On May 6, 2022, the new season of the Overwatch League is about to open, this tournament will use the client of Overwatch 2, although the game has jumped the ticket countless times, but the good villain is also on the agenda, so that players can see the game's true deity. So, supposedly, this league should be very popular, right?
However, in fact, as of now, no investor is ready to sponsor it, once a phenomenon-level annual game that has been popular all over the network, today's players are rare and half dead, even with Microsoft's blessing, Blizzard wants to return to the peak is still not an easy task. Looking at today's Blizzard, one can't help but think of that game, and if it had been successfully born, what would Blizzard look like now?
Players familiar with Blizzard have already guessed that it is the Titan that was secretly developed for 6 years, but was eventually abandoned.
In 2005, Blizzard first revealed that it was making a new MMO game, when Blizzard gathered a large number of game production talents, it is not surprising to say that the production of gamers, but at this time " World of Warcraft" is in full swing, so many players did not think about the two games on the same level for the first time.
Two years later, however, when Blizzard announced that it was openly recruiting multiple classes for the next MMO game, players began to realize that Blizzard might be playing for real time. But up to this point, this mysterious MMO work is still in the clouds, and the outside world knows nothing but knows about such a project.
It wasn't until 2010 that it all changed! A Blizzard project plan suddenly appeared on a domestic website, and in this project plan, it included a top-secret project called Titan. Soon after, Blizzard's country manager was directly dissuaded for leaking secrets, and it is not difficult to see how much Blizzard attaches importance to this game.
However, just when everyone thought that the development of "Titan" was very smooth, on the eve of the E3 exhibition on May 28, 2013, it was reported that Blizzard's internal "Titan" project had been postponed, because the development and design direction and ideas were not in line with expectations. In September 2014, Blizzard suddenly announced that it had canceled the next-generation online game Titan, which had been developed for many years, and from the appearance of the game to the end, players' understanding of it was limited to one name.
According to the content of the conversation of Blizzard's game director in an interview, in the past decade of research and development, the entire "Titan" project has brought about $50 million in losses to Blizzard, and Blizzard can be said to be a failure on the "Titan" project, as for what this game is like, I am afraid that not many people can say clearly.
But in a 2019 interview, the departing Blizzard CEO Mike Mohan once mentioned that the Titan project at that time was actually two projects developed in parallel, and there was a lot of information in this sentence. As an MMO game, Mike said that its essence is two works developed in parallel, what does this mean?
Titans is set in a futuristic sci-fi MMORPG game set in the future, where the world is split into three factions after fending off an alien attack, and players will choose one of the lineups to join and help the faction take control of Earth.
In the game, Blizzard intends to open up the Americas, Oceania, Europe and other regions in the early stage, and according to the subsequent plan, they will continue to spread the map to the entire earth through the mode of expansion card updates in the future. The concept of this map is very similar to the regional map in Overwatch, but in Titan the cities will be connected to each other, eventually constructing a huge open world.
In addition to the map, in the known data players will have five classes to choose from, namely Titan, Jumper, Reaper, Ranger and Lord, each class will have a corresponding role positioning and special skills, such as the most well-known jumper has the ability to flash and teleport, can travel freely in the battlefield, this class is inherited into overwatch, I believe everyone has guessed who it is.
These classes are also similar to World of Warcraft, with their own talent system and equipment growth system, while the gameplay of Titan is a combination of large-scale life simulations and exciting battles. It will be mainly in two modes, day and night, and during the day players will be like reality.
Not only that, Titan also wants to improve the sense of substitution and playability of the game through the huge amount of text and NPC interaction design like "Big Cousin 2". In normal games, NPCs generally only have a set of words, but in "Titan", the player's daily actions will affect the npc's favorability, NPC will have a completely different attitude towards the player because of the favorability, and even the player can marry the NPC to form a family, for this goal, Blizzard even dug up the AI designer in the "Sims" team to improve the communication and interaction between the characters in the game, and the real restoration of the game world.
At night, the player transforms into a special person with a special identity and can use special skills, fighting for their respective factions, and the gameplay of the battle is much more than that. According to the information, players will have their own classes in the game, but as soon as the faction releases the mission, it will immediately become a warrior fighting for faith. Of course, players can also choose to ignore the task and continue to do what they like. Speaking of which, mike's parallel development should not be difficult to understand.
Titan divides the game into day and night, but it's actually the Sims plus Overwatch, and overall, what Blizzard wants to achieve in Titans is arguably the ultimate dream of an online game. A whole new world similar to the metaverse, the perfect fusion of virtual and reality, this goal is not to say that in 2005, even if it is put into the present, it is definitely a rather huge dream.
We can compare the open world of other game developments, saying that R Star's Big Cousin 2 is just building a western world, and with open world production experience, it still cost R Star 8 years and billions of development costs. Another example is "The Division", the development of 3 years is only an area of Manhattan, Blizzard's hundreds of millions, although it sounds like a lot, but for the blueprint it outlines, it is really insignificant.
The parallel development of Titan, the combat class, the life class, the huge amount of text, the construction of the map of three continents, and the infinite possibilities brought by NPCs, how to look at it is not a Blizzard can make it on its own, the result is that everyone knows.
It may be because of the previous successes, which led Blizzard to incorrectly estimate its own strength and funds, and finally the Titan project could only end sadly. The failure of Titan was a pretty heavy blow for both Blizzard and Blizzard fans. However, although the Titan project was canceled, the data it left behind, including beautiful character modeling and huge map data, was also a valuable asset.
20 years ago, Blizzard canceled a sci-fi RPG game "Nomad", after which "World of Warcraft" was born instead, and now, "Titan" is gone, but failure can become the driving force for progress. Although the resurrection of Titan is hopeless, other companies around the world are constantly realizing the vision of Blizzard in 2005, in a sense, this is also a different kind of rebirth of Titan.