Old History Question

[lepidopter]

EDIT-- ignore this whole thing, turns out it's nonsense.  I thought I'd checked a couple months ago to see if any info about this stuff had been made public in the last 10 years, but apparently I uhhhh didn't actually do that.  Sorry!

 

 

So finding out this game is actually really good (flawed ofc) makes me wonder about the old Blizzard project, Titan.  Mods feel free to move this to a different section.  Or delete it, or paint it pink and make it about cartoon bunnies, it's your forum after all.  But I think this is about CoX in the same way questions about Blizzard creating WoW are Everquest questions.  Since outside of Diablo (different studio) what old-skool Blizz did was make really good copies of other games, and it seems likely they tried to do that with CoX.

 

What I heard years ago (while WoTLK was live, or maybe even TBC) was that Blizz pulled a lot of their A team off WoW to work on a secret project, their next MMO.  Later the name Titan comes out, and then much later word leaks it was actually a superhero thing all along.  We also hear they went through many versions, scrapped all of them because they could never "find the fun" but the last version was the basis for Overwatch.  My questions are about the first(?) version they scrapped, and that period of early development.  Rumor about that version was, 2 parts, day-job system and then hero system.

 

First question.  Who decided the fun hadn't been found?  The dev team?  Or the new Activision corporate overlords that thought Cata was a good idea, and pretty obviously wouldn't know a fun game if it bit them in the ass...  or maybe just walked into their office calling itself Project Titan...  I always thought it was a tragedy and a surprise Titan didn't manage to weez the juice, I'd say it's one of two things that killed MMOs.  But what if they DID weez the juice, and had the framework of a really good superhero game years ago, which Activision stupidly buried?

 

Second question, do you think the copy would have captured what makes CoX so uniquely good?  Personally I think not entirely, partly because both the CoH/CoV music and writing betray an understanding of culture (and even subculture) that video game dev houses almost never have, and Blizz pretty spectacularly didn't.  Ofc I also think Blizz completely failed to copy or replace a lot of what made early EQ so good, we know how the market voted THERE.  And a lot of game systems in CoX could desperately use some polish, like well ALL of them.  Old-skool Blizz was really good at that.

 

Anybody here know anything about any of the above, that you're in a position to divulge?  I assume anyone with direct knowledge is under NDA, but there must be rumors...  Maybe a long shot, but this is one of 2 maybe 3 non-discord places on the internet I think it's worth asking.    

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by lepidopter

[Snarky]

I am playing WoW now like crazy.  I am soloing a ret pali through all loremaster horde side.  
 

WoW is not great.  It is like fast food when you want steak dinner.  But….steak is not available due to shortages (cash,time, cant find restaurants etc).  Fast food is there.  There is a lot of it.  Its not great.  
 

I bring this up to point out what WoW seems to have realized….they suck.   Good for them

 

One of the forgotten reasons CoX is so special is the Devs missed their mark hard.  And made a cult classic.  
 

One of my issues with the current Dev team (and I give them full props for talent and writing skills) is that in my opinion they are slowly but surely “correcting” a lot of the “errors”. I mean they are turning this into a Tank/Heal/DPS/DPS/DPS/DPS….. slogfest.  With only the bestest team/league design even being able to handle some stuff.  
 

To me the fun was always the oddball with super powers swatting at the world

 

Give me a “Mystery Men” or “Suicide Squad” anyday over another cookie cutter Batman movie

[biostem]

I don't think the CoH-offshoot "Titan" is the former WoW project you mentioned.  I don't think Blizzard had any intentions of going into the superhero genre - it seems they found their niche in fantasy and sci-fi, (Warcraft & Starcraft, respectively).  

[lepidopter]

1 hour ago, biostem said:

I don't think the CoH-offshoot "Titan" is the former WoW project you mentioned.  I don't think Blizzard had any intentions of going into the superhero genre - it seems they found their niche in fantasy and sci-fi, (Warcraft & Starcraft, respectively).  

Of course this is mostly based on old rumors.  But there was solid info Titan was the project name, was superhero-based, and was going to be their next MMO.

[TygerDarkstorm]

This was pretty easy to google in a couple of seconds: https://kotaku.com/heres-what-blizzards-titan-actually-was-1638632121

And no, it was not meant to be a superhero or CoH-like game.

