As any Blizzard fan can attest, the developer never rushes a project. Games like StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 spent over a decade in development before finally hitting store shelves.

It's because of these long development cycles that Blizzard has been labeled a perfectionist, a company willing to scrap several years of work (StarCraft: Ghost anyone?) if a project isn't turning out as expected. And as we unhappily report, a similar situation is playing out with Blizzard's yet-to-be-revealed MMO Project Titan.

According to GamesBeat, the majority of the Titan team has been reassigned to work on other forthcoming projects — likely Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 expansions — while the core team starts over. With this restart, gamers are likely looking at a release date of 2016 at the earliest.

While Blizzard wouldn't reveal why Titan is headed back to the drawing board, they did release an official statement:

“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 announcement couldn't come at a worse time for Blizzard, who have been watching World of Warcraft subscribers drop steadily over the past two years or so. Last quarter, subscribers for WoW fell by 1.3 million subscribers to just over 8 million. Needless to say, MMO players are anxious for the next best thing as World of Warcraft is no longer scratching that itch.

Even though GB hypothesizes Titan could hit as early as 2016, we can't imagine an MMO, especially a Blizzard MMO would take less than 3 years to finish. We, of course, don't know Blizzard's progress with Titan before the restart, and whether or not any of that work can be repurposed in some fashion.

Either way, it's likely going to be some time until we hear more about Titan. We may see reports about what the project could have been - rumor had it the project was going to cater to the eSports crowd - but that won't comfort the MMO gamers who have already waited years to see something…anything from this game.

It's not all bad news for Blizzard fans, as the developer still has plenty of projects in the pipeline to get excited about, including StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void, an unnamed Diablo 3 expansion and a PS4/PS3 release, and Blizzard All-Stars (Blizzard's version of DOTA). In fact, most of the developers that were working on Titan were repositioned presumably to help get those various games finished and onto store shelves.

Are you disappointed to learn Blizzard is starting over with Project Titan? Would you rather they take as they long as they need, provided the game is good?

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Source: GamesBeat