Speaking to Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime has announced that Titan, the MMO project the studio had been working on for the past seven years, has been cancelled.
“We had created World of Warcraft, and we felt really confident that we knew how to make MMOs,” Morhaime said, in part. “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.”
Blizzard senior vice president of story and franchise development Chris Metzen explained that the decision to cancel Titan was “excruciating”, but it was for the best. “The discipline of knowing when to quit is important,” he 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.”
Metzen also noted that the success of Hearthstone helped the studio realize that it doesn’t need to make products of a certain scale. “Maybe we can be what we want to be and inspire groups around the company to experiment, get creative, think outside the box and take chances on things that just might thrill people,” he said. “Maybe they don’t have to be these colossal, summer blockbuster-type products.”