Blizzard ‘Hits Reset Button’ on Titan Project (No Longer Rumor)
by JR Cook - 12 years ago show comments
Blizzard’s Titan project (rumored to be the code name for their Next Gen MMO) will not be out until 2016, according to an article put up at VentureBeat. The report claims that Blizzard has ‘hit the reset button’ on Titan, and will be starting from scratch having taken a majority of developers off of the next generation MMO. It’s important to note that Blizzard has not responded to these reports, and it’s all very much unsubstantiated at this point.
This rumor comes hot off the heels of the announcement that Blizzard All-Stars, Blizzard’s upcoming attempt in the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre market will not be available in 2013. If Titan has indeed been reset, this will leave Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft as the only major Blizzard project set for release in the near future, at least prior to BlizzCon.
We have also reached out to Blizzard for comment.
We’ll post more updates on the situation as they become available.
UPDATE: Blizzard has responded and seems the rumor holds some merit – there was some shifting involved
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.
Pretty interesting, sounds a lot like the Diablo development of iteration after iteration after iteration.
I don’t doubt Titan will be amazing whenever it gets released, but it’s a reminder of the stark difference between development and release for Blizz’s games. Lets look back at D3 for a second. There were 3 (almost 4) WoW expansions released during D3 development and during this time WoW has changed significantly. While one team was stuck in iteration mode the other team was pumping out content and massive changes year after year. Now that D3 is out we’re seeing sweeping, game wide changes every few months when it was years in between content updates during it’s development.
People love to harp on Blizz for taking forever to release anything, but they want to get it right. They take their time before release but once they hit market they go full gear on supporting that product and getting out updates as soon as they can.