KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Back in 2014, Blizzard officially announced that it was pulling the plug on its next generation MMO known as Titan. The game was stuck in various stages of development for seven years but eventually, the whole game was scrapped and the team working on it went on to create Overwatch instead. Now, just ahead of the shooter's launch next month, the game's director has spoken a little about his experience working on Titan before its cancellation.
In a recent interview with Gamespot, Overwatch director, Jeff Kaplan gave us a bit of background as to the state of Titan when it was cancelled, claiming that the team “failed horrifically”: “You had a really amazing group that was working on Titan. They were really talented individuals, but we failed horrifically in every way… In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating”.
Titan concept art by Blizzard Senior Artist, Nick Carver (via Kotaku)
“You had these people who either came from other companies or from within Blizzard, and were used to working on games that were very successful like a World of Warcraft, for example. To go through such a complete and utter failure is very hard for people who are used to experiencing success.”
Due to the success of most Blizzard franchises, the Titan team had a hard time trying to live up to expectations and felt a huge amount of pressure. While that project may have failed, out of the ashes rose Overwatch, which has reinvigorated the team: “When it came to move to Overwatch there was an extremely tight bond on the team and a ravenous hunger to show the world that we’re not failures and we can make something really fun”.
While Overwatch has been available to plenty of YouTubers and streamers for the last few months, the game will finally be having a short open beta running from the 5th of May until the 9th, ahead of its final launch on the 24th.
KitGuru Says: While we didn't get too many details, it certainly sounds like the team working on Titan hit their fair share of challenges. However, something good did come out of the experience in the end. Are any of you looking forward to Overwatch? Would you guys like to see Blizzard come out with a new MMO at some point?
i enjoy overwatch but i don’t think it will be what Titan was supposed to be which is a great game that will last a decade. If they thought Titan was a their biggest failure, i’d like to remind them of Diablo 3. Although Diablo 3 made its sales, it damaged the brand hard and left nothing but a sour taste in everyone’s mouths. Blizzard is about great story and fun gameplay. Overwatch seems to not have much a story and with no campaign well….i guess we have to see. Maybe their new direction is releasing short animated films to get us to care about the lore of Overwatch….
This is no shock really. Blizzard have been cruising on their past success and I think lack a huge amount of skill for modern games. None of their games in the last 10 years have had anything innovative or any modern technical features. Heck, they are still using their god awful engine which WoW is based on for every single game of theirs. This means they have invested next to nothing on training or modernisation.
The great small team of friends that used to be blizzard, that made WoW, has long broken up. Some have even left to make their own lousy mmo’s like WILDSTAR. Together they were strong, but apart they are weak.
Do you hear me internets? WILDSTAR STINKS!!! It was and is so incredibly boring. I bet titan would have been a lot like it.
They should have listened to a nobody like me all those years ago and made a Star Craft MMO with same style as WoW but updated engine, 3 main races with several offshoots.
Would of been interesting to see which side people pick as all 3 are good, I usually like playing on the good side but I could see myself playing as Zerg. 😉
I bet that a Star Craft MMO would have been just as huge as WoW.
“my room mate Mary Is getting paid on the internet 98$/hr”..,……..!wc112ctwo days ago grey MacLaren P1 I bought after earning 18,512 DoIIars..it was my previous month’s payout..just a little over.17k DoIIars Last month..3-5 hours job a day…with weekly payouts..it’s realy the simplest. job I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months. ago. and now making over. hourly 87 DoIIars…Learn. More right Here !wc112:➽:➽:➽➽➽➽ http://GlobalSuperJobsReportsEmploymentsRavenGetPayHourly$98…. .❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦::::::!wc112……
My friends and I still play D3 and its still getting content/patches. 😛
“my room mate Mary Is getting paid on the internet 98$/hr”..,……..!wc146ctwo days ago grey MacLaren P1 I bought after earning 18,512 DoIIars..it was my previous month’s payout..just a little over.17k DoIIars Last month..3-5 hours job a day…with weekly payouts..it’s realy the simplest. job I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months. ago. and now making over. hourly 87 DoIIars…Learn. More right Here !wc146:➽:➽:➽➽➽➽ http://GlobalSuperJobsReportsEmploymentsCollaborativeGetPayHourly$98…. .❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦:❖❖:❦❦::::::!wc146……,.
lol u can level in less than 2 hours to max and be fully geared in another hour with sets/legendaries. The game is easymode. To be honest it was actually a lot better right at launch when it was super hard and when everyone was struggling to get past act 2. All they really needed to do was update items to make them as good as now and keep the difficulty.
wrong
I guess you’re right, i could level to max in less than 1.5 hours.
and have shit gear
There isn’t a need to do a total rewrite of the engine. Especially when not much has really changed in the past 10 years. New features have been added but still following the same frameworks that were in place back in 2003. Valve have evolved the source engine over the years and have still be able to create some impressive visuals.
