Bad news for the millions of fans eagerly awaiting Blizzard’s upcoming MMO, which is code named as Titan – it is going to be seeing a release of 2016, and that is at the earliest.
There has been a report which suggests that the World of Warcraft’s developers team who were working on Project Titan have been slashed from around 100, to only 30. News first broke on the delay on the website Venturebeat. Blizzard have since confirmed a delay, but refuses to comment with information on the new release date.
“We’re using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven’t announced any dates for the MMO.”
The report suggests that the team of 100 has been reduced to only 30 core team members, so they can “start over” with the game. The reasons according to sources close to the project are cited to being:
- Blizzard felt that Titan wasn’t going in the right direction and decided to make significant technological and design changes to the game. This happened in the past with Starcraft and Warcraft 3.
- A smaller dev team will be in charge of redesigning the project and about 60 or 70 developers are being moved to other teams (WoW, Blizzard All-Stars, Diablo 3 expansion, Battle.net)
Originally, Titan had been expected to show up late this year, or possibly some point early next year (2014) according to information that had previously been leaked from an internal source.
We know that it is not a World of Warcraft sequel, and despite the fact the game has been playable for some time now, virtually nothing is known about it.
It will be difficult for any MMORPG to follow in WoW’s success, the MMO however has been dwindling in subscriber rate recently. It is currently hovering at around 8 million, compared to a peak of 12 million subscribers, and 10 million from last year.
I would love to know why there is the huge delay happening for Titan, and just how will the fans react at possibly needing to wait another 3 plus years for the next big Blizzard MMORPG.