Blizzard has cancelled MMO title Titan

Mystery MMO Titan has been scrapped by Blizzard after seven years of development.

"We had created World of Warcraft, and we felt really confident that we knew how to make MMOs," Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime told Polygon. "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. We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a re-evaluation period, and actually, what we re-evaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no."

Blizzard’s senior vice president of story and franchise development Chris Metzen added: "It’s always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we cancelled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we cancelled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work.

"I’m not saying we’re an old rock band. But you watch documentaries about The Rolling Stones or U2 or these bands that have lasted for a while. And there’s times where they just drive each other batshit crazy. For as good as they are and the experience they have, sometimes you just don’t find it, and you’ve got to get out of the damn studio and go have a beer and regroup.

"In many ways, Titan was that for us. We took a step back and realized that it had some cool hooks. It definitely had some merit as a big, broad idea, but it didn’t come together. It did not distill. The music did not flow.”

Recent successes in the esports sector with StarCraft II, the RPG sector with Diablo III and the app sector with Hearthstone have perhaps dulled the company’s appetite for MMOs, with Morhaime conceding that "I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again, but I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time".

Analyst Michael Pachter told the site that the delay is a blow, for sure", adding: "They need to stem WoW declines, and I am surprised that it took so long to make a decision."