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Will Titan be a mobile device game?
Pynda
Member UncommonPosts: 856
I got to thinking about this because of a comment I read in the business section about Zynga. It said "Analysts say [Zynga} needs to downsize its current 3,000-strong global workforce and come up with a hit that can captivate the growing number of players now moving to mobile devices". So apparently the bean counters are creaming themselves over mobile devices these days. And would probably also love to throw in a "Cloud" element to any new product as well.
Also, one of the few comments directly from Blizzard about Titan said something to the effect of "Titan will not compete with WoW".
And I thought the console interface was bad for gaming. IMO mobile devices are complete and utter nuclear devastation. What do you think?
Comments
You never know, maybe a cross platform game the could work on PC's and tablets.
Titan's been in development for a while, It was probably in concept before tablets and smart phones were the rage. I could see it happening but they would have changed concept mid stream to do it.
PC Only + minigames/alternative game play streams for mobile and social platforms.
We're on the cusp of having real tablet chips capable of handling all of modern graphics. They won't be able to run the relatively more demanding games at playable frame rates, but they will run games lighter on hardware requirements. At that point, it will be entirely possible to design a single game to be playable on tablets while also taking advantage of the additional hardware that a gaming PC has to offer.
Will Blizzard go that route? Likely not. But if they wanted to, they could.
Mobile games are designed as pick up and put down games that can be played on the go with sporadic internet connection.
There is now hardware limitation today that prevents you from running games like WoW and SC2 on high-end mobile hardware these days, but then you are not designing a mobile game you designing a game that happens to be running on a mobile platform.
If you are going to design a game that will run on tablets you are going to sacrifice every thing that makes console and PC games great, and the hardware specs have nothing to do with it.
You'll have make a game that you can jump in and jump out with ease, have very small minimal time investment requirements, and a limited control scheme.
PC gamers do not want that, what you can have and most likely will have are unique game play aspects that are accessible only or also on mobile devices. For example if you take the farming mini game that WoW has now you can easily make it accessible on a mobile platform, since it will not require you in any way or form to make changes or compromise the main game mechanics and game elements of the main game in other to facilitate mobile platforms.
If Blizzard is smart and they are they will develop Titan in such fashion that you could easily make certain game elements accessible to mobile and clientless platforms as we've them doing it before. Mail, Guild Chat, Armory, and even Auction House are available these days for mobile clients(used to be for a fee, not sure if it still the case these days).
I thinkjPC only, but it is possible that you could get some limited access, like crafting the AH and similar from an IPAD.
Blizzard and lead designer Kaplan have just experience in PC so designing a full mobile game does not seem very likely. Blizzard never been that much for experiementing, not their style. They prefer safer bets.
By your (Dogma's) definition, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS aren't mobile gaming devices. Having only several buttons rather than a full keyboard does restrict what you can do, but some PC games do work pretty well with a gamepad.
If a game doesn't need quick access to a ton of buttons, and can have settings turned down far enough to make it playable on low end hardware, then it's plausible that it could be made to run well on some tablets that will launch soon. And if so, then why not give tablets access to the full game?
People play mobile games usually when they can't play normal ones, i.e. on the crapper, daily commute, airplanes, during breaks or while waiting etc`. Those games are designed so you could pick them up instantly play some and put them at any moment with out penalty, most games, especially MMO's cannot be designed to facilitate such game play behavior.
If you're going to design a game that will require some one to sit down and invest couple continuous of hours of their time to play it you might as well make a full on PC/Console title. Since there is nothing mobile about the game you just made except that it happens to run on some platform that some one would consider mobile.
And again the fact that Titan will or could run on tablets, smartphones, or even your smart fridge will have nothing to do with it being or being not a mobile game.
Mobile games have their own category and very specific game design elements that make them mobile games, not the hardware they happen to run on. They are simply the evolution of all those browser and other procrastination games that we used to have way before we could have mobile hardware capable of running them.
I had Doom 2 running on my first ever camera phone Nokia 7650 were talking 10 years ago, and i still played snake on the phone simply because i could pick it up play it pause it or put it down with out giving it any additional thought, just like i can do with almost any other time of what i would consider a well designed "mobile game".
Also stop bringing hardware specs and pure horse power all the time, they are almost completely irrelevant...