‘Project Titan’: Blizzard Making Big Changes

Blizzard has confirmed that its “Project Titan” is undergoing major changes.

The mainly PC developer Blizzard is known for its top-down MMORPG and real-time strategy titles. A few years ago, you could barely go online without hearing about World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s magnum opus in the MMORPG world. Diablo has turned heads itself, mostly due to its use of religious imagery for shock value, practically making it the Marilyn Manson of the video game world. StarCraft has been a huge source of income for Blizzard due to sci-fi gamers who want intergalactic warfare, and it is the spiritual successor to the original Warcraft series.

When it comes to PC games, Blizzard seems to know what it’s doing.

Blizzard’s latest project, code-named “Titan,” was sent back to the drawing board yesterday. Apparently, the game needed to be retooled for new technology. Blizzard reps issued a statement to Kotaku:

“We’ve always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We’ve come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. 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.”

This follows the report yesterday that Blizzard cut the development team working on “Project Titan” from 100 to 30, redistributing the other 70 to work on other projects. We can only hope that the supposedly endless postponement of “Project Titan” doesn’t produce something as half-baked and rushed as Duke Nukem Forever, which proved that extensive development time doesn’t mean it will be any good.

Blizzard’s company COO Paul Sams stated two years ago that “Project Titan” was coming along nicely, “We’re playing it already. It is a total ball to play. We think that the reach of that product is greater than anything that we’ve done before. We’re very excited about that. I believe that it’s the type of game that will have a very long life, much like World of Warcraft has.”

Hopes are high, but we can’t help but wonder exactly what went wrong with a game that was so fun and yet sent back to the drawing board two years later.

What do you think may have gone wrong with “Project Titan”? Is Blizzard secretly giving up on it or actually updating the technology?