Blizzard has a long history of making great stand alone games that just happen to double as testing environments. Following Overwatch I have no doubts that this will be a success but I can't help but ask myself these questions so I thought I'd throw them out to the GB Community.

Will Overwatch just be what it is?

Will Overwatch serve to be the beta test for Blizzard's "Titan" goals?

Will Overwatch be updated to the point that it becomes what Blizzard had in mind with "Titan"?

Will Blizzard eventually release a paid expansion, Overwatch 2 or "Titan"?

All of the above? None of the above? Or (despite me just not seeing it) do you think Overwatch is going to fall flat and send Blizz back to the drawing board?

no. i think it was a design problem, not an appeal problem. if blizzard couldn't figure out an mmo, i doubt they'll return to it.

Correct. Titan is a dead project. They tried different iterations of said design scope, and were not satisfied with any of them. Further, present Blizzard is focused on making niche games focusing on specific segments of the esports scene, with esports being a focus they have invested in. Overwatch fills the FPS team niche, and while they have said it might be nice to have a singleplayer side to it, it would not be in Overwatch and likely would be a different game altogether.

What history is that? Not even necessarily disagreeing with you, just not sure what you're referring to.

I think Overwatch as is,is what we are going to get.

I do hope at some point there is a spinoff game in that universe because the character design and general look of it is fantastic and would be far easier to appreciate in a single player setting.

I doubt we'll see paid DLC , but I bet blizz will toss in new maps etc occasionally and will load it up with microtransaction cosmetics.

@mellotronrules: Maybe this was a bit of an overstatement, but Blizzard clearly has a history of re-using lessons learned. Balance data from Warcraft/Diablo to assist in balancing Starcraft/Diablo 2, load data from Starcraft/WC3/Diablo to prepare for WoW. Just wondering if they will actively compile data from Overwatch to solve the issues they were having with creating Titan in an effort to someday execute on that vision.

@bigsocrates: Correct me if I'm wrong but when you say "if blizzard couldn't figure out an MMO" I assume you mean they couldn't figure out "this style" of MMO?

TF2, as the obvious point of comparison, started off as one basic class multiplayer thing with a handful of modes, and over time they bolted on equipment load outs, hats, new game modes, better video recording and editing integration, etc. Still, they never dramatically broadened the scope of the whole game because integrating that with the existing FPS would be a pretty significant undertaking. So same deal with Overwatch; broadening the scope of the whole game would be a ton of work, and using Overwatch as some weird introduction to the "Titan" setting seems like a stretch.

I don't think it is at all likely that Overwatch is the beginning of some gradual resurrection of the ideas that were in "Titan". I suspect that if anything, the FPS multiplayer we're seeing in Overwatch is probably the one aspect of "Titan" that everyone agreed already worked pretty well.

@bigsocrates: @bisonhero: I'm inclined to agree with both of you as I'm at a loss to think of any game that has truly, successfully pulled off combining action-based PvP gameplay with number based progression without making the the two two separate elements and creating questionable motivation for one or the other.

@professoress: The examples you gave don't really transfer. Every (good) developer learns from game to game. You can learn balancing an RTS from making an RTS (same with action RPG) and managing a server load from running a big multiplayer game, but how do you learn MMO design from a shooter? If they didn't learn how to make Titan from WOW then Overwatch is not going to do anything for them.

MMOs as a genre are no longer what they once were. I doubt we'll see a big "traditional" MMO launch again after Elder Scrolls, at least until VR has high penetration and you can create a truly immersive world (and then people will DIE from playing VR WOW if the game isn't careful to force them to do things like eat, sleep, and exercise.)

Titan is dead. Overwatch is a (successful) salvage project for some of the assets. Blizzard MAY make an MMO again somewhere long down the line, but it won't be Titan.

@bigsocrates: That's fair. You could replace "Blizzard" with "Any good developer" in my original post but I still feel like Blizzard as a history of learning and using said lessons better than most.

If you watched any of the Gamespot videos and developer interviews, they pretty much buried Titan and drank it down, it just didn't work. Overwatch has only a few borrowed things from it. And yeah if you're at all interested I highly recommend watching those interviews, they're pretty interesting.

Not sure how you can say Warcraft/Diablo was testing for Starcraft/Diablo 2.

