Titan has been officially canceled by Blizzard after a year and a half delay. Since around May of 2013, the developer attempted to "reset" the project by shrinking its staff down to a core group of thirty, down from a hundred. This team wanted Titan to embody their wildest ambitions, but they realized that it was not going to be fun. "Fun" is not the goal of every game, nor should it be.
If "fun" was the intention though, and it isn't, then you have a problem.
As for the employees, there does not seem to be any discussion of lay-offs. 16 months ago, when the team was downsized from 100 to 30, Blizzard claimed that its staff would be reassigned to other projects. The smaller, core team is not mentioned today at all, positively or negatively. Whether that is a good sign, and why it never came up in the inteview, is still unknown. Hopefully they will be transferred to an existing game or service, or work on a different, new product.
What argument or evidence do
What argument or evidence do you have that “‘Fun’ is not the goal of every game, nor should it be”? Short of gambling, I don’t see how this stands.
Boiling down an whole medium
Boiling down an whole medium to a single metric of value is naive. The obvious counter-example is an interactive work that conveys a narrative, but has stupid mechanics.
It could be entertaining, but not fun; neither entertaining or fun, but enlightening; or a terrible experience that is awful and upsetting, but lets the artist express a difficult part of their humanity.
It could also be fun.
or a terrible experience that
or a terrible experience that is awful and upsetting, but lets the artist express a difficult part of their humanity.
It could also be fun.
Well, if it wasn’t fun, would you still play this medium of expression? Seems to me it is based on whether it is fun or not.
I think there is more being read into “fun” than what is there. A few quotes from the linked polygon article:
“We didn’t find the fun,” Morhaime continued. “We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”
“In many ways, Titan was that for us,” Metzen said. “We took a step back and realized that it had some cool hooks. It definitely had some merit as a big, broad idea, but it didn’t come together. It did not distill. The music did not flow. For all our good intentions and our experience and the pure craftsmanship that we brought together, we had to make that call.”
Looks like they based their efforts on a few metrics other than fun. If you disagree that is fine, but in the end it’s clear they weren’t interested in the work they were doing and it reflected in the product.
I would still play the
I would still play the content just like I'd still watch a sad movie. Fair point about "based their efforts on a few metrics other than fun", though.
Wonder what their plan for
Wonder what their plan for the future is, riding WOW down to the gutter and then quit?
If you were raking in
If you were raking in billions from a popular game, what would you do? As an investor and game-maker, I would be pretty happy that my game was so profitable while still maintaining such a huge following for TEN YEARS, especially in the face of so much competition over that time. Blizzard has a license to print money in the form of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Why change now?
http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/
If they made a less cartoony
If they made a less cartoony MMO than WoW, id be in! Until then ill meddle with everything else. I also wish there would be a revised Age of Conan.