Jak rozpadł się Titan firmy Blizzard

In 2014, Blizzard revealed in an interview with Polygon that it had canceled its ambitious MMO task known as Titan, a follow-up to the massively successful World of Warcraft. A period and a half later, it became clear why Blizzard had been eager to break the news, as it was getting ready to announce its next game, the hero shooter Overwatch — which, as it turned out, was built from any of the scraps Titan left behind.

Fast forward 10 years, and Overwatch has become a staple Blizzard franchise and 1 of the industry’s most popular games. Yet it’s hard not to wonder what could have happened if things had shaken out differently. Fortunately, a fresh book excerpt explains just that.

Below, we have an adapted version of a section from the upcoming book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment by Bloomberg author Jason Schreier. The book covers more than 3 decades of Blizzard history, looking at the fascinating communicative behind the company’s successes and struggles, while the excerpt below focuses specifically on what happened to Titan.

Way back during the ancient days of 2006, video game bloggers and analysts liked to crow regular about the long-awaited “World of Warcraft killer” — the game that would draw distant the iconic Blizzard game’s millions of subscribers. Seemingly all month, another contender failed to pull off the feat, from The Matrix Online to Age of Conan. To paraphrase a certain beloved HBO character: You come at the Lich King, you best not miss.

Still, Blizzard’s executives suspected that a WoW killer would be on the horizon sooner or later — so they figured they should be the ones to make it. The natural next step seemed like a planet of StarCraft, but they struggled to envision StarCraft lore fitting into an MMORPG, so alternatively they decided to make a fresh fictional universe. Blizzard vice president Rob Pardo began gathering a tiny squad of the company’s top developers to incubate this project, with the hope of gradually bringing over the best designers, artists, and programmers from World of Warcraft. Leading the way would be people who had been at Blizzard since the 1990s: Chris Metzen would pen the story, Shane Dabiri would head production, and Justin Thavirat would be art manager on the fresh game, which they called Titan.

Every day, the group would hold long lunches to bounce around ideas for the look and subject of Titan, which would be unlike anything they’d done before — grounded, near-future sci-fi alternatively than space or advanced fantasy. “How do you follow up on the biggest game ever?” Thavirat said in an interview for this story. “I couldn’t see how we could outdo the same formula.” another video games, like Half-Life and Fallout, painted a grim, dystopian image — in contrast, Titan would feel bright and optimistic, possibly attracting people who wouldn’t usually play Blizzard games. “We were truly excited about appealing to a broad audience,” Thavirat said. “Gamers, non-gamers, young, old, men, women, everything in between.”

Titan would be set on an alternate version of Earth in the 2070s. The hook was that it was fundamentally 2 games in one, with players taking control of superhero-like characters who lived average lives during the day and secretly battled against evil forces at night. An early presentation showed the player, as a professional chef, popping a dish into the oven before going off on a secret mission. erstwhile they returned, the dish was perfectly cooked and ready to serve.

A couple of years into development, Titan had a tiny but increasing squad of engineers, artists, and designers who would meet for brainstorming sessions all week. The unit, which Blizzard called squad 4, was envisioned as an all-star team, bringing in the best staff that Pardo could find both within Blizzard and from elsewhere in the industry. People on another Blizzard teams would look over in envy, sometimes begging for a place on what would be the company’s first brand-new franchise in more than a decade. What they didn’t know was that behind the scenes, the game was flailing.

As the Titan squad expanded, bringing in veteran developers from across the video game industry, the group built a near-endless number of prototypes for the civilian condition of the game: fishing, farming, photography, gardening, hacking. This non-combat section, which they called Titan Town, was fundamentally Blizzard’s take on Animal Crossing or The Sims — players would be able to deck out a home with furniture, run a business, and go on quests in their neighborhoods. During playtests, the Titan squad found that any of these game mechanics were fun in isolation, but nobody could envision what game developers called the “core loop,” or the series of actions that players would spend the bulk of their time doing. “It always felt like it was right around the corner,” said Thavirat. “Right around this milestone, this is where things will come together.”

The combat side felt more coherent but was facing its own issues. Each player would be able to choice from 1 of a fistful of superhero classes, like the speedy Jumper, who could teleport short distances, or the sharpshooting Ranger, who wielded a powerful sniper rifle. Players could group up with friends to conflict through dungeons or fight 1 another in team-based competitive battles. These matches could be fun in bursts, but the Titan squad struggled to figure out how to keep players engaged over a long period of time.

Meanwhile, Riot Games was utilizing all that League of Legends cash to poach Blizzard’s staff — including, at 1 point, nearly the full animation team. And the underlying technology behind Titan — all designed from scratch for this task — was hampering the team’s progress, whether it was laggy, incomplete tools or faulty “version control” software that would sometimes prevent the squad from working for hours at a time.

The manufacture had evolved since the days of Warcraft and Diablo, erstwhile video games had simple 2D art and could be programmed by a twelve people over the course of a year or two. Technological advancements made video games look more beautiful all year, but they besides ramped up the complexity of development. By the 2000s, teams were swelling to more than 100 and their games might take 3 years or longer to produce. The larger a game squad grew, the harder it became to coordinate tech, make a consistent art style, and execute on a single coherent vision.

