not see it as competition.

You could not have it more backwards. Wildstar is the one that is going to get held up against Blizzard, not the other way around.*

*Not at f13, probably, but by the market as a whole, that is how it will go.

If Blizzard had announced these changes at the start of 2012, some people here would be saying that Blizzard was scared of SWOR. I do not think they are scared of Wildstar or Definance or Destiny or any other MMO out there other than WoW. WoW is their benchmark and potential millstone, so they've got to get Titan above that point or be considered a failure.

Do we even know how Wildstar has its payment model set up?

Yeah, sorry guys, it's "Wildstar is aping WoW's art style," not the other way around, for good or for ill. Hell, there were a couple of shots I saw that made me straight up think of Nagrand. It's not a criticism, really, I heart cartoony art (I liked WoW's, I liked the Torchlights, I like Wildstar's), but people would not have gone OMG ART THEFT if Titan is/was a cartoony sci-fi game. If anything, they'd be going "oh gawd, WoW in space." People whine "WoW clone" at everything, even over stupid shit like a mini-map existing, or how the character portrait is displayed.

I'm not saying wildstar isn't taking wow's art style, it very much is. I'm saying wildstar is "wow in space" which means if titan is also "wow in space" then there are gonna be problems. Would more people have gone with titan? probably but the fact that wildstar is coming out first means a lot of people probably wouldn't want to jump ship.  Titan being wow in space would not be the smartest decision.

Also things like adding facebook or rmt? That shit doesn't make you re-evaluate an entire project, that's stuff that can be done fairly easily and has been in several other games.  The only feasible reason would be changing the core mechanics/art aesets of the game.

I played warhammer for *years*, and sorry but the charge that Warcraft is warhammer just is plain untrue. Apart from having orcs who fight humans the games and settings have *nothing* in common. Even the orcs and humans are very, very different in tone, composition, setting and style. Even the first Warcraft game which apparently was originally pitched as a warhammer gamer is significantly different - just because Metzens orcs look like warhammer orcs doesn't make them a copy, it just makes them orcs?

If Warcraft was warhammer we'd have squigs for one thing. We need squigs.

(I would argue that until Warcraft 2 at least warcrafts problem wasn't that it was a warhammer copy, it was that it was far too generic fantasy in general. Warcraft 2 started to create a more tangible Warcraft feel that separated it out).

Warhammer orcs are genderless mushrooms, aren't they? I'm pretty sure Thrall would disapprove.

Anyway, while Diablo was pretty much just a realtime roguelike with fancy graphics and Warcraft was just a shiny Dune 2 with a control scheme that sucked less, I thought Lost Vikings was pretty novel. Of course it was made in the protoBlizzard days, but still!

Maybe Blizzard have anticipated the future F2P backlash and are reworking Titan to be sub based?

I know that I've started to groan inwardly when I see the words free-to-play appended to any promising looking upcoming game. 95% of them get it wrong from my perspective and make games that are either crippled or overpriced with no middle ground.

I can but hope...

Things like Squigs and mushrooms came later. I think they may have actually re-retconned the fungus bullshit out of the background. It certainl'y hasn't been front and centre for some time.

Mushrooms came with Gorkamorka (1997), there was an appendix in Da Uvver Book which explained Ork physiology that I helped to write. Squigs had always been around since WAAAGH! The Orks! in Rogue Trader (1990).

For those who aren't aware of the background here, the story goes that Blizzard pitched a Warhammer Fantasy RTS to GW back in the mid 90s. The game was close to complete when GW for unspecified reasons pulled out and yanked the licence. Blizzard, left with a mostly functional game, changed as much as they had to to avoid legal issues with GW then released it as their own IP. When I was at GW, I spoke to Andy Jones who was head of licencing at the time (also head of Black Library and Warhammer Records) and asked him if that story was true. I got an non-answer in return so draw your own conclusions from that.

I want this to mean that Activision will now allow Destiny to come out on PC.

I can dream, right?

Has Activision ever locked a product into a single platform other than PC?

I knew  absolutely nothing about Titan so really  nothing changed for me

There's a chance it could be code for paid vacation time.

I have nothing to contribute that I didn't already say last year (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22440.msg1098980#msg1098980). This announcement really hasn't been a surprise for all the months everyone assumed it was coming.


