Blizzard has confirmed a restructuring of the development team behind its unannounced MMO in light of significant design and technology changes made to the project, amid reports that the game has been completely reset and won’t release until 2016 at the earliest.
A VentureBeat source said to be familiar with the matter claimed that a team of 100 developers working on the MMO was cut to 30 members charged with starting over, while the other 70 staff were reassigned to other work.
A Blizzard spokesman said in a 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.”
Blizzard has never named or put a target release date on the game, but it has spoken openly about it as its “next-gen MMO project”, while a supposedly leaked release schedule suggested in 2010 that the game was being lined up to launch either late this year or in early 2014.
In March 2011, Blizzard chief operating officer Paul Sams told VentureBeat that the studio had “taken some of our most experienced developers and put them on [Titan]”, adding: “We believe we have a dream team. These are the people who made World of Warcraft a success. We are going to blow people’s minds.” In July of the same year, a report on Activision Blizzard's stock prospects from analyst firm Stern Agee claimed that Titan was set to target a “casual” audience.
