Blizzard: “Game designers steal ideas all the time”, Talks ‘Titan’ MMO
By Ajané Celestin-Greer | June 22, 2011 | News | No comments | Share
It’s no secret that Blizzard is working on a next-gen Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game codenamed Project Titan. However, little else is known about it, except that it was playable back as far as March, and that Blizzard hopes it will do even better than World of Warcraft.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, World of Warcraft lead systems designer Greg Street explained a little about the development process of Titan. It has also been known for a while that many members of the World of Warcraft team have switched to working on Titan, but Street tells us they still sometimes both collaborate to help each other out.
We've had some key members go over to that team to work. When we interview new people, there's a chance they'll come under our team, and there's a chance they'll go onto that team. We meet with those guys quite regularly to say, 'Hey, here's an opportunity to do something different. Do we want to do it differently to how WOW did it, or are we happy with the way it worked out?
We think that the reach of that product is greater than anything that we've done before.Blizzard COO Paul Sams
Street even said that sometimes they take each other’s ideas, and he admitted that great games were built on the foundation of many others.
Many other MMOs—such as Rift—have built upon World of Warcraft, but World of Warcraft has also built on the groundwork of EverQuest and many other games. One of the biggest questions facing the MMO industry right now is if any game can break the mold World of Warcraft has been polishing for the past seven years, and bring something new to the table. Gamers have been looking for that “something new” from games like Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it might just be Blizzard themselves that surprises us.
A leaked internal timeline pegs Titan as being released late 2013.
