Why Titan failed: hiring ahead of a vision

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:02:33

   do a great game but it was canceled after seven years in development so tell me what was the vision of the game and what happened sure so as we were experiencing success with world of warcraft there was this concept in the studio that wow wasn't going to last forever wow would be maybe successful for five years and eventually kind of age out and the studio would be real in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game sort of waiting in the wings. So starting around, I want to say 2006, maybe 2005, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum and we were working on burning crusade uh rob pardo took the helm to start sort of titan development we didn't even really have a team then and i remember i remember being like embroiled in burning crusade and going to titan meetings and

2. 3:03:49

   And Rob pulled a group, you know, from kind of across the company. And we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going. And eventually it started in earnest, like real development around 2007. The first team members joined. And it was a real ambitious project, including like building a new engine from scratch. I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John LaFleur, who was just a stellar game programmer. And the engine, which ultimately failed for Titan, ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him.

3. 3:04:36

   And the idea behind the game, it was going to take place in Future Earth, and the players played as secret agents. And by day, they all had day jobs. And by night, they went off and did cool secret agent stuff. And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but over-the-top abilities, like you would see in Overwatch, because that's where they came from. And the by-day stuff, we were going to let you run businesses. We took a lot of influence from games.

4. 3:05:17

   like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, The Sims. We had a brilliant game designer and game director named Matt Brown, who was the creative director on The Sims. He came over. And so we had this vision that there was going to be all this, like, daytime business house stuff. You could build a house. You could live in a neighborhood. And beyond that, there was also a vision on the technical side, game design and technical side, that unlike World of Warcraft, which the modern day term for is that it's sharded.

5. 3:06:02

   So meaning people play on different realms or servers and a WoW server. I haven't been on that team in a very long time, but back in the day, you might have 5000 people on a WoW server before they'd have to spin up another WoW server. the big idea behind titan is that everybody would play on one server it was a one server one world game and the world was massive it was going to take place in future earth and we were literally building like we have what we call bay city which was san francisco we had you know hollywood and then we had to build all of california between that and we also wanted to build like cairo and london and there's this realization of like how do we connect all of these the game had driving in it like full-blown like gta style driving it was such a gargantuan huge undertaking

6. 3:07:07

   With a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over. Like the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure out, like, are there aliens or not aliens? You know, like, all that sounds kind of dumb and fun. But when you're building a game like you, especially world building, you have to have rules. That's what makes world building work is that like this exists in this world and this doesn't. And, you know, why? It's like because someone said so and just the way it needs to be.

7. 3:07:46

   But that development started in 2007, kind of as ideation, brainstorming, early work, really got going in late 2007. And then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King. um and it was we had the like we always did like a champagne toast uh i i still remember it because it was election day i think it was like election day and my birthday and the day obama got elected then i left the wow team on that day it was like memorable in all those ways uh and then i joined the Titan team. And that game, we went on, like the fast forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013. That was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of. And, um, probably, probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist. And by 2010, like after numerous times trying to convince