Titan - why such long NDA?

[Cracked]

I find it really unprecedented for an "awaited" PC game to remain hidden from public. As far as I can tell, first signs of development go all the way back to '07, although it may have stayed in the "on paper" stage for a long time. Even if so, I believe developers have been reassigned around 2.5 (?) years ago, so by then there must have been a pretty clear concept at the very least.

Pretty much only thing I could ever find was this youtube channel who supposedly uploaded two Titan videos - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8bqbgCusdA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElKIg-tGY6g&feature=plcp, which are likely a fake or I just missunderstood.

Is Blizzard trying to avoid hype? Why? Do they want to overwhelm people with info at some point? Are they trying to go for the impulsive buyers?

Who knows, Titan could be a codename for a hoax

[Zenotetsuken]

Announcing a "secret" project that no one knows any details about is just a way to generate buzz.

[Deleted]

There is no reason to announce anything before they got something really really good to show off. It takes time to make an mmo. This game might not come out in the next 5 years, to prevent competition with wow.

[hailey]

They're about due for another Warcraft Adventures or Starcraft Ghost

[schir2]

That's a video card stress test....................... Not Titan.
I forgot the name of the stress test but I'm sure you can find it.

[Knarp]

The first Youtube link is a taken from Unigine 'Heaven' DX11 Benchmark 2.5. The second is from some other game that I don't know.

[insmek]

The first Youtube link is a taken from Unigine 'Heaven' DX11 Benchmark 2.5. The second is from some other game that I don't know.

AHA! I knew I recognized it from somewhere.

[Drithien]

If anything, Blizzard are trying to produce as much hype as possible. But not turn hype into boredom at the same time. Which calls for management of what they reveal, as a whole. Until May, Diablo III was their point of focus as a company. Before that, it was StarCraft's long awaited sequel. Now it's all about Mists of Pandaria. And after that, perhaps even after the release of the second part of StarCraft II, we will hear more about Titan, or whatever its name is going to be, I think.

What is more, if Titan is going to be as big a game as World of WarCraft, in size, then they must have a huge amount of work to do before the game is anywhere near a state that it can be shown, even teased, to the public. Even more than the workload of World of WarCraft, since development cycles have increased in size since then.

[Kuja]

It's been taking so long I get the feeling they've scrapped it :P They could have hired a thousand programmers to code it, and it would've been finished by now. Or then it's just a very low priority, or D3 devs are on it now.

[Badpaladin]

They could have hired a thousand programmers to code it, and it would've been finished by now.

Average salary in the US for game software engineers is ~95k, so 95 million dollars each year they're employed. That's way too hefty of an investment when they're in the middle of two giant releases.

[Cracked]

Until May, Diablo III was their point of focus as a company. Before that, it was StarCraft's long awaited sequel. Now it's all about Mists of Pandaria. And after that, perhaps even after the release of the second part of StarCraft II, we will hear more about Titan, or whatever its name is going to be, I think.

They've said time and time again that their focus is split rather than 1 project at a time though.

[Buu]

One very popular theory is that Titan is about an IP that will be under other studio for some time yet, and then released to Blizzard publish an MMO.
Since that IP is not property of Blizzard they legally must avoid any relation with it, even if their studios are filled with stuff from that.

But again, it's just one popular theory.

[reckoner04]

Well, first, developing a new IP takes a very very long time if it should last (which I'm sure is Blizzard's goal).

Second, they probably wrote hundreds or thousands of design documents and coded lots of prototypes to test their design principles.

Just guessing, of course, I'm no insider... <.<
>.>

EDIT: And of course you have to draw the line where you talk about "a running project". Maybe the fans have just drawn this line a bit too early (because Blizzard fans are just insane!) compared to other similar projects.

[Deleted]

Doom 4 was hinted in 2007, and announce May 2008. We haven't seen anything except the logo yet. Titan will be announced next year I think. I would have said this year as 5 years is a decent development time but there is no Blizzcon this year.

[Drithien]

They've said time and time again that their focus is split rather than 1 project at a time though.

I meant as focus "to promote to the public eye". Development-wise, they are working on all kinds of things simultaneously. Their goal to me seems to be to establish each game, and create some flow-over from each other. But, in matters of publicity, have one upcoming game or expansion of a game, at the spotlight each time. Their big summer announcement of sorts, usualy at Blizzcon. So maybe they will reveal something next summer.

[Deleted]

Anybody know what the second video the OP linked is? Looks interesting.

[Valeron]

They haven't even announced the game yet. I wouldn't worry about an NDA.

[Kisho]

It's better this way, where people can just randomly speculate but not get too invested, rather than 'omg they promised x feature but now it's been scrapped, YOU LIED TO US BLIZZTARD FFS'.

This way the hype is being 'safely' generated. We know it's out there, rumours are spreading, but nobody is getting too emotionally invested. Blizzard will release info when they have something solid to show us. Patience!

[PriestAlisha]

The second video is the following Nvidia demo: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cool_st...l#!/demos/2341

[lordjust]

Well, first, developing a new IP takes a very very long time if it should last (which I'm sure is Blizzard's goal).

Second, they probably wrote hundreds or thousands of design documents and coded lots of prototypes to test their design principles.

Just guessing, of course, I'm no insider... <.<
>.>

EDIT: And of course you have to draw the line where you talk about "a running project". Maybe the fans have just drawn this line a bit too early (because Blizzard fans are just insane!) compared to other similar projects.

Back in 2007 I think they hinted at Titan and said that it will be a MMO and that they code a completely new engine specifically made for MMOs. I think it will take a lot of time to create a new engine and tools and everything before they can really start working on the game. In the last few months there were rumors that Blizzard doesn't show something because there's nothing to show. They are still in search for people to work on a new project which is probably Titan and I think we won't see anything about it in the next 2 years.

At the moment everything is about MoP and we already know that SC2 add-on is already gone gold and will be the next big thing until its release. Furthermore there are hints about a Diablo 3 add-on so that could be the next big thing next year for Blizzcon and the year after that it's time for a new announcement of an WoW add-on.