Blizzard cancels Titan MMO after 7 years of development

Blizzard will cancel its next-generation MMO called Titan. A little weird to see as the game already had a development time  seven years! Blizzard claims the project was too ambitious and notes they failed to get it together, the game reportedly had some cool hooks but lacked a big, broad idea.

This revelation comes after at least seven years in development and word last year that the developer was going back to the drawing board to reevaluate the project.

Speaking to Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime reiterated that the company has technically never officially announced Titan, though it hasn't been shy to talk about the game over the past seven years. "We had created World of Warcraft, and we felt really confident that we knew how to make MMOs," Morhaime said. "So we set out to make the most ambitious thing that you could possibly imagine. And it didn't come together.

"We didn't find the fun," Morhaime continued. "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."

Chris Metzen, Blizzard's senior vice president of story and franchise development, called the decision to cancel Titan "excruciating." Morhaime agreed: "It's always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work."

"The discipline of knowing when to quit is important," Metzen said. "We were losing perspective and getting lost in the weeds a little. We had to allow ourselves to take that step back and reassess why the hell we were doing that thing in the first place."

As Metzen and Morhaime have looked back on the past decade at Blizzard, a major factor in their decision to pursue Titan was the immense success of World of Warcraft, the company's first MMO and still the most financially successful game ever released in the genre.