No, I'm not bragging about my thoughts in general. I had a chat with a guild mate, Drop who runs the second raid team, about Titan the other day. We were initially talking about devs that they've put into the Titan project, and that made me check out some of the Titan rumormill websites. If what some people are saying is true, I seriously can't wait for any official anything from Blizz about the game.
So, this post is about my own kind of wishful dreaming about what Titan could be, what it could consist of, what my imagination would love to play...
There is talk about Titan being two kinds of games, a "sims" game, and an action "mmorpg" game. Eve already does this to a very minor degree, where you have to spend time, real time, learning skills and stuffs. I don't play Eve, so I don't actually have personal knowledge of how all that works, but I'm pretty sure on that.
What does that really mean though? From the rumors floating around, Titan's "sim" part of the game could mean all kinds of stuff we haven't seen before in a game. A statement like that seems fairly "captain obvious" when talking about Titan, considering it's probably going to have boat loads of stuff we haven't seen in a game before. But let's imagine. Player run economies very similiar to real life real world economies. Are we going to be playing a game where our characters interview for jobs, be accountants, walk to the corner grocery store and buy groceries, pay taxes, watch tv? Who knows, but would we want to play that kind of game?
That depends. A lot of people really love sim type games. What if Blizzard took that idea and expanded it to such a degree that it is literally mind boggling to comprehend how much is available to do in the game, just in that part of the game? Imagine a huge engine and system designed for all of our crafting, learning new abilities, trading, starting businesses, loaning money to others through banks, housing, clothing, etc. Imagine small mom and pop type stores, then larger towns start to form. Bigger cities. Countries. None of it pre-defined. All of it player generated.
I just threw out a ton of crap just there.
But imagine how the "sim" part of the game could pair with the "combat" part of the game. What if the "time travel" idea is a real thing? Okay, that basically means we have different time periods where combat will take place, and we can go back and forth into different times to "fight". What if there aren't classes, but you have to "learn" in the "sim" part of the game? What if wielding magic took research in a library or over the internet for your sim avatar? If learning ancient languages would give you an advantage in finding treasure back in history? What if learning higher level math would give you an advantage in futuristic gear/weapons? There could be so many ways to pair the two "worlds" together in ways we can't even perceive of yet. I have so many imaginative ideas here, and I know most of them won't be true, but what if we're all thinking all kinds of thoughts like this, and some of them are true?
Anyone who has read Ready Player One, you'll be imagining that game world as what Titan could be, and if you are like me, it seriously makes your inner geek freak the hell out.
I hope that Blizzcon this year gives us something substantial. Until then, I guess I'll find stuff to pass the time, like WoW.
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ReplyDeleteOkay saicho, first time reader and first time poster. This topic caught my eye on the first pass through looking over your topics in general. Good topic and you stay on point for the most part, but moving away from my short review on your writing skills lets talk titan.
ReplyDeleteLets think for a second on the facts we do know about Titan and Blizzard in general. First we know that titan is a large goal blizzard has had this in mine for a long time(years). But just two-four months ago they have started putting resources into it aka programming/textiles i'm guessing. This fact would put Titan release date in Nov. 2015 or Early 2016 if they rush it. We also know from Blizzard that its going to be a mmo of types. Lastly we know that Blizzard will use elements from its other games like knowledge and player-base. To back up my release date, back in the end of BC when I used to play with a very different group of people which one of those players had a Uncle who works for Blizzard(not sure if he still does today) and he had secretly told us that there was going to be 4 more expansions before they wrapped it all up from the end of BC. So lets count together:1-LK 2-CATA 3-MOP 4-? 5-Titan.
That's how I came up with the release date.
Moving on to your thoughts on Titan, you talk mostly on the sims idea. I think evolving too much sim into the game would be bad. Some is okay, with ways to link social media with the game. Where if you did dailies on game maybe you earned points in the blizzard store to spend or liking/commenting on blizzard media earned you free mats in the game. If you go too far with the hands on sims then you get content that is too much for the average player, hell blizzard was getting yelled at this expansion for too much content that it caused everyone to play too many hours just so they could keep up.
Sims are flawed in one other aspect:Player Generated. WoW currently doesn't have much PG(Player-Generated)content pass the Economy, RP and World PvP. The main flaw with PGC is that players in MMO's don't have long term goals that is needed for sims to be long lasting. Most RP events are only a few hours and even less link to the pass events. To have long lasting sims where we could have Countries in WoW under player factions controlling land and using maybe BG win % for fights(Risk style)we need a player base with long goals to stand by.
Example time! Game called Total War:Shogun 2 is a Turn base strategy game where you play the fights in RTS like Starcraft/Rise of Nations. The multiplayer for this game is you(general) join a player faction to fight under vs other factions like in risk but in real time. Turns are every 2 days, a faction can only attack one map point at a time not counting sea battles. End of turn the faction who won the higher % of games would hold off a attack or take the land. Anyway, i'm getting off topic in the end games that last the longest are the ones where faction leaders have good long term goals take guide the faction to a win or at less holding a good part of a map.
If players don't have focus goals then the games over in less than a month because the one team with goals just wipes the map.
Okay back to Titan. Above shows why i don't like most PGC. I have lots of thoughts on my ideas on whats going to be in titan but that's something we'd had to talk or write about in a different time. Keep up the good work. I'll be reading.
~Darbee (Stephen Carr)
I loved the Total War games!! Yeah, if there is a "sim" type part of the game, you are definitely right that PGC is going to be really tough. I mean how does a game dev get players to even create their own content? Shadowbane's entire game concept was centered around the Game of Thrones books, but the dev's goal was for all of it to be player driven. That game failed early on, so going that route in a game is obviously very difficult, if not impossible, to do right now. They (Blizzard) would have to do an amazing job of creating the "carrot-on-a-stick" for that model to work. Something that nobody has really done well at all yet in the MMO world.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I do think we're going to get "Titan" info this coming blizzcon. I don't know what, but I think it will be the first blizzcon that openly talks about the game somehow. If that's the case, then I think you are pretty spot on with the release timeframe.
With how many people that they have moved over to the dev team for Titan, I mean it's a huge group of people with all sorts of different talents, I think they are much further along with Titan that we think. I really do think it's going to be sooner, like within the next two years, than later (read 4+ years).
But for PCG, going back to that, what if Blizz's tag line for the game was something like "Rule the actual world!"? What if the SIM part of the game is more like today, where the majority of the time borders don't change, but economies of scale do? What if the "sim" game is purely economical and skill learning based, while the fighting game is done during different "epochs" of the actual Earth? Blizz can design something that, while there could be a very real benefit in game to (economically speaking) controlling more of the "sim" world, holding onto higher levels of control/wealth is harder and harder to do.
I could be way off the mark with my ideas though. God Blizzcon cannot get here fast enough!!!