Blizzard confirms next-gen MMOG called Titan

Early this month, an austere document appeared online purporting to be Blizzard Entertainment's road map for the next five years. Dated April 2, 2010, the document listed quarterly release windows for all of the Irvine, California-based studio's projects, including Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (Q4 2011), Diablo 3 (Q4 2011), and World of Warcraft's fourth expansion (Q2 2012). Also appearing in that chart was a mystery project, bearing the title Titan and a Q4 2013 release window.

Though the validity of the chart is apocryphal at best, it has been lent some measure of credence this week, courtesy of none other than Blizzard cofounder and executive vice president Frank Pearce. As part of the 2010 