Those examples you gave are just examples of iteration. By your logic any game made is just a "testing environment" if said game ever gets a sequel or if the dev ever makes another game. Was Halo just a testing environment for Bungie to make Destiny? Since they implemented a lot of what they learned from making Halo into Destiny.

I would love to read an in-depth post mortem with the dev team where the details of how Overwatch came to be and what assets were salvaged from Titan and what weren't. I think that would be super interesting.

It will not happen. Guaranteed.

@professoress: @bigsocrates:

I recall from a podcast around the time that EQNext was cancelled that that game was cancelled because "it just wasn't fun." The critics (the good folks at http://massivelyop.com, where I tend to go for MMO criticism these days since no one else does it), talked about how their language was very similar to Blizzard's for cancelling Titan, and listed several other cancelled projects.

The point that they made was that it looks as if when a company says these days "we cancelled this MMORPG because it just wasn't fun," that's generally their excuse for not stating their real reason for scrapping their project: big budget WoW style MMO's these days just don't make the money they need to take that kind of massive risk. They ran numbers and the numbers were just not good enough to satisfy them. Or possibly in the case of EQN, they didn't have the funding to complete the game.

Obviously we can also just take their "it just wasn't fun!" statement at face value, but how the hell do they manage to go years and years developing these games and sinking millions into them and after all that somehow realise that they weren't fun.

@zombie2011: Again, a bit of an overstatement, but iteration is tantamount to testing. I didn't really mean to imply that Blizzard was special in this regard.

But I do believe Bungie is actually one of the better companies for this and yeah... I do believe Bungie aggregated significant experience and data that inspired the development of Destiny and aided in Activision's decision to support it.

@professoress: I don't know if you watched the videos Danny O'Dwyer made on gamespot about Overwatch, but the developers he interviewed seemed like they had moved on from Titan. I don't think it will happen.

It brings to mind how much Blizzard learned by showing too much of Starcraft Ghost. That was terrible because they just kept adding content into a development that went too long to become profitable. They announced that game in 2002, and 2005 other studios were talking about dev kits of the PS3 and 360. Titan was rumored around 2007, it used to be part of the rumor of Microsoft wanting an MMO on the 360 (actually they did announce that there was a Marvel MMO by the City of Heroes team).

Again with all this secrecy about this project probably has a lot to do with them understanding the market and they would cannibalize their own series. At some point after Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm interest levels just dipped because of interest in MOBAs. The thing is anyone who talked about Titan was probably moved to push Heart of the Storm development. As much Overwatch could have been just scrapped graphics from Titan.... I still don't believe we will know what their ideas and their ambitions of how they wanted to roll out that game, from servers handling different gameplay, or even how you would pay for it..... it's like how when Rich Gallup was on the Bombcast talking about the canceled MMO Project Copernicus even if you did get that computer files you still don't have a server and people to run it. Because when we talk about an MMO a lot of that is still server side.

Right now I do think a lot about canceled game developments. Like, at some point Duke Nukem 4 had artists from Star Wars episode 2 designing levels for them, or I reading one artist talk about Disney Infinity was in development since 2008. And a lot of the time it's the stuff we see on animator's demo reels.... but if you did want to play an early build..... maybe there was something, but even then those are so Slice, you push forward too much and the world falls apart.

I really hope they just keep adding to Overwatch. New characters, maps, modes and cosmetic items would be more than enough for me.

Maybe once they finish up Starcraft: Ghost

Not a chance, Overwatch will be what it is.

The next huge MMO is probably going to be one built for VR, because the current style has been tried a million times already with no other huge successes like WoW.

Might be SAO, who knows.

Honestly, I question whether a relationship between Overwatch and Titan ever actually existed.

Titan is a very dead project Blizzard doesn't fuck around, and your correct Overwatch and Titan crossover is questionable, heres a quote from a Blizz dev:

"There are definitely some similarities between Titan and Overwatch. But Overwatch really is its own project built from the ground up."

"We learned mostly what not to do while working on Titan."

AkA Not Titan.

Game ideas have to evolve over time but after WoW nobody knew what that meant for mmos. The short answer was "copy what works" but obviously that only works for so long. After that burned itself out devs were left with a genre with no discernible future. You can only have so many big budget projects flop/fall apart before developers take their ball and go home.

So no, I don't think Titan can exist in this climate.