Excellent!
(http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r302/Iskallt/Random/Ace_Ventura_Plunger.gif)

Blizzard cancels Titan:


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

In other words, their game was wrapped around a dated sub model and couldn't make it work now.

But they found the fun in HOTS?

I don't believe that.

This was inevitable when they delayed it. Now I have no idea what's in their pipeline. They are in serious trouble over at Blizzard.

I don't think they have any expectations for HOTS anymore.  The dev team probably consists of Raj the intern now that the art assets are done.

They should be working on Warcraft 4, and trying to make a new IP that they can sell. My concern is that the people at Blizzard right now (Metzen) are so fucking stupid they can't create a new IP that isn't garbage.

necro'd just to kill it...

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/477385/blizzard-cancels-titan-mmo-after-7-years/

Confirming what we all assumed anyway.

I hear there is going to be a Red Panda expansion next.. cuz ppl like pandas!

Heart of the Swarm is actually a really good RT... oh, oh you mean that HOTS.  Yeah, that's garbage.

Fuck Red Pandas.

In WoW that is.

Rock and Roll Racing 2 finally?

The Lost Vikings are coming back baby!  I would like it...

Was there any real doubt? I don't understand why it wasn't cancelled initially other than for fear of investors fleeing en masse when combined with the drop in WoW subs and no other revenue streams.  Hearthstone has saved them there, and Heroes will add some more bucks when it's finally released.

They don't need to invent a new IP, just to reskin another one :why_so_serious:

Pretty sure the existing Panda people can already be red anyway.

I mean, I guess so but it really is very bad.

Funny. Magic players say the same thing about Hearthstone and arent wrong there either. 

Hearthstone is WAY better at what it is trying to be than Heroes is.  And I say that as someone who thinks Hearthstone is a total snoozefest.

I couldn't imagine working on something for 7 years of my life and having basically nothing come of that, that must be a bit of a kick in the nuts on a personal level. At least they were smart enough to say "Ok we're done", although I would be willing to bet they probably could of canceled it some time ago and not waited 7 years...

LOL.

Eventually you get to that age that you realize that ALL the things you've done have been that.

 :why_so_serious:

I am having an eery déjà-vu here. Didn't Titan get cancelled a while ago already?

Didn't we even discuss this on F13?

It was back-burnered, but it wasn't axed. Until now.

Nope, everything I do is important   :cry2: :cry2: :cry2: :cry2: :cry2: :cry2:

So Blizzard has coming down the pipe:

-A MOBA no one likes in a market that has a new stupid fucking MOBA coming out like literally every other day
-A shallow but successful """"CCG"""" that may or may not have retention value
-The final like practically half a decade-delayed third part of Starcraft II which is struggling as an e-sport because MOBA
-An expansion for the ever declining cash-cow WoW that is so bad that even the reviewers Blizzard fed previews to can't find a good word to say about it
-D3, which basically had to be half-gutted and redone to be a good game

And the only one of those things that is even close to original or new is Hearthstone.

Yes.

Don't worry mate, one day I'll look on your works and despair.

The Vivendi buyout was going on right at that time. It would have screwed up the deal to announce that a big project was being cancelled.

This won't hurt them, but they will need a strong new revenue stream within the next three to five years.

For any personal hit the developers might have taken for the failure to launch, I'm sure the money, benefits, and secure employment they've enjoyed and continue to enjoy will be no small comfort.

According to Kotaku's sources, this is what the game was:

http://www.kotaku.com/heres-what-blizzards-titan-actually-was-1638632121

That sounds way less interesting & ambitious than I was imagining from the game given all the rumors surrounding it for years. Less sad to see it shelved now.

Ahh. Yeah that'd do it.

Pretty much fits with exactly what I guessed five years ago. They were working on a twitch version of an MMOG shooter.

It also sounds like they were trying to channel the non-combat portions of SWG, which is a cool idea, but would never work if they aren't integrated with the rest of the combat game.

I had read about someone who used to work at Blizzard saying that the reason it was canceled was because it was too close to Destiny in look and feel.

That would make total sense to me. In reading it, it sounds like Bungie beat them to the punch.

Which is really sad if you think about it, because Blizzard had to have been kicking around this idea forever. They can't get anything to market on time.

A Destiny aimed at the PC would probably still do pretty well.

I don't want to go into detail, but that Kotaku report is perhaps the most accurate description of what Titan is that's been made public so far.

