The success or failure of Overwatch is actually very embarrassing, and it can be said that it is both success and failure.

The record is not counted, which does make many players feel friendly, but it also makes those master players feel unfriendly.

The graphics are gorgeous, but too flashy, the game is complex but too complex, and it's easy for beginners to pick up, but the difficulty increases dramatically after the beginner period...... Every element, if the game is successful, is the secret to the game's success. On the other hand, if the game fails, then these elements are the main cause and culprit of the game's death.

But at the end of the day, Overwatch's time from development to release is still too short.

Speaking of which, many people have actually understood, yes, Overwatch is actually a defective product. Blizzard was originally going to launch a game tentatively named Titan. Speculation about the game began in 2007, and while Blizzard didn't officially release it at the time, the company discussed hiring software developers for Titan. Titan is an MMO game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, and it is a work that has the potential to replace World of Warcraft, which is the initial successor of Blizzard.

In 2007, some users on Blizzard's forums speculated that Titans had already started developing characters and scene concept artists after Blizzard announced that it was recruiting character and scene concept artists for a "top-secret next-generation MMO". A Blizzard community worker confirmed that the job announcement was for a new game that had not yet been announced, and not a new expansion for World of Warcraft.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby said at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technical Conference that the new game is not a clone or competitor of "World of Warcraft", which makes it clear that the new game is the successor of Warcraft, in fact, Blizzard has seen the decline of MMORPG games, and they need a new game to continue to lead the trend and ensure Blizzard's position in the game industry. Paul Sams, then Blizzard's chief operating officer, revealed limited information in a 2008 interview with videogaming, saying that Blizzard's next-generation MMO would be "really cool, next-gen, different" and "challenging" for the development team.

Blizzard CEO Mike also confirmed in a 2008 interview with Wired Magazine that it was a different game and not a sequel.

Then, in November 2010, a top-secret Blizzard project schedule was released without the company's permission. The plan indicates the existence of a project called "Titan", with a release date of Q4 2013. Blizzard's Huaxia general manager resigned after this leak. Speaking at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards (VGA), Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce told the gaming blog Destructoid that the studio's current talk is still focused on hiring, saying, "It's our next generation MMO, and we're only talking about it to a limited extent at the moment." Because we want to focus on things like recruiting new talent, so that we can get the best talent in the gaming industry to work on this project. ”

Mike also mentioned Titans in a macro discussion at the 2011 Game Producers Summit.

He said Blizzard's most experienced developers were involved in the project. He explained that they had learned a lot from their long work on World of Warcraft, and he emphasized the significance of people playing games with people they know compared to people they know with strangers. Mike was confident at the time that the Titans would coexist with World of Warcraft in the market after release.

In March 2011, in an interview with Gamasutra, Blizzard's COO Sams revealed that Titan was ready to play, demonstrating that it was a game with strong vitality and growth that would "become a new milestone in the industry."

At the time, it was reported that the game would be discussed at the BlizzCon in October 2011, only to be clarified by a Blizzard spokesperson as a rumor. However, Rob Pardo, then Blizzard's executive vice president, updated a brief update on the development process: 90 developers participated, it was almost in "full R&D mode", and it was announced at BlizzCon 2012 that it was "maybe unlikely".

On January 25, 2012, Blizzard stated that it would not hold BlizzCon 2012 to announce new products and expansions, but would host the Battle.net World Championship in Asia. In fact, at that time, "Titan" was already in the company's internal testing, but unfortunately, the almost complete version of the Titan was rejected by a large number of testers in the company's internal testing.

On March 28, 2010, Rob Pardo, vice president of Blizzard Entertainment, tweeted that he had tried Titan. There's still a lot to improve, but it's still a lot of fun. This tweet actually already has a very strong meaning of wanting to cover up, and he is cheering himself up.

On May 29th, when the media and players were looking forward to Blizzard's mysterious new work "Titan" being unveiled at the 2013 E3 exhibition, the United States technology blog site Venturebeat poured cold water on players: news from Venturebeat pointed out that Blizzard has recently issued an internal announcement, and the Titan project has been postponed to at least 2016 because the development and design do not meet expectations. As of press time, Blizzard has also officially confirmed the news to 17173 on the Huaxia side, but denied that the game will be launched in 2016, and the following is Blizzard's official response:

In game development, we have always adhered to the principles of excellence, continuous evaluation, and continuous refinement. Massively multiplayer online games, which we haven't officially announced, are no exception. So far in the development of the project, we've found that we need to make some very big design and technical changes to the game. Taking this opportunity, we have also reallocated some of our resources to other projects to support the continued development of other projects. At the same time, the MMO's core team is adapting our technology and tools to be able to implement the changes we wanted to make to the game. We would also like to remind you that we have not yet announced any launch or beta dates for this MMO.

However, it was in anticipation for all Blizzard players.

On September 24, 2014, foreign media IGN and Polygon both reported that Blizzard co-founder Mike revealed the latest news about "Titan" in a recent interview: the success of "World of Warcraft" made us believe that "Titan" could be made a better online game, but in the end it backfired. We did not have fun and passion in the "Titan" project. Therefore, after careful consideration, we decided to terminate the project.

Fallen.

Yes, the Titans have fallen.

This one has been entrusted to hundreds of employees up and down Blizzard for several years, and the gold-swallowing monster that has eaten too much money and resources, but at the moment before leaving the barracks, it officially announced its death.

Fans were disappointed, the industry lost its voice, and Blizzard was speechless.

