So, Blizzard officially cancelled Titan. What a strange world we live in, that the cancellation of a never-announced game is newsworthy.

In this case, however, I think it might be. There’s some small amount of information out about what Titan actually was, and I feel like the description is really telling. I’ll try to sum up the description in an elevator pitch:

Titan is The Secret World meets Team Fortress meets Superman, only you’re a butcher or a chef or a businessman that leads a secret double life in a post-alien invasion sci-fi world.

The game designer in me just cringed. It’s a bunch of neat ideas all mashed together, and from the press release and talk about “not finding the fun”, it’s not terribly surprising to me that it was ultimately cancelled. As a general rule, if a game is actually several games all at once right from the start, there’s probably going to be problems in development.

What I think the cancellation of Titan (and its very confusing-sounding descriptions) speaks to is the uncertainty in the MMO side of game development. MMOs are fickle, and their players both moreso and less so at the same time. “More of the same” has become a damning term among players, and the things that the MMO offered to players are becoming available elsewhere, in different forms.

At one point, at and before the launch of WoW, being able to easily play games online with your friends was a novelty. If you wanted a stable server for your CounterStrike clan, you were probably paying for it. MMOs were huge worlds that you could play in with your friends, and promised months or years of entertainment for you. A big part of the reason so many MMOs were released (and almost certainly why they were so promising-looking to investors) was less “chasing the WoW jackpot” and more the almost-assured return on investment as players played them for months or years. Consider the number of MMOs that have actually shut down– it’s a very small number and games that you may not even remember are still up and running. Ultima Online is celebrating 17 years this week, as an example, meaning that there is an MMO out that may well be older than some of its players.

Now, the drop-off in an MMO after even a single month is devastating, and three and six months are further hits that companies prepare for. I suspect that there are a couple of things happening with that. As mentioned above, the novelty of easy multiplayer games has dropped off significantly, from being surprising and exciting to being an expected feature in nearly every released AAA game. The same is largely true of a lot of other “standard” MMO features, enough so that the genre gets a lot of criticism for being stagnant.

I’m not sure I disagree with the criticism. There is a lot of conceptual space in the MMO genre that hasn’t been explored outside of niche titles, and one of the problems with a niche title is that the lack of resources for such things means that the end product is often buggy or otherwise problematic– see Darkfall, Fallen Earth, and a variety of other niche MMOs. The tried-and-true approach with relatively small variances works well for the games industry at large, as frequent release cycles and short game lifespans mean small variances add up over time, such that the Call of Duty you buy this year is fairly noticably different from the one you bought five years ago, but the changes have been incremental enough that you notice them without the game alienating you.

With their longer development and life cycles, MMOs move along this path much more slowly, and the infrequent development cycle and longer intended lifespans mean that risks are extremely concerning– a project that takes a risk on a year of development is one thing, a project that takes a risk on 5 or more years of development can be catastrophic. I feel like that’s why we see relatively few risks taken on MMO projects, and I’d hazard a guess that most of the ones we do see have some interesting stories behind them and were almost certainly highly contentious during development.

I feel like, particularly with the cancellation of Titan and the rocky releases of the last few MMOs (the two most recent being Wildstar and Archeage), we’re unlikely to see a whole lot new appearing in the MMO sphere anytime soon. I think the next thing for the genre is going to be a significant departure from what we’re used to, and what shape that will take I can’t say, but I don’t think the current model for MMOs has, in hindsight, been terribly sustainable, and moving forward the genre will need to find new ways of distinguishing itself as an experience worth having.