What?! Sorry, but Valve are a bad example as they have only made Dota recently and that looks dire for 2016. Blizz nor Valve use engines which come close to Unity 4, Unreal 4 or CryEngine 3. Where is the DX 12 support, heck, what about full DX11 utilisation?
You don’t see my point at all. Valve have used evolution rather than revolution as they have realised there are more important things than being the first to support the latest Direct X. They are in fact trying to move away from Direct X and being tied down to windows. Crytek have spent masses of money trying to be cutting edge in terms of visuals and that’s all they are. Most of the Farcry games are merely a graphical showcase. They pumped in so much money into developing cryEngine that they couldn’t even pay their employees. Yes sometimes you have to scrap an old dog and move on. But a well designed game engine can last ages, especially when the PC games industry hasn’t had major competition or major change in the lifespan of those engines.
Hm you have never used game engines otherwise you would know that nearly every game only uses a handful of features on offer. Again, look at UE4. what the heck does Source offer in terms of destruction , real time rendering etc?
I’ve used source. I’ve usedone UE4. I’ve used unity, I’ve even written my own basic 2.5d opengl engine. People bash game engines all the time. There is more to it than graphics. A good game engine will run well on lots of devices. If you need groundbreaking graphics to sell a game then it must be pretty shit in other departments.
So then you should know the pros and cons of modern engines…which leaves me baffled to what you previously said. You should have realized that their engine is decades old with no modern features. Why else is the performance in SC and Diablo 3 so poor? Its an ancient engine with too much bolted onto it. They shouldn’t have tried dragging it into the modern world and should have used their fortune to make a new engine.
Overwatch is a classic example. For me it runs well on lots of machines. It’s requirements are low because the game is pretty simple. It doesn’t have anything fancy going on. It makes up for that in other areas using good game design. The Farcry games have always looked nice and been leading the way with graphics technology. Put them into a multiplayer environment and they are crap. It feels slow and sluggish and there is no connection with the game. So which is the better engine? The one that looks nice, or the one that runs a well designed game perfectly well? Apples and Oranges, 2 different approaches, neither is right or wrong. Blizzard have got guys working on those engines that are miles better than me and you. They aren’t fools.
Unfortunately you have confused game design with the engine.
The pace of the game etc has nothing to do with the engine but to do with design. Ubi could have made FarCry a twitch fps if they wanted to =p Also FarCry achieves lower fps because of many, many technical challenges such as far more complex shaders, more objects to draw, Ubisoft being inept etc. Overwatch runs well because it is doing absolutely nothing new and could have come out years ago (hence so many gpus getting 100’s of fps on it). Just compare the technical achievements of BF4 (and how old it is) and how it runs compared to Overwatch.
Blizz will have very few lead programmers for graphics and be doing no experiments because it doesn’t have to. It has made a style based on very simple aesthetics so they don’t have to struggle with advanced PBR methods, workflow tools, new pipelines etc. Anyone wanting to work on those challenges will be elsewhere (probably at Epic).
To quickly sum it up, what can Blizzs engine do? It has never released a tech demo for a reason…
PS. Don’t assume Blizz know what they are doing. The article is about them failing spectacularly and the gaming industry as a whole seems highly inept! Just work for any big firm in a big industry and you’ll see just how amateur gaming devs are =D
You say I have confused game design with the engine, when in fact you have done that yourself. I wasn’t talking about pacing of the game. I was talking about the performance of the game, Farcry games for me have often felt disconnected because they have often run like crap on current gen hardware when they are released. So you don’t get a responsive input.
You obviously have a love for massive game engines that can do anything and everything. Part of the problem with this design is that the engine is bloatware. The advantages are it’s quicker to make a game and there should be less bugs as the core engine should be tried and tested. But that doesn’t means it’s optimised to “YOUR NEEDS”. The advantage that Blizzard has in using bespoke engines is that they can design the engine around the games needs. Overwatch for example was written ground up. They kept it simple because sometimes less is more. And in my humble opinion I would say Overwatch runs a lot better than the much acclaimed frostbite engine on lower end machines, albeit it’s capable of much less.
You don’t need to release a tech demo unless you’re trying to sell a commercial engine to other dev’s. They aren’t selling an engine, they are selling a game.
My point is that a good tight game engine only really does what is needed. If there is no need for it do more then it’s just bloatware. There is no need for some games to offer the latest and greatest graphics techniques as some games out there don’t require amazing graphics to sell the game. One of the best engines ever made was the quake 3 engine and so many major games used it because it was so tight, reliable and efficient for the time, it was a great base to start with. Thus my originally point that the best engine isn’t necessarily the engine that can do “everything” and has realistic weather, realistic waves, realistic wind, photo-realistic ray-traced shadows, super foliage and other bs used to sell a game engine.
The games have only ran badly if you’ve had a naff PC. I’ve never had an issue with them nor have many people so that’s a problem on your end.
Also design elements will make it less responsive e.g. time to get into vehicles, reload, aim time etc.
