Funny how simple website changes and past trends can determine when big shake ups will be happening within organizations.. or more specially, Take Two / Rockstar.

Past trends can give you a really good idea of approximately when announcements will be made or what the announcements will be. But, any other small events (like sudden forum maintenance or website domain changes) can help fine tune your predictions.

By the way, it looks like all of their websites have now been redirected back to their original domains instead of centralized at Rockstar HQ. It was all done pretty quickly, so it appears that they might be testing a future change and possibly making more "internal changes" to additional studios.

It was just announced that Team Bondi is closing their doors, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Expect many more announcements or internal restructuring over the next couple months.

Anyone out there watching their stock prices?

That Activision Blizzard Analyst Day call is today too.. should be a good news day. :)

** Update

Another group of layoffs has hit within Take Two. This time at 2K Games Mafia 2 studio.

Apparently, Blizzard might be changing their Character Naming process and are considering a switch to the StarCraft 2 naming system.

We’re very likely following the StarCraft II character name system in Diablo III, but it’s something we’re still discussing.

We think the ability to name your character anything you want (barring restricted words, of course) even if someone else picked it is just a more positive experience for the user. You want your barbarian named Baba? Cool, have fun playing the game. The World of Warcraft experience of sitting there trying names for 30+ minutes until you find one that isn’t taken can be very frustrating, and ultimately you end up with a name you didn’t really want. Granted that’s for a well-aged game with a lot of characters created over the years, but it’s also a game that’s broken down into hundreds of separate servers. In Diablo III everyone in a region is in the same boat, so unique-naming difficulties could get pretty out of hand even in the first few months.

As I said it’s something we’re discussing and could have some different angles on those ideas, but that’s essentially where we see the benefits of a non-unique naming system. [Source]

If so, then this won't be a viable gold making strategy anymore, and you'll see thousands of characters ingame named Legolas.

I can understand their reasoning.. there are pros and cons to doing it either way. They could make a lot of money from the old fashioned WoW style naming approach and players would be very happy to have unique names. On the other hand, it alienates newer players as the names dry up. With the StarCraft 2 naming method, it appeals to more newer players but takes away the pride of having a one-of-a-kind name.

It's something they're still discussing though, so they're still weighing the pros and cons themselves.

* Hot on the trail of the recent Minor Rockstar Update and the "Max Payne 3 is getting close?" posts, Rockstar has just announced that Max Payne 3 is getting closer to completion and that we're going to be getting a lot of news within the next few months.

* Also, hot on the trail of that Diablo Clone post (in which Diablo was once compared to a clone of Gauntlet, but now users just call new games clones of old Blizzard games), just 2 weeks later a wonderfully confirming forum post was made by an average MMO-Champion user.

I'm not shocked in the least that many gamers believe that Gauntlet was just a clone of Blizzard's "much older" Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 games. Everyone on Blizzard's PR department deserves a raise. :)

* Activision Blizzards Analyst Day is coming up this Thursday, so expect some new announcements this week. During past Analyst Days, there have been new game announcements (COD6) or confirmations as well as zany Activision quotes about the current state of console, gaming, and their vision of their future.

* You've probably already heard about the massive Copyright theft by "Chad Love", if that's his real name, of ART4LOVE.COM. When I first heard about it over a week back, I immediately thought about that "Everyone Is A Pirate" post. There were potentially thousands of people who purchased pirated art from this very professional looking website, and they were even provided a Certificate of Authenticity with the art. This is just one small operation out of thousands of other fraudulent (but professional looking) websites out there selling pirated goods to unsuspecting consumers.

* I have a bad feeling about the game length of Diablo 3. It looks like leveling in the game is too quick (e.g. Lvl 30 by Act 2), and each of the Acts will be much shorter than Diablo 2. It's almost as if the difficulty levels were created to extend the length of the game rather than for re playability purposes like in D2. I really hope we won't be seeing too many "this game is too short" reviews. I may have to look into this a bit more to see if Blizzard has made any recent comments about the game length.

