Blizzard is officially hitting the reset button on the planned MMORPG, Project Titan. The project aimed to be the companies’ follow-up to the widely successful World of Warcraft. Blizzard still hopes plans will pan out, but it will now be with a core group of 30 developers, rather than the hundred individuals previously working on the project. The remaining 70 developers have been repurposed at the company for different endeavors. Blizzard is known as an ultimate rumor machine, so some players have been skeptical about the announcement.
Sadly, Blizzard has already confirmed the new by stating, “We?ve always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We?ve come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. We?re using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven?t announced any dates for the MMO.”
The sad truth is that the Titan team will be completely starting over. Now players will have to wait until at least 2016 for the game to be released. People will clearly give the game a try no matter when it’s released (look at Duke Nukem Forever). It will be interesting to see how Blizzard and Project Titan hold up though against an exploding MMO genre.