Engines? Blizz have only been using one engine for years and just do a shoddy job of re-utilizing it. They wrote a “new” engine after 16 years? That’s very poor. Also engines don’t have bloatware – that fact that you call additional utilities and tools bloatware shows how inexperienced you are at programming. Blizz have few bugs because there is not much to the game. Also you just reasoned why their games should be much cheaper as the dev costs are far lower. Why pay £45 for a game that was made in a 1/4 of the time by less people than another game at £45?
It runs well because it is basic tech. You might as well say Dota runs well on old platforms compared to the Witcher 3.
Why not sell the engine as additional income? What company doesn’t want more money? Oh right, its because they couldn’t sell their engine as it offers nothing new or anything decent and any studio could do the same.
No – a good engine offers everything at no additional costs. Just because Blizz made a simple game with a simple engine does not show their technical prowess in any way, shape, or form. It just shows a massive studio that has been around for decades made a simple engine. Frankly, that is concerning.
id Tech 3 wasn’t actually that popular. UE 3 was far more successful and the reason was because it was versatile. The best engines can do everything with ease and can support new features with no problems. This is why good engines still use the original foundations e.g. the UE series of engines or the X-ray Engine. The X-ray engine showed how fantastic it was with the unbelievable amount of complex mods it could integrate into it. A good engine (UE engines) provides a solid foundation that can be built on where as bad engines just fall over when they have too much added on to them e.g. Gamebryo or Anvil.
Also you just focus on what graphics the engine offers rather than work flow utilization methods which implies to me that you have never worked. These features are a huge selling point as it saves millions of pounds (or more) per project due to speeding up delivery (easier to work with, faster to work with, less bugs etc).
You keep coming back. You have no evidence that blizzard have used the same engine, you are guessing. All references on web say they use bespoke in house engines because they can optimise them better. It takes longer to create a game without using a mainstream game engine/package. I’ve worked in many languages doing different types of work. For example web development. A lot of big companies now use drupal, hybris, django etc etc. Now I know if I write a website from scratch with my own backend I can write something smaller, quicker than if I used a framework, which is what I tended to do. But someone else could create something a lot quicker using a framework with adequate performance. The same goes for game development. I know I can create my own game from scratch or I can use Unity. It would take me a lot longer to write the game from scratch, but in the end I could optimise it much better than with Unity because I have full control, I am not relying on somebody else’s work that is optimised to do other things I don’t need it to do. So all in all it’s a trade off. To you it might not seem worth it as blizzards games offer nothing over an off the shelf product. Blizzard actually used Unity for Hearthstone, but that’s because that project had a shorter timescale and even with unity it could still run well on lots of devices.
As for the problem of some games not running well on my end. I wasn’t talking about me personally. I have always had a high end rig. I was talking about a lot of other people that don’t. This is partly why games like TF2 and CS:GO are so popular. They can run well on lots of devices. Not everyone can afford a £400+ graphics card every other year.
I agree with you that in some cases it’s much better to use a 3rd party engine that does everything and is proven. For smaller indie peeps it makes perfect sense and Unity’s business model makes it easy for them. It’s a great to see this available and only promotes more people to start making games. But surely you can see my point that not all games need the latest graphics features to be a great game. Blizzard have never been about pushing photo realistic graphics.
Well the shaders are a giveaway. However if it is “bespoke in-house” engine it would be a respin of what they have. Why? Because it would be the easiest option as you wouldn’t have to retrain all your staff to use an off-the-shelf engine.
As optimization goes, that’s limited to the competency of the engine and staff using it. UE4 is very efficient and most engines are highly optimized nowadays. Just show me a popular commercial engine that isn’t.
You have full control? But of what exactly? A handful of features? As you say, they made a basic engine for a basic game….which is my point. It shows no technical prowess in any way. But it also means they can’t add much to it either. A good company would get the best engine and optimize that as it would allow for greater capability if needed. Instead they have cornered themselves in a similar fashion to WoW. It’s 2016 but that game looks and plays terribly now because they can’t expand on it. Short term gains impacting long term performance.
A £100 gpu will do well on most games and always has. You just have people who don’t know how to use settings ^^ Also those games are popular for many other reasons besides running well. Heck, you can get 200 + fps on BF4 and far more on BF3 but that doesn’t mean all the CS:GO players will move to it.
I agree, graphics are certainly not indicative of the quality of the game. Prison Architect is a perfect example. It is extremely complex with simple graphics. However, it is also a game made by less than a dozen folks and an Indy company. It is also leading in the genre. Blizz and Overwatch on the other hand is a massive company achieving nothing new in the genre. Yes, it has sold well etc which shows that they have a good design process and marketing strategy (I’m not going to bring in fan loyalty, launcher advertising etc), HOWEVER it does not show that they are technically competent. They re-spun a basic game for a basic genre which had been stagnant for years. That’s just taking advantage of a gap in the market rather than technical skill.
If you’re still disagreeing then please say where you think Blizz have done something technically outstanding in the last 10 years.
They fail on WoW also…