After seven years of development, one full project reset (that we know of), and nary an official announcement regarding the game’s identity, Blizzard has said it is no longer working on the project known as “Titan,” which was to be the World Of Warcraft studio’s next massively multiplayer online game. Mike Morhaime, Blizzard co-founder and CEO, confirmed the news in an interview with Polygon’s Phil Kollar. “We didn’t find the passion,” he told Polygon. “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.”
The “Titan” project first came to light in 2007 when Blizzard fans posted on the company’s forums about a job listing that mentioned a “next-gen MMO.” Blizzard later confirmed that it indeed was working on a new MMO and that the game would be an original creation, unlike World Of Warcraft, which expanded on the existing Warcraft series. Outside of the project’s codename leaking and the occasional assurances that “Titan” was super cool and would be able to exist alongside World Of Warcraft, nothing else was about the game was ever announced. In 2013, GamesBeat reported that the “Titan” development team had shrunken significantly and those who were to stay on would be starting over.
This isn’t the first time Blizzard has cancelled a high-profile, long-gestating project. The studio canned Warcraft Adventures: Lord Of the Clans, a traditional point-and-click adventure game, in 1998. (An unfinished version has found their way online, in case you’re curious.) Later, there was StarCraft Ghost, which famously went through multiple iterations and developers before being put on “indefinite hold” in 2006.
In the same Polygon interview, Chris Metzen, another Blizzard executive, implied that Blizzard’s recent success with smaller scale projects, like the digital card game Hearthstone, has the company rethinking its focus. “Maybe we can be what we want to be and inspire groups around the company to experiment, get creative, think outside the box, and take chances on things that just might thrill people,” Metzen told Polygon. “Maybe they don’t have to be these colossal, summer blockbuster-type products.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Blizzard won’t ever make another giant MMO. “I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again,” Morhaime said in the Polygon interview. “But I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time.”