Titan [working title] Message Board

The famed Autobot leader is heading to Titanfall! Check out this new DLC trailer, featuring a new Titan ability and melee weapon.

Here are the basic rules to Capture the Flag, along with some loadout and play style tips.

Here are the basic rules to Pilot Hunter, along with some loadout and play style tips.

Here are the basic rules to Last Titan Standing, along with some loadout and play style tips.

By most estimates, World of Warcraft is now 17 million years old. Typically, Internet scientists carbon date it by slicing open expansion packs and counting the rings, but there is some controversy surrounding that method. One thing’s certain, though: WoW’s been at the top of the MMO food chain since before man invented either food or chains. Its age is starting to show, and even Blizzard’s willing to admit that. And while WoW: Warlords of Draenor is working its time travel magic on the MMO kingpin’s dry, cracked landscapes, it’s still fundamentally the same game. But could that change someday? Well, WoW will probably never morph into EverQuest Next, but Blizzard told me that it’s definitely looking into procedural and user-generated content to revitalize its slowly withering world.

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This offers a first, real-time look at Respawn Entertainment's new game.

I’m pleased to announce that I too am developing a ground-breaking MMO called Titan. And I will be releasing it in 2034. Now invest in shares in my owners.

Extraordinarily, Blizzard and their infinite wealth have just said that the much-mentioned, never-shown Titan has now been delayed until “2016 at the earliest”. The suggestion is, they’re retconning and starting over.

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Blizzard's follow-up to World of Warcraft, a project known only by its codename Titan, has been in development since 2006. And it's going to be in development a lot longer, after the company announced today it was making some significant changes to both the game and the people working on it. Responding to a report on VentureBeat from earlier in the day, which claimed that the entire project had been "reset" and delayed to 2016, Blizzard's Shon Damron issued the following statement: We’ve always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We’ve come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. We’re using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven’t announced any dates for the MMO. While stopping short of confirming the report - something they were never going to do, since the game itself hasn't been officially been announced yet - it sounds like those are some sweeping and fundamental changes. Certainly enough to keep the project secret for a while longer yet. To get an idea of just how long this game has been in development, and how long it's taken Blizzard to show/tell absolutely nothing about it, check out this timeline. Blizzard delays unannounced MMO until 2016, resets whole project [VentureBeat]

VentureBeat is reporting via "a source familiar with the matter" that Blizzard Entertainment has reset development on its long-rumored post-World of Warcraft MMO, codenamed "Titan." The source says Blizzard had 100 people working on the project, but that number has been reduced to just 30, with those dismissed being put to work on other games. Titan never had an official release date, but VentureBeat claims it won't be ready to publish until 2016 at the earliest.

Joystiq has also gained information on this development, with a source claiming the project "just wasn't up to polish." Stripped down to the core ideas, the game will now restart its process from the ground up.

Blizzard is no stranger to long and laborious development schedules. Diablo 3 famously went through multiple redesigns over ten years of development, and StarCraft Ghost was "postponed" after years of work, then never seen again.

Blizzard is gearing up to release a new digital card game named Hearthstone later this year, and then host a sold-out BlizzCon 2013 in November.

Texas-based developer TimeGate Studios has announced that it's working on a new free-to-play, third-person match-based shooter called Minimum.

Minimum boasts a simplistic look, and has you building a character up during each life, adding more and more power-ups to your weapons (ranging from ice-powered sniper rifles to flaming katanas) as you go. In Titan, the "signature" game mode according to the FAQ, players support two giant creatures fighting each other during the match.

TimeGate also says it hopes to bring "everyone to the development table to influence how the game grows and changes." Minimum will be in closed alpha soon, and is set for a Steam release whenever it's ready.

TimeGate is probably best known at the moment for its work on Aliens: Colonial Marines, but the company also made Section 8 and Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in the past, so Minimum is coming from a substantial history of development experience for PC.

#nvidia More »

#hardware Earlier this week I told you about Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan, the $1,000 graphics card with supercomputer power, tons of tweakability and an astounding acoustic footprint which keeps it whisper-quiet under the heaviest of loads. What I couldn't tell you about were the benchmarks—those all-important numbers. More »

#kotakutimeline Are you ready for Blizzard's next MMO? Their first since 2004's World of Warcraft? Well, tough, Blizzard's not done making it. More »

#fineart The last time we featured the art of Nick Carver was in 2008, when the dude was looking for a job. Today, he seems to be doin' OK, as he's a senior artist at Blizzard. More »

Very little is known about Blizzard's in-development "next-gen MMO" currently being referred to as Titan, though a recent job posting reveals an interesting piece of information. The position of Franchise Development Producer includes the following responsibility: "Work with major consumer brands...

The games journalism equivalent of binology involves scouring the job advertisements that developers post, seeking clues as to the content of future titles. Say Popcap were to exhibit a desire to hire a Masters degree wielding “actual unicorn-handler with three years experience of rainbow-wrangling” I would assume Peggle 2 was a glorious physical playground rather than a digital toy. That hasn’t happened, but a poster at NeoGAF spotted that Blizzard are looking to recruit a Franchise Development Producer for their “next-gen MMO”, with one of the main responsibilities being to “work with major consumer brands to facilitate product placement and licensing within the world of Blizzard Entertainment’s next-gen MMO”. Hmmmm.

