Yes you read it correctly. If you’re eagerly waiting for the next big MMO from Blizzard after the great grand World of Warcraft (WoW), I’m sorry but your hope is crushed. Titan, the not-so-mysterious secret MMO project, is officially canceled; and this decision is not made after two or three months, but happens after seven long years of investment and development.
In the interview with Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime gave a confession about everything. The reason why Titan was there in the first place is that, due to the overwhelming success of WoW, they “felt really confident that (they) knew how to make MMOs,” said Morhaime. So it was their ambition to create the next-gen MMO title that “you could possibly imagine.” But after 84 months, things were not working so well, and they felt that the fun and passion were all lost. As a result, after the reevaluation period, the entire project was ditched. “The discipline of knowing when to quit is important,” claims Chris Metzen, Blizzard’s senior vice president of story and franchise development. They even began to ask themselves philosophical questions like “Is this really who we are? Is this really what we want? Is this really what we want to burn our passion and our work lives, our careers on, for years on end?” Thanks for the reflection, but doing so couldn’t rescue you from the rage and sarcasm of gamers.
Being a gamer myself, what makes the entire issue so daunting is that a video game giant like Blizzard has to spend seven years to realize a project isn’t something they want to produce. And this is not the company’s first case; in fact, Blizzard is notorious for canceling projects, from the announced Warcraft Adventure to the “unannounced” ones like Denizen and Pax Imperia, together with the poor StarCraft Ghost that was put to the “indefinite hold” bin, a.k.a literal termination. Perhaps, after the traumatic Diablo 3, we gamers need to accept the inconvenient truth that Blizzard is no longer the Blizzard that created Diablo 2. Since they’re not “the MMORPG company,” as Metzen emphasized in the interview, we gamers should not pressure them to produce something great in terms of both scale and quality. All that’s left in Blizzard’s mind are the small bland titles like Hearthstone and Heros of the Storm, which don’t have much potential except short-term money-making for the company itself.
“We had to allow ourselves to take that step back and reassess why the hell we were doing that thing in the first place.” True Mr. Metzen, you guys really need a reassessment.
