With 'Titan' cancelled, has Blizzard run out of ideas?

Unless you’re living under a rock, you probably already know that Titan, Blizzard’s top-secret MMORPG project, has been cancelled after seven years in development. Ouch.

It must have been an extremely difficult decision for the company to make, but as a fan of Blizzard games—and the worlds the company creates—I have to say I’m a little bit worried.

To be clear, I’m not worried about the company. Titan or no Titan, Blizzard will continue to be a massively successful, massively profitable games industry behemoth. WOW is still massively popular, Hearthstone is a huge hit, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo all have huge fanbases, and Heroes of the Storm looks promising, even if the alpha hasn’t been good enough to tear me away from League of Legends yet.

(See: China’s craziest WOW player has 247 level-90 accounts, and there’s more…)

But part of the reason I personally play games is that I like being transported into new worlds, and experiencing new stories. Blizzard has a history of creating really immersive worlds and telling fascinating stories in them, but it has been an extremely long time since the company tried to do something new. Titan was meant to be based on new IP and not related to the Warcraft, Starcraft, or Diablo series. But with that game now cancelled, there’s nothing new on the horizon.

And look, I love the worlds of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying Blizzard should abandon them. But do you know how long it has been since Blizzard ventured outside the box and created a new world? 16 years. The last time Blizzard released a game based on totally new IP was in 1998 with Starcraft. Since then, every game the company has been released has been based on the worlds of Warcraft, Starcraft, or Diablo (and, in the case of Heroes of the Storm, all three).

I can’t criticize Blizzard for cancelling Titan, because that may well have been the right decision for the company. But personally, as much as I love them, I’m getting sick of the same three universes being rehashed and revisited over and over in every single Blizzard game released. Here’s hoping that with its next release, Blizzard can prove it hasn’t run out of ideas, and that we aren’t doomed to another decade-plus of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo-only releases.

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