Everybody act surprised: Blizzard is making another massively multiplayer role-playing game! And why wouldn’t it? World of Warcraft is still making money nearly ten years after it opened for business and fundamentally changed the gaming business in its wake. Blizzard’s game was not the first MMO, but it was the one that brought online role-playing to the masses (around 12 million players at its peak in 2010).
The studio said as far back as 2007 that it was developing a successor to its groundbreaking work, and it later confirmed the working title. Project Titan was even up and running in 2011, and Blizzard confirmed in 2012 the development team had grown to around 100 staff members as of last September. So it exists, but what is it? A StarCraft MMO? Just World of Warcraft 2? One source claims that it’s something entirely different, the first wholly new IP from Blizzard in fifteen years.
Blizzard fan website Titan Focus spoke with a source claiming close ties to the Titan development team, who provided a wealth of information about Blizzard’s next game. Rather than the fantasy and science fiction settings of its staples StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, Titan will actually build its dense fictional history on the real world. The third-person MMO will retain the character view of World of Warcraft, and it will also let players travel through time to the Roman Empire of more than 2250 years ago, the 11th century Viking Age, and even ancient Greece. All these time periods will have the character interacting with prominent mythological characters from those respective cultures. Characters from World of Warcraft may also make appearances in the game.
The game will be for PCs first, but next-gen console versions will follow later on. The goal with Titan is to establish Blizzard back at the top of the eSports field currently dominated by the likes of League of Legends and Dota. The game will be teased at Blizzcon later this year with early Alpha testing scheduled to begin in 2014.
More details can be read in Titan Focus’ report.
While there is a fair amount of support to these claims, and so far Titan Focus has been fairly good about reporting stories that pan out to be true, we want to emphasize that these are wholly unsubstantiated details about the game. Blizzard and its parent company Activision Blizzard are not ready to talk about Titan just yet, and Activision Blizzard CFO Dennis Durkin’s comments during the company’s February earnings conference call did confirm that the game won’t be ready any time in the next twelve months. “[There will be] significant continued investment in several new properties with long-term potential that are not factored into our 2013 financial outlook, including Activison Publishing’s new Bungie universe, Call of Duty Online for China, and the new Blizzard MMO,” said Durkin.
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