A friend of mine worked his entire 35 year career at HP in the printer/printing R&D department and none of the projects he worked on were ever turned into commercial products.

He retired at 50, despite that fact. I guess that helps it sting a little less.

No wonder they canned it.  That sounds shite.

The artist concepts were amazing, if that matters. But Blizzard artists always put out amazing work.

Yeah the art would be gorgeous but the game itself sounded like ass. The blurbs on kotaku were enough that unless it played far differently than it sounds I'd have given it a pass.  I'm not into crafting. 

I stopped reading when they said TF2 style art.

Easily identifiable character and weapon silhouettes to allow faster recognition by players.

I dunno, sounds like it could work to me.  Sounds like an attempt to balance the virtual world / sandbox players (Have a job!  Be friends with NPCs!  Engage in the player economy!) with theme park players (Play CTF matches!  Class based gameplay!  Small group content!).  It sounds like it would be a ton of work to integrate all that stuff in to one game, but if anyone's got the resources to do it, it should be Blizzard.

I have zero faith in Blizzard's ability to balance anything adversarial and competitive.

Has there been a problem with Starcraft 2 in that respect?

No.

Triple no. 

Yes, almost all of Blizzards attempts to make the three sides balanced have resulted in stagnate gameplay that is both horrible to play in AND watch. Probably most worrying is some of the worst matches are the mirrors. Like for awhile now ZvZ has devolved into ww1 style trench warfare, where lines of swarm hosts just endlessly send their minions at each other canceling out... while at the same time the first side that flinches and tries something different is immediately at a disadvantage due to how the unit works.

I haven't really followed SC2 in like a year now though, maybe its totally awesome and dynamic now! I doubt it though as tournament interest in the game keeps dropping.

Basically the game stopped being about out thinking your opponent maybe a year into the base game, and became purely about execution. A Stupid plan executed flawlessly is superior to a brilliant one executed poorly.

It's ultimately just speculation about a dead project, I suppose, but the article gives me the impression that it's an option, not a requirement.  There are plenty of people who like that kind of thing provided it's done right, games like Harvest Moon and Papers, Please are fun to me because they handle a "job" in a fun way.  It looked to me like they were going for a "trying to please everybody" kind of design (something with an even bigger draw than WoW), and that only works if you allow people to choose what they want to do.

In general, all MMOs have tried to make both the gameplay *and* the social aspects of their game interesting and engaging for their audience. I believe one of Titan's focuses was attempting to innovate on this concept, predominantly in the social realm.

It took Blizzard like five years to figure out people like dressing up their characters.

I worked on something for about 3 years that was cancelled - really sucked and basically the reason I do contracting / work for myself now.

That said from what I heard one of the biggest problems with Titanfall was huge staff churn, so I suspect most people working on it didn't work for the full 7 years.

Which is why they should stick with gameplay and stay away from social aspects.  They are former hardcores and still want to cater to that group. They don't understand us filthy casuals.

Titan was started so long ago, subs-based Western MMOs were still the thing. Big budget, huge staff, new IP, all still fine at the time.

But very soon after, I remember earlier versions of the "next big Blizzard MMO" where a few of us continually asked "wait wuh? Why?". It was obvious for years this was never coming out. It's not just any one reason. It's the combination of the end of big budget non-IP subs-based Western MMOs as a byproduct of even the big IP MMOs not being all that, Starcraft 2 not completely replacing 1 with all the hype, Diablo 3 being fine but not the decade+ forever-game Diablo 2 was, WoW shedding players that weren't staying with this kind of game, the rise of a new class of game players that weren't and aren't gamers that the current navel-gazing industry continues to focus on, and so on.

Any two of those reasons were enough to kill Titan.

Now people are wondering what next big thing they're working on. I personally wonder if they're working on anything big at all.

I would imagine with Pardo gone and Metzen neutered that the employee landscape is different compared to 10 years ago.

I don't completely agree with the Why's of Titan, but I'm in a position where I have to be careful about how much engagement I have on this subject.

As I said, Blizzard does need something 'big' within the next three to five years, but without looking at the numbers I'm guesstimating that they are still making ridiculous amounts of cash to cover their expenses and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This 7 year R&D project that didn't pan out is something they can write off -- and whose to say that something didn't come out of all that research they could apply elsewhere?

I do think that Pardo leaving the company and Titan's failure to launch are related.

Their concept sounds even more boring than Destiny, and that's a feat.

