Following last night’s news that Blizzard were going back to the drawing board with their unannounced MMO codenamed Project Titan, they have confirmed the story that the game is being redesigned. Blizzard commented:
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.
Blizzard has not commented on the staff number reductions cited in last night’s news, but based on the fact that the Titan developers are now focusing on technology changes, a reduction to 30 staff does sound reasonable.
As far as we are aware, Blizzard has no other MMO in the works but they do have a Diablo expansion, the next StarCraft game, Blizzard All Stars and the recently announced Hearthstone to focus on in the years and months ahead.
Whether these new titles will prevent a decline in World of Warcraft subscribers is unlikely, but WoW still commands a lion’s share of the MMO market so they’re probably not too concerned.