The fall of the Titans is not only a loss of funds, time, and morale, but these losses are irreparable. What's more, in an era when game models are beginning to change, Blizzard's all-or-nothing project has fallen, which means that Blizzard, the company that has led the gaming industry more than once, is a big step behind this time. In fact, the fall of the Titans actually has a huge relationship with this change.

With the rise of the Internet in China, the world game pattern has changed. The pace of life is accelerating, and the demands of players are changing.

The old stuff wasn't suitable for the future, so Blizzard started a new project when World of Warcraft was just showing signs of decline. Their ideas are good, their opinions are right, but the fault is that their ambitions are too great. In fact, whether it is Warcraft or World of Warcraft, when it was developed, no one had the idea of "being the number one in the world". Everyone just tries to make a fun game as much as possible, to make themselves happy, and to make the players happy.

But after years of development, Blizzard has changed when developing Titans, similar to the burden of idol baggage, which makes them subconsciously want to continue to maintain a leading position in the world.

But it's very, very hard to make a good game.

Perfect?

Then you can only think about it.

Blizzard's mistake was that it was too ambitious and wanted everything, but the topic was too big and it dragged itself down.

As for Overwatch, it's just a half-finished product that grew hastily on the corpse of the Titan.

Let's take a look at the time interval between the two sides.

At the end of September 14, Blizzard announced the fall of Titan, and in May 16, Overwatch was launched, and it took a year and a half from finalization to development to testing to launch...... To be honest, from another point of view, Blizzard was able to come up with such a work in such a short period of time. Even if it is a semi-finished product, it is enough to prove Blizzard's strength. The company's strength is there, but it just took a wrong step.

And more than one step.

MOBA games originated from Blizzard.

In 1998, StarCraft was released, and Blizzard Entertainment first integrated a map editor into a game produced and published by Blizzard Entertainment. With this map editor, a player named Aeon64 made a custom map called Aeon Of Strife, which was the prototype of all MOBA games. In this custom map, players can control a hero unit against a computer-controlled enemy team, with 3 lanes of troops connected to both main bases, with the goal of destroying the opponent's main base. It's worth mentioning that this old map is still updated in StarCraft II.

This custom StarCraft map is the predecessor of DOTA and the prototype of all mobas, so the origin of MOBA games should be traced back to the RPG maps of the StarCraft era. To the emergence of League of Legends, at the beginning League of Legends called itself a DOTA-like game, but then Riot Games began to define the game as a MOBA game, and then the name of MOBA game began to become more popular, but it is essentially a game type that evolved from a DOTA-like game, which includes more content than a "DOTA-like game", and even DOTA itself began to be defined as a MOBA.

But whether it's DOTA or MOBA, these things originally came out of Blizzard.

But at the time, Blizzard was not optimistic about this game genre, and they did not pay attention to it, allowing the Dota map to cultivate more and more users on their platform.

As a result, one day, the founder of DOTA Maps set up his own company, and there was a small situation along the way, but in the end, DOTA and LOL split up and quickly occupied the high, medium and low-end market of MOBA games. Dota occupies the high-end market, and this high-end does not mean that Dota is noble, but that Dota is significantly more difficult to operate, so this high-end refers to the average player.

The average level of DOTA players is undoubtedly above LOL players, after all, there are too many LOL players, and even if there are many gods, it is inevitable that a large number of primary school students will flatten their strength.

LOL is to seize the majority of the low-end market,Players with ordinary strength and average strength,A large number of them are concentrated in LOL,After all, the operation of this game is simpler,As long as the consciousness can be slightly better,If the hand is not too disabled,You can always have a certain game experience。 Unlike DOTA, once the conscious operation can't keep up, sometimes you really don't know what to do.

All in all, in short, DOTA and LOL are crazy to carve up the market, and other companies are also moved by it, and this is when Blizzard is belated.

But by the time they came to their senses, it was really too late. The main battlefield of MOBA games has been divided between the two, and the rest is just some leftovers.

But as Blizzard is concerned, they can't let go of the leftovers, especially at the moment when "Titan" has fallen, so they immediately made the Hero of the Storm, but there is no way, when the overall situation has been decided, it is no longer the same half-finished product of the Hero of the Storm that can turn the situation around. Yes, Hero of the Storm is also a half-finished product, just like Overwatch. In fact, if you take a closer look, you can see that every game in Blizzard is not developed casually. Except for the first few best-selling games, which can also be called the ancestor level of the game, the development speed of the subsequent games is getting slower and slower.

World of Warcraft is the most obvious, with years of development and the accumulation of previous trilogies.

This is the emergence of the king of MMORPG.

The Titan obviously followed this path, but he went crookedly, and in the end, he went lame.

For comparison, Overwatch is a year and a half, and Hero of the Storm is a year...... It's still such a big online game, it's like a joke.

So it's clear that the launch of these two semi-finished products is not a small means for Blizzard to turn the situation around, because they can't do it at all. So at the end of the day, Blizzard just doesn't want to lose some markets entirely. Occupy it first, maintain the current position as much as possible, and if you have the chance, maybe you can make a comeback in the future, which is Blizzard's goal.

It's just that no one expected that Hearthstone, which was thrown out like a casual game of chess, suddenly became a super popular card game in the game industry. The history of card games is quite long, from physical cards to board games to video games, but Magic, the famous computational game, had to retreat during the most popular period of Hearthstone. And also after Hearthstone, electronic card games have become completely popular, and similar games have sprung up on the market all of a sudden.

So, Blizzard's strength is definitely there, what they lack is the right direction, if the direction is right, there are not many companies that can fight with Blizzard, what they are afraid of is that the route is not accurate, and they will play themselves to death.