* Did some researching and found out that each Act is about 2 hours long. So, that's 8 hours for a full playthrough of the game and then you can go back and do it again and again on different difficulty levels. According to Blizzard, you will be able to complete the difficulty levels faster as you progress too, so Nightmare and Hell will take less than 8 hours. That sounds rather disappointing and I hope it's not accurate. Each play through should be at least 25-30 hours in length (not 8), and then shorter periods for each followup difficulty excluding Inferno. It really worries me that the game is going to be too short now and will rely on Auction House metagames and simply replaying the exact same game again but with NPC palette swaps..

On a related note, the reason why they only need players to test such a small section of Diablo 3 in the beta is because D3 is much easier to manage, test, and QA than WOW. D3 has a very small fraction of thousands of WOW quests and gameplay mechanics. A small QA team can easily spellcheck and test everything in the game over a short period of time. The only testing that's really needed from us is for load, server, and technical reasons.

Following the path left behind by some of Daeity's old drafts, I did a little investigation and came across some interesting information. You can't really call these leaks as it's just information I spotted on a publicly accessible website. The term "leaks" tends to get overused a lot.. it should only be reserved for actual leaks of insider information from real employees. If you stumble upon information on a blog, for example, it's not considered "a leak".

This is definitely new information though, I didn't find any references anywhere else to this.

So.. Cameron here was on the Titan team for 2 years as their World Designer, and then transitioned to Writing and Development for other Blizzard (trans)media in August 2010.

Here's what he had to say about their Next-Gen MMO:

Imagining, creating, and writing the universe for Blizzard's new MMO (working title: Titan) from the ground up -- the history, philosophy, heroes, and villains. In addition to the core construction of the game's story, I wrote flavor pieces for the main characters and important events to lend depth and immersion for our team. Much of my time involved meeting with the art and animation team to ensure their work wove into the narrative.

So, apparently it will be storyline driven, have main characters, histories, and heroes/villains. It won't be completely like a Second Life type game, but probably a combination of sorts with a real world, actors, story, and history.

Cameron also has a twitter account here. He makes references to the Titan project a few times, like when it's existence was first discovered. [Links: 1 2 3]

On June 10, 2010, he tweeted: 'I just got to tell the one of our artists "Yes, Stan Sakai is definitely on board."'

This was while Cameron was working on Titan and "Much of (his) time involved meeting with the art and animation team to ensure work woke into the narrative." Also, Stan Sakai at the time was already working for Blizzard on the separate World of Warcraft magazine. He had a recurring comic strip called "Goblin vs. Gnome."

This would imply that the legendary artist Stan Sakai was brought on board into the Titan MMO as a writer. :)

Cameron's first tweet (while working on Titan), was that he's "shifting tectonic plates, raising Atlantis, and reviving Teotihuacan. Damn I love my job." This might just be a figure of speech, and have nothing to do with Titan, but I figured I would make note of it.

The other discoveries, however, are certainly interesting and confirm some of Daeity's old blogposts about multiple environments (or universes) and societies intended to attract a wider audience of players. Blizzard has also been snagging up employees who previously worked on RAGE (Post-Apocalyptic), the Halo MMO, and a "next gen NCSOFT game". Also, audio engineers who developed the CryTek engine.

Here are some of the assumptions I'm adding to "the list":

* Titan is possibly taking a "The Secret World" type approach. Wide variety of environments or "universes" and many different types of gameplay.
* One of these worlds may have a Stan Sakai influence, but there will be elements of fantasy and scifi from the other writers.
* Possible change in gameplay depending on the "world" you're in.
* Designed with real world payment systems from the ground up with heavy social integration. Not an Auction House, but rather a way to buy, sell, rent, or trade virtual constructions or items.
* Game will have multiple expansion packs.
* Not a casual game, but will have casual elements in the gameplay. Blizzard looking to compete with Zynga and snag their customers.

I'll continue hunting around to see if there's anything else out there. This only took me about 30 minutes to find, and I'm surprised that this information hasn't been published anywhere else on the web.

There are websites out there completely dedicated to collecting Titan information, and they didn't even know this. Most of them just have outdated information, and short employee lists of people suspected to be working on Titan. It's kind of sad.