The MMO market has been struggling to evolve for years. There have been some great releases, such as Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, but even these games haven’t pushed the genre as much as many expected. For many, any hope for the genre moving away from the stagnation of recent years has come in the form of Project Titan, a huge project that has been seldom talked about by Blizzard. Unfortunately, as of today there is no plan to ever release this mysterious game.
Blizzard has confirmed with Polygon that development of Project Titan has been canceled. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime shared the following:
We didn’t find the fun. We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.
Project Titan began development as early as 2007, meaning it’s been a full seven years before its concepts materialized. The few concepts that have been shown indicate that it was a game with a much different direction than World of Warcraft, with Morhaime emphasizing that Blizzard planned for both World of Warcraft and Project Titan to coexist in the market. As such, it wasn’t so much a successor as something new to keep Blizzard as relevant as possible in the online RPG space going into the future.
Last Summer, Blizzard scrapped the years of work it had invested, including code, concepts, and art, to start fresh. As indicated by Morhaime’s quote above, the team struggled to make the game fun, one of the qualities that has given World of Warcraft such a long, successful life. It appears that the second try was no more successful.
Replicating the success of World of Warcraft is nearly impossible, as demonstrated by the dozens of MMOs that have tried to emulate it during the last 10 years. Blizzard is in a tough spot because anything it releases in the MMO space will be compared to World of Warcraft. The expectations are immensely high, and it’s undoubtedly feeling the pressure.
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Speaking of which, World of Warcraft celebrates its 10 year anniversary this November 23rd. While its subscription numbers has fallen from the peak of 12 million subscribers down to 6.8 million, it is still the most popular MMO in the world.
At some point, Blizzard will need to find a way to continue the Warcraft timeline, and more importantly its competitiveness in the MMO market. Incremental visual updates, such as the release of new character models in the up coming Warlords of Draenor, only go so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if a World of Warcraft 2 is now in development. The formula is simply too successful. A complete overhaul of the engine to increase potential for quest design and raid encounters seems like a safer bet than trying something completely new.
I also wonder if Project Titan was similar to Destiny. The few details we’ve gathered suggest it was an open-world sci-fi shooter, which is the same for Destiny. It was also likely a console-friendly game given Blizzard’s increasing attraction to non-PC platforms.
Sony Santa Monica canceled one of its projects back in March due to its growing parallels with with Destiny. It wouldn’t surprise me if Destiny‘s poor critical reception, despite being made by a top-tier studio with a lot of funding, has something to do with Project Titan‘s cancellation. This is merely speculation, but the release of Destiny was only two weeks ago, with many underwhelming reviews being published in the past 9 days.
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Whatever the case may be, Project Titan is dead, and Blizzard’s design team is undoubtedly trying to figure out where to go from here. There were employees who worked on the game for the past few years, many of which were re-positioned to other teams along the way. Will these employees begin working on the next big project, presumably World of Warcraft 2? Probably, but chances are we won’t know for a very long time.
In the meantime, Blizzard has a variety of games in development, including the final StarCraft 2 expansion, Legacy of the Void, and its MOBA/Action-RTS solution Heroes of the Storm. It has plenty of products to carry it into the future as it determines what its next big step in the online RPG genre will be.
