May 30, 2013 by Paul Curtin
E3 is less than two weeks away, so you’d expect that there would only be good gaming announcements over the course of the next few weeks. But like their disappointing Diablo III reveal at the PlayStation 4 event, Blizzard has even more bad news for PC gamers (maybe console gamers, too). The super-secret yet-to-be-announced “Titan” project that Blizzard has been working on for the past few years is said to have been completely reset with the expected release now scheduled for 2016 at the earliest.
The Titan project that nobody outside of Blizzards knows anything about is said to be Blizzard’s next big thing and the successor to their World of Warcraft franchise that has given them a license to print money. However, with WoW subscribers on the decline, Blizzard is in need of another new hit in the next few years as their products continue to be on the decline and the new wave of MMO games on consoles start to take over the industry.
Blizzard is known for having far greater production times than any other developer due to their standards, but Titan may be going the way of their canceled StarCraft: Ghost project with 70% of the team of 100 reassigned to other work. Here’s an official statement from Blizzard made to IGN:
“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.”
Maybe we’ll hear more from Blizzard about Titan at BlizzCon 2013, but it’s highly unlikely with the project now being completely reset and the core team having to start over.
