Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The games journalism equivalent of binology involves scouring the job advertisements that developers post, seeking clues as to the content of future titles. Say Popcap were to exhibit a desire to hire a Masters degree wielding “actual unicorn-handler with three years experience of rainbow-wrangling” I would assume Peggle 2 was a glorious physical playground rather than a digital toy. That hasn’t happened, but a poster at NeoGAF spotted that Blizzard are looking to recruit a Franchise Development Producer for their “next-gen MMO”, with one of the main responsibilities being to “work with major consumer brands to facilitate product placement and licensing within the world of Blizzard Entertainment’s next-gen MMO”. Hmmmm.

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Gamasutra reports that Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia claims [PDF] that Blizzard’s next big MMO project, Titan, will be a “casual MMO”. Now, in my head at least, “casual” is Zynga, or maybe PopCap. Games with a shallow learning curve, and limited endgame complexity. Now Blizzard games might not be ultra-badcore brainburners, but they are also not casual, and I don’t expect that to change. Quite what analyst means by this term, of course, isn’t clear. Perhaps it was a slip of the finger. Or maybe he is so l33t that anything less ‘core than Darkfall doesn’t stand up in his book. Whatever it means, it paints what I think is an inaccurate picture.

My prediction? I say Titan will be an action MMO, probably an MMOFPS, with a sci-fi setting. It’ll aim wide, be accessible, and snare millions of gamers, but “casual” won’t be a word we use to describe it. Let’s come back here in two years and see who is right.

So then. There was this leak of an internal schedule from within Blizzard, which we were a bit sceptical about and didn’t bother to post. It mentioned a game called “Titan” slated for the end of 2013. Then in these VGA interviews Frank Pearce of Blizzard admits that this is the next-gen MMO, but won’t say any more about it.

My bet? I’m confident that the MMOFPS rumours are true. It’ll be a sci-fi action game with hefty social and trade elements, and it’ll be a new franchise. Not World Of Starcraft, but close enough. Blizzard will be looking closely at APB, Firefall and everything else in that area, and then they’ll make their move. I think this ties neatly into the “No Subscriptions For CoD”, too. No, there won’t be subscriptions for that, but Activision can rely on Blizzard to create something else that we will pay subs for, something that will bestride the Halo/Gears space marine manshoot genre at the same time. It’s going to be bold, and it’s probably going to look like a big risk, just like WoW did.