Titan Canceled

Well, it's official. Project Titan, which was slated to be a new Blizzard MMO set in a totally new IP, has been canceled. Last year, Blizzard a lot of the Titan staff onto World of Warcraft, which is why they believe Warlords has taken so long to come out and also why they think future expansions will take less time. The idea was that they were going back to the drawing board with Titan, but in the end, Blizzard decided to pull the plug.

I'd started hearing about Titan as early as during Wrath of the Lich King, though I think they started work on it before even that. Apparently one of my former guild mates actually did some concept art for the project, but he was of course sworn to secrecy about it.

We don't actually know much about what Titan was meant to be. It was apparently going to be a new MMO, but in the years since the project started, I'm sure Blizzard noticed that the WoW model of MMOs was really only still working for WoW. So many games have come and gone since then, all supposed "WoW-killers," but they all kind of died out. WoW itself has diminished somewhat, but it's still bigger than any other subscription-based MMO has ever been.

What little details we've gotten from Blizzard seem to suggest that Titan just wasn't working out. They claim that they were trying so hard to get it to work right that they lost sight of the big picture and were caught "down in the weeds."

Honestly, I have a huge amount of respect for Blizzard in recognizing that when a project isn't working, it isn't working. The fact that they're willing to scrap an idea six or seven years in the making in the interest of quality is, well, pretty laudable.

Still, I hope that they can at least salvage the IP. Blizzard comes up with some interesting universes, and I wonder what they came up with for this one.

What this does mean is that all the MMO love they have is going to be poured into WoW. Chris Metzen stated that if it was up to him, they would support the game "forever," which doesn't sound like such a bad idea given that after ten years the game still has seven million subscribers.

Some of Blizzard's newer, smaller projects, have taken off like crazy. Hearthstone has a whopping 20 million players, which is kind of mind-blowing. Heroes of the Storm will admittedly be dipping its toes in a genre that already has some big name competitors, but it's also the kind of game that they as a company are pretty well-suited to build.

What does this mean for WoW? Well, I think we've already seen the biggest consequence, which is that they've been able to move a lot of people onto the project. I recognize that just throwing more people at a project isn't necessarily going to make it any easier to produce, but they seem to feel it will result in faster content, so... you know, if it happens I'll be happy to see it.