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#rumor MMO specialist website Massively claims that, according to a "tipster", Blizzard's John Staats has been laid off. Who is John Staats? Only the senior level designer of the company's next big MMO, the successor to World of Warcraft. More »

#titan As World of Warcraft begins its slow, inevitable decline, people will want to hear more about the company's next big MMO. People might be hoping that this project, code-named Titan, will be spoken about at this year's BlizzCon. More »

Reports indicate that Titan, the next MMO from Blizzard, may see an official announcement in October...

Blizzard's next MMO - codenamed Titan - has been under wraps for a long time. Following the internet's rules of speculation, things are likely to get interesting soon. Take, for example, what Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia wrote in an investor's note (PDF). Detailing the various properties Activision Blizzard is likely to launch, specifically those that could ease investors' worries that the publisher's focus is becoming too narrow, Bhatia included "a new casual MMO." He later confirmed to Gamasutra that he was indeed referring to the long-in-development Titan.

Of course, whether or not that's "news" depends on how you define "casual." With 11.4 million active subscribers - and that's a post-Cataclysm dip! - one could say that the mammoth World of Warcraft is already a casual game. And, of course, the game's new free-to-play trial is bound to attract many more casual players as well. Still, the prospect of a Blizzard MMO aimed squarely at the casual market is certainly intriguing - and just a little terrifying.

Gamasutra reports that Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia claims [PDF] that Blizzard’s next big MMO project, Titan, will be a “casual MMO”. Now, in my head at least, “casual” is Zynga, or maybe PopCap. Games with a shallow learning curve, and limited endgame complexity. Now Blizzard games might not be ultra-badcore brainburners, but they are also not casual, and I don’t expect that to change. Quite what analyst means by this term, of course, isn’t clear. Perhaps it was a slip of the finger. Or maybe he is so l33t that anything less ‘core than Darkfall doesn’t stand up in his book. Whatever it means, it paints what I think is an inaccurate picture.

My prediction? I say Titan will be an action MMO, probably an MMOFPS, with a sci-fi setting. It’ll aim wide, be accessible, and snare millions of gamers, but “casual” won’t be a word we use to describe it. Let’s come back here in two years and see who is right.

#clickclick The people who make MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft have another massively multiplayer online game in the works, a game they're calling Titan for now. Blizzard calls it "awesome" and "ambitious." And one analyst calls it "casual." More »

Speaking during a financial earnings call today, Activision COO Thomas Tippl said that if we don't see any games from Blizzard this year, the publisher expects to see them next year. "Because Blizzard Entertainment has not yet confirmed the launch date for its next global release," Tippl told investors and press, "our outlook at this time does not include a new game from Blizzard in 2011." But don't worry, Blizzard fans, Activision's got a whip it's not afraid to crack: "Should we not release a major title from Blizzard this year, we would expect for planning purposes to launch a minimum of two Blizzard titles in 2012."

Presumably, those two titles would be Heart of the Swarm (the Zerg-based expansion for Starcraft 2) and the long-awaited Diablo 3. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime joined the call after Tippl spoke and promised that more information was coming about both. Blizzard's developers, he said, are hard at work on Heart of the Swarm, and we'll hear more "in the coming months."

Additionally, Morhaime said that he would talk about Diablo 3 "and the upcoming beta on the next call," in about three months. "Until we get to beta and have the community help us test the game," he later said, "we're not going to lock in a release date."

Blizzard is also working to get both World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft 2 out in China, but had "no specific updates to share at this time" about those releases -- or the "Titan" MMO, for that matter. Morhaime did plug both the upcoming BlizzCon and Blizzard's twentieth anniversary this year, and closed by saying that "the games we have in the pipeline represent the best and widest slate of games we have ever produced."

Speaking during a financial earnings call today, Activision COO Thomas Tippl said that if we don't see any games from Blizzard this year, the publisher expects to see them next year. "Because Blizzard Entertainment has not yet confirmed the launch date for its next global release," Tippl told investors and press, "our outlook at this time does not include a new game from Blizzard in 2011." But don't worry, Blizzard fans, Activision's got a whip it's not afraid to crack: "Should we not release a major title from Blizzard this year, we would expect for planning purposes to launch a minimum of two Blizzard titles in 2012."

Presumably, those two titles would be Heart of the Swarm (the Zerg-based expansion for Starcraft 2) and the long-awaited Diablo 3. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime joined the call after Tippl spoke and promised that more information was coming about both. Blizzard's developers, he said, are hard at work on Heart of the Swarm, and we'll hear more "in the coming months."

Additionally, Morhaime said that he would talk about Diablo 3 "and the upcoming beta on the next call," in about three months. "Until we get to beta and have the community help us test the game," he later said, "we're not going to lock in a release date."

Blizzard is also working to get both World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft 2 out in China, but had "no specific updates to share at this time" about those releases -- or the "Titan" MMO, for that matter. Morhaime did plug both the upcoming BlizzCon and Blizzard's twentieth anniversary this year, and closed by saying that "the games we have in the pipeline represent the best and widest slate of games we have ever produced."

In an interview with Destructoid, World of Warcraft producer Frank Pearce finally confirmed "Titan" as at least a codename for Blizzard's new MMO projectd. "The media is not supposed to know anything about [Titan]," Pearce said with a smile. "It's our next-gen MMO, and we've only started talking about it in a limited fashion because we wanna leverage the fact that we're working on something like that for the purpose of recruiting, getting some of the best talent in the industry on that project." Does "we made WoW" not work well enough for recruiting developers?

The name "Titan" most recently appeared on an alleged Blizzard release schedule that had supposedly leaked, but Blizzard has declined to verify its authenticity. These documents also contained details about two additional WoW expansions, as well as expansions for Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2.

Could the game live up to the name?