These things are linked, and Mr. Kotick wants widgets, not design development. Many folks have asked in the past, "Why would ActiBlizzard kill the goose that laid the golden egg?"

They wouldn't. They would, however, ask, "Well, where's the eggs?"

I think 3-5 years is too generous a timeline. If HOTS fails, expect heads to roll. Even if they've been there a long, long time.

If things don't work out and they have to reduce staff, it'll be peaceful dismissal with generous severance packages. You're mistaking the rest of the games industry for Blizzard.

But yeah, I agree. It felt important to me to make that distinction because of how great a working environment Blizzard can be.

A lot of the people who work at Blizzard now are Blizzard superfans, and in particular WoW superfans.

Employees being fans is ok in moderation, but in extreme cases can lead to a situation where everyone is content to badly recapture the past. I assume the "next big thing" from Blizzard is going to be another IP remix.

I'm not convinced they know how to do that anymore either!  :why_so_serious:

I still believe that Blizzard would make millions ripping off Mount and Blade mechanics and creating a new IP around it, or by making Warcraft 4 a ripoff of Total War mechanics, but without all their current issues.

I can't see Blizzad making a sandbox. They are an Invisible Hand of the Designer company.

Blizzard is the Extremely Visible and Obnoxious Hand of the Designer company.

How many times have WoW and D3 been changed because players were having a fun time in ways designers didn't intend? It seems to genuinely make Blizzard designers angry when players enjoy their game in the "wrong" way.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/23/6834203/blizzard-titan-cancelled-hearthstone-heroes-of-the-storm

That is literally the most unnecessary article ever written. Every single fucking day companies kill games.

Every day.

Blizzard was stupid enough to keep this shit in development for seven fucking years. HOTS is the one that needs to die. Fuck, in seven years empires in gaming have risen and fallen. The fucking Wii came out 7 years ago! We're two generations into fucking consoles! Goddamnit, games journalism. Go back to writing about how we're all dead.

Edit: At least they come out and say what we all say about them:

They are not a company of original ideas.

So in 5 more years we'll see "Blizzard does Minecraft" then.

How is Kuchera still relevant. That man has controversy nipping at his heels.

Games journalism is only relevant in the sense that it burns Schild like elven rope.  :why_so_serious:

Blizzard could probably just port more of their shit to consoles and coast on that seemingly forever. If they could make a playable version of Diablo 3 run on the 3DS that'd make a shitzillion dollars.

I don't believe so. ATVI has cut costs a lot in order to pump up their profits, but their revenues in 2013 have slid back to just above 2010 numbers.

The difference this year will be the Destiny numbers, and that will pump up revenues back to normal levels. However, none of that has to do with Blizzard (except Hearthstone). They are going to hope to bring in major sales from the xpac, but the market is slowly dwindling every year.

The goose is not laying as many eggs, as Merusk noted. Other parts of ATVI are having to pick up the slack.

Zowie... that was not at all what I was expecting.  What a dreary and bleak sounding game...waking up to go to work each day would be a welcome relief.

They should have just gone with galaxy of starcraft.

I'm shocked they haven't done a Blizzard Brawler ala SSB.

At this stage I'm expecting a Zerg V Protos shooter game...

Aliens: Terran Marines?

Blizzard's Friday Night Poker with Jim Raynor and Jayna Proudmoore.

Probably. They've got to be looking at more ways to cash in which lighter games like Hearthstone.

World of Warcraft Pinball Extreme
The Burning Pinball Crusade

Don't forget that Blizzard wants to hook people while they're young. That Megablocks parntership is just one example.

Speak & Spell with Vol'jin!

Mines of Azeroth. Minecraft w/ Blizzard skins.

Fuck, I might figure out how to mod that anyway.

You guys aren't thinking small enough.  They're probably developing a shitty iOS free to play kingdom builder.  It'll be out before Christmas. 

I'm surprised we haven't seen mobile ports of the old Warcrafts yet.

"Dat's a cat, mon!  Da cat go 'mou'.  Cat.  Say - Eeh -  Tay."

Blizzard Clash of Clans ripoff would do well.

Come come, we can think smaller than that! easy enough to do Match 3 Orcs, something like http://gameslikefinder.com/cavemania/.

I'd go with something Diablo-y though. Heck, I'd be surprised if they didn't already have a feature complete Diablo mobile app already. Perfect game and business model for 7"+ tablets.