The Queue: Titanic

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Buckle up, y'all. I get a little ranty today.

@Atanae asked:

How much of a non-issue is the Titan announcement?

Adam has a brief editorial coming in shortly about his take on it, but I might as well provide mine since you asked: it's a total non-issue. Blizzard never, at any point, gave a release date for Titan. Titan isn't even the game's real name, it's a project name. Those who expected an announcement at this year's BlizzCon had no basis for that expectation. Are we really upset about a game being delayed when it hasn't even been announced yet? There's no delay. There was no date given to the consumer at any point.

Calling the Titan news a "reset" is also a gross exaggeration, most likely. I doubt Blizzard has scrapped every bit of work they've put into the game so far. What people need to consider when it comes to Blizzard games is that the length of time it takes them to make a game can cause serious developmental problems. If you've been developing a game for an entire generation of games, you end up with an ancient piece of software. Games are constantly changing, with cool new tools and toys cropping up everywhere you look. A game that is in development for more than two or three years needs to take a break at some point and dedicate time to modernizing.

I'm not just talking the consumer experience here, either -- development houses who work on more than one project at a time need to do internal modernizing, too. Your internal infrastructure changes. You develop tools that can do a job better. Something that worked great five years ago maybe doesn't work so great anymore. At some point, you need to stop and refocus what you're doing so your process isn't miserable.

Two things that we consider a focal point of modern society, the smartphone and the tablet, only became a thing in the last five years. Apple didn't launch its App Store until 2008. The first iPad hit the market in 2010. Even if you don't game on those devices, surely you can appreciate how big a deal they are in our culture right now. Those are just two big examples of how quickly technology moves, and how much of an impact a change in consumer technology can have. Titan has been in development longer than those products have been on the market.

All of that said, I'm speculating here, too. No better than anybody else. Maybe Blizzard flushed Titan down the toilet and are making a Samurai Pizza Cats MMO instead. Who knows?

CharlesGoyim asked:

Is anyone else having this problem? On the Beasts of Fable quests, I will win a battle, get the message on my screen "You Won!", get lesser charms, but not get quest credit. This has happened several times. It's a bit frustrating now that the elites are such pains to beat.

Known bug, unfortunately.

thebiggameover asked:

what happened to the podcast roundup?

We discontinued it. We couldn't police dozens of podcasts every week. It was impossible to screen them all for content. In the beginning, we figured the community could police itself, but it ended up not being true. Some people abused their position in the roundup to harass others. Many consistently had content in their podcasts that went directly against the values we hold for our content here on our site. Because we couldn't screen all of those podcasts, very poor behavior was being featured on our site that wouldn't fly in other formats such as blog posts.

If you wrote a blog post that was one big sexual assault joke, there's no way we would feature that on our site. Podcasts were doing it and getting away with it because we couldn't dedicate a full week to making sure they weren't.

@riotto asked:

WHAT CAN HOLD ANY FORM, TAKE ANY SHAPE, AND OVERCOME ANY OBSTACLE?

Jell-o.

I meant water.

I meant the Blob.

@MMOGeek5 asked:

What do you foresee Blizzard doing for WoW's rapidly approaching 10-year anniversary?

Onyxia returns! Again!

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!