Blizzard Confirms Titan MMO Rumour

Their next game Diablo III may be stuck in a loop of delays and postponement in the quest for perfection, but Blizzard COO Paul Sams had confirmed the rumour that has been circulating since the past two months about an upcoming MMO title. Speaking to Gamasutra, Sams confirmed rumours about the next-gen MMO, which has been tentatively titled Titan. The next-gen MMO will be its "next big thing" after the studio rolls out the much awaited Diablo III.

Paul Sams, in an interview with Gamasutra, announced that Titan will stretch Blizzard further than any previous project. "I believe [it's] the most ambitious thing we've ever attempted," said Sams. He also confirmed that the same core team behind the success of one of the longest running MMO king World of Warcraft (WoW) is behind the upcoming game, "We have some of our most talented and most experienced developers on that team. Many of the people that built World of Warcraft are full time on that other team."

However, shifting the team behind WoW over to Titan doesn't mean any compromise towards the 6 year old MMO title. Sams explained that World of Warcraft will be serviced by fresh talent trained under the WoW developers. "We've spent a lot of time over the last number of years transitioning those people off [of World of Warcraft], and having great people below them that were trained up by them to run World of Warcraft. Those people have been doing it for the last couple of years without the assistance of those people that created it," explained Sam.

He further added explaining that the WoW universe has still got more going for it, "I see World of Warcraft as having many more years in front of it. We have over 12 million subscribers. We're continuing to grow and we feel very good about them. We're going to continue to support that product for many, many years to come. As it relates to that other [MMO], we think that it's going to be very impactful in our industry and, we hope, very impactful to the world. We think that that will be, after Diablo III, the next big thing from us. The thing that we hope will happen is that it will not stop World of Warcraft but we believe will eclipse it."

However, gamers should get all worked up on the new announcement as the project is secondary to the release of Diablo III, which may not release at all this year. Although Blizzard, who hasn't issued a release date for Diablo III yet, claims of a 2011 release, the publisher Activision indicated otherwise during their investor call. That means we can expect two Blizzard titles in 2012 - Diablo III, which seems most likely to release by that time, and Heart of the Swarm, the next instalment in the StarCraft II trilogy. Knowing the time consuming perfectionism of Blizzard, it's best not to speculate on the time frame for Titan.