Team 4’s artists drew concepts for Titan’s colorful classes and futuristic cities — bright, idyllic versions of regions like east Europe and the western United States — but many of the designs kept changing as the game evolved in different directions. An interior repository called TitanArt grew so bloated, with thousands of images, that artists would sometimes draw characters or cities only to later learn that individual else had already done the same years earlier. “The amount of art we did was adequate for 5 games,” said artist Vadim Bakhlychev in an interview for this story.

One artist, speaking for this story, described working on the task as an interminable state of déjà vu — like they were surviving in Groundhog Day. They’d draw costumes and furniture, take long lunches, and then fine-tune what they’d already made. There are no seasons in Irvine, where Blizzard is located, so it was always dry, sunny, and 60-80 degrees — which made it hard to tell the weeks apart. “Was that yesterday?” the artist said. “Was it last year? What day was this?” They were arrogant of the art they were making, but it was hard not to wonder if 1 day, individual was going to come down from advanced and realize that they weren’t making much progress. “There was a feeling that Blizzard had fundamentally written a blank check to fund this game and that bred a sense of complacency within the team,” the artist said. “We were not working with any kind of urgency.”

Making games is always hard. Making fresh franchises is even harder. And making a fresh franchise at a company full of perfectionists, with the force of surpassing World of Warcraft, with a squad that was increasing larger than that of any task in Blizzard’s past — well, that was proving to be impossible.

Later, respective developers on the squad would blame many of Titan’s struggles on Rob Pardo. As Blizzard’s vice president of game design, Pardo was besides overseeing StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, and the remainder of the company’s projects, which limited the time he had for Titan. “He at times seemed like an absentee game director,” said 1 developer. To mitigate this problem, Pardo had brought in 2 lead designers: Jeff Kaplan, who had designed quests on World of Warcraft, and Matt Brown, who had worked on The Sims and SimCity at EA’s Maxis. But Pardo remained manager of the task and would occasionally jump in with feedback, forcing the squad to change course and possibly throw out months of work. “I think erstwhile you want to lead something, you have a work to lead,” said Connie Griffith, who worked as an assistant to Pardo. “And if you are not able to give it your full attention, you request to relinquish control.” (Pardo declined to comment.)

Titan had gone from a dream task to demoralizing for many members of squad 4. Designers would spend weeks getting excited about an idea, then set up a gathering with Pardo to review it only for him to shoot it down without offering an explanation or alternate direction. On erstwhile games, not everyone had always agreed with Pardo’s decisions, but at least he had made them. On Titan, he appeared to be unwilling or incapable to commit to a vision, squad members said — possibly due to the pressure. “There was this fear of the sophomore album,” said Griffith. “What can we do that’s as good as World of Warcraft?”

With years of improvement behind it and very small to show, the Titan squad began building a vertical part set in the game’s near-future version of California, complete with a suite of mechanics like driving and combat. Parts of the demo were excellent, but it became clear that the cohesion problem wasn’t going away. It felt as if the squad had made a twelve different games but had no way to unify them — like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces wouldn’t fit together — and it continued to conflict with both method and artistic challenges. But this was Blizzard. surely squad 4 would get more time to nail down Titan. “The work was super inefficient, and the scope constantly grew,” said 1 artist, “but everyone trudged along calmly, assuming Blizzard would proceed backing this endeavor indefinitely.”

Then 1 morning in the spring of 2013, as developers on the Titan squad trickled into the office, they noticed that rows of folding chairs had been set up in the common area for an impromptu all-hands meeting. erstwhile it started, Pardo stood up and dropped the large news: Titan wasn’t working out, so he and the another Blizzard executives had decided to reboot it.

For Thavirat, this was bittersweet news. On 1 hand, Blizzard was throwing distant countless hours’ worth of work from his nearly 7 years on the task that would never be seen. On the other, he recognized that Titan couldn’t keep going the way it was headed. “It was tough,” Thavirat said, “but there was besides a small bit of relief.”

At the end of the day, Titan cost Blizzard around $80 million, according to people with cognition of the financials. Many of its staff moved to Blizzard’s another teams, while a fewer were laid off. Jeff Kaplan, Chris Metzen, and a fistful of artists and engineers stayed behind to effort to figure out whether Titan’s remains could be salvaged — a process that would later lead to the hit game Overwatch, which transformed Titan’s classes into memorable heroes.

Later, Pardo stood up in front of the company, tears in his eyes, as he gave a presentation about why Titan had failed. He noted that he should have done more about the game’s method and artistic problems, which squad 4 members saw as a backhanded way of blaming another people for the game’s issues — the last straw for some. The longtime Blizzard designer had stewarded quite a few large games and was CEO Mike Morhaime’s heir apparent, but now he had lost the trust of Blizzard’s another leaders. respective executives and directors demanded that he be removed from a position of leadership. They didn’t want to study to him anymore; didn’t want him overseeing their fresh projects.

Pardo took a sabbatical as Morhaime and his squad tried to find Pardo’s future at Blizzard. At first, the squad talked about possibly shifting his responsibilities, but after a fewer months, Morhaime met with Pardo and told him it would be best if he resigned. In the summertime of 2014, Pardo announced that he was leaving Blizzard, saying publically that he had made the “difficult and bittersweet but yet breathtaking decision to prosecute the next chapter in my life and career.”

The failure of Titan would have ripple effects for years to come.