Blizzard Entertainment's "Titan" project has been reset.

Article from Venture beat.

MMO-Champion's announcement and summary of above article.

UPDATE

The game's been officially canceled.

edited 23rd Sep '14 11:30:40 AM by tclittle

Can you say ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, and ouch?

The one upside is more manpower for their other properties, so maybe they'll be able do some better stuff with WOW.

Please look forward to more World Of Warcraft expansions and Diablo 3 for the PS 4!

So something we know nothing about with development completely hidden has had a reset because of unknown causes to a level we're in the dark about.

News!

While I've heard a couple of speculative rumors that it might be time-travel based (which would be very different as far as MMOs go), I agree that they've kept the whole thing a little too hush-hush to really draw any conclusions here.

The barbarians are at the gates# of Blizzard, and we are starting to see their end times. Anyone wanna hazard a guess as to how much money Blizzard seems to have pissed down the wall with the collapse of Titan? Because it could be a huge amount that they have wasted.

^ Not the first game to have suffered. See Starcraft: Ghost and Warcraft Adventures.

They survived those (especially Ghost), they'll survive this.

Well, a "reset" seems to be slightly more alive than "indefinitely postponed". Apparently this happened to both Starcraft and Warcraft 3 at some point in their development?

It did in Starcraft. For instance originally it was going to use an engine not too dissimilar to the one found in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Ah yes, I remember those screenshots. Anyway, according to the article the same thing happened to Warcraft 3 but I guess we never heard about it. It's not really a death knell, it's just part of their design process.

..never heard of it? Dude. there wass huge amounts of hype for the original form of Warcraft 3.

Yeah, originally Warcraft 3 was going to be a squad-based RTS, with strong RPG elements. (They even billed it as a RPS: role-playing strategy.) They re-tooled it into a more conventional RTS.

Yep. The heroes of Warcraft 3 were pretty much a relic of what the original design was

Oh, I do remember that but I don't recall a big "we scrapped it" moment. It just sort of steadily lost the RPG elements.

Well, I used to get the British pc games magazine, "PC Zone" years and years ago, and the hype for the first version for what ended up as Warcraft iii was massive, lasted for a long time and crashed to a halt with an eventual story in the magazine explaining how big a train wreck the development ended up being. There was a similar kind of coverage in the other British game magazines as well. Some of which was under the impression that Blizzard were going to die as a games developer.

How wrong they were, ey?

Yeah, Blizard is one of very few studios that can afford to do this. Particularly now given that even with diminishing subscriptions, WOW is still a huge money printing machine. Dropping from 11+ million to around 8 million subs is still millions and millions of dollars.

edited 29th May '13 12:10:30 PM by Elle

Well, they had well over twelve million subscribers at one point, not eleven, but your point still stands. For now.

The game's been officially canceled.

I'm looking forward to the bit about "not being passionate about the project" being taken completely out of context and applied to World Of Warcraft for years to come. Why is WoW always leveling and raids and never anything new like go-kart racing and owning a small business? "They're not passionate about the game". Why is Pv P unbalanced? "They're not passionate about the game".

It'll be the new "cost us a raid tier".

On the other hand, I hope it was a new franchise and not Diablo or Starcraft. I think they can work as an MMO some day.

I'm also baffled by the conspiracy theories that Titan was secretly Destiny all along—that Blizzard developed the game and Bungie polished it off/gets the credit or something because of Secret Business Conspiracies.

edited 23rd Sep '14 11:44:25 AM by Rotpar

It's been cancelled. Good. Warcraft IV please.

Huh. Maybe we will hear what it tried to be in the near future.

edited 23rd Sep '14 12:48:03 PM by stevebat

Hah. There was talk of a "World of Warcraft II" somewhere. I've given up hope on ever seeing getting an RTS Warcraft IV.

And have the story overwrite and Retcon World Of Warcraft as well.

I hope they will at least release some info about what Titan was all about, so we can get an idea of what they were working on for all these years.

Blizzard is well aware of how any information they release is inevitably dissected and criticized in the fan world. If they were trying to create a brand new franchise (and corresponding IP), then they'd be fools to release it in case they ever wanted to revisit it in the future.

Warcraft IV is not happening as long as World of Warcraft remains popular, nor is there any need for a World of Warcraft II.

Developers often cancel projects that don't turn out as hoped. The only difference between Blizzard and many other companies is that they have enough money to have a team working on it for seven years and still cancel it, and enough integrity to ditch something that wouldn't be a good game; many developers would release a shoddy product anyway just to get some kind of return on their investment.

edited 24th Sep '14 7:43:50 AM by Fighteer