 

The CoH related Titan project was, as I recall, being worked on by former CoH devs.

Edit: The CoH related Titan can be found here: https://cityoftitans.com/

Not sure why the needless speculation and rumors when the facts are out there and easily found.

Edited September 20, 2022 by TygerDarkstorm

[Omega-202]

Titan was always described as a "shooter with powers, online RPG" and not a true MMO.  All descriptions from the time before it got retooled into Overwatch made it sound a lot more like Destiny, Anthem or Borderlands than a super hero MMO that tried to do what CoH does.  

 

I don't think there was any real corellation.  

[lepidopter]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

I am playing WoW now like crazy...  WoW is not great...  I bring this up to point out what WoW seems to have realized….they suck.

sure, and some of the people who made the OG version, which I'd argue has zero to do with the version you seem to be talking about, saw this coming years ago.  We have a pretty good idea what Nu-Blizz would do with a superhero MMO, fail and make something corporate plastic, oh look there's Overwatch.

[Snarky]

3 minutes ago, lepidopter said:

sure, and some of the people who made the OG version, which I'd argue has zero to do with the version you seem to be talking about, saw this coming years ago.  We have a pretty good idea what Nu-Blizz would do with a superhero MMO, fail and make something corporate plastic, oh look there's Overwatch.

i tried the OG version for a month when iy rebooted Classic a couple years ago.  What killed it for me was the even more lopsided content.  The need to be on a team or working with 5 others in your area / pug equivalent is just not my style.  I solo a lot.  It still suffers from that but the classic stuff was stupid.  Insta death unless you had every zone memorized where you could be, where you could not.

[lepidopter]

7 minutes ago, TygerDarkstorm said:

This was pretty easy to google in a couple of seconds: https://kotaku.com/heres-what-blizzards-titan-actually-was-1638632121

And no, it was not meant to be a superhero or CoH-like game...  Not sure why the needless speculation and rumors when the facts are out there and easily found.

I stopped following the story several years before that came out, apologies.  I didn't know about it.  Speculation is because I found it interesting.

[lepidopter]

so, uhhh, apologies to everyone who read this, and especially anyone who I replied to.  I had a clear memory of thinking recently "huh, I wonder if there's any public info yet about Titan from all those years ago" and looking into it, and finding that there wasn't any.  According to my search history, I didn't actually do that.  If I thought there was the slightest possibility that memory wasn't ummm real I would have done basic research before writing any of this.  I try not to waste other people's time with nonsense (I like to waste it with other stuff instead haha).  Getting older is weird.

 

So, I'm sorry folks.  100% my fault, in case that wasn't obvious.

 

 

(I still think they were good questions, IF you ignore all the reasons why they weren't.)

[Luminara]

28 minutes ago, lepidopter said:

100% my fault

 

[Doomguide2005]

On 9/19/2022 at 8:25 PM, TygerDarkstorm said:

This was pretty easy to google in a couple of seconds: https://kotaku.com/heres-what-blizzards-titan-actually-was-1638632121

And no, it was not meant to be a superhero or CoH-like game.

 

The CoH related Titan project was, as I recall, being worked on by former CoH devs.

Edit: The CoH related Titan can be found here: https://cityoftitans.com/

Not sure why the needless speculation and rumors when the facts are out there and easily found.

     City of Titans development team, far as I know, was former CoX player based (much like HC).  Though I haven't checked in there in a while (since about the time I found HC).  And, of course, no SCORE, to work with.

[TygerDarkstorm]

2 hours ago, Doomguide2005 said:

     City of Titans development team, far as I know, was former CoX player based (much like HC).  Though I haven't checked in there in a while (since about the time I found HC).  And, of course, no SCORE, to work with.

Ah, that must be what it was I saw way back, a former CoX player, not dev, thank you.

[Snarky]

City of Titans.  Sigh.  Grateful for the Homecoming Team since that project burned int hte drydock, half sank in the mud, and became a haven for the destitute and half mad. Hmmmm…. Theres a plotline in there somewhere….

[TygerDarkstorm]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

City of Titans.  Sigh.  Grateful for the Homecoming Team since that project burned int hte drydock, half sank in the mud, and became a haven for the destitute and half mad. Hmmmm…. Theres a plotline in there somewhere….

Starring the one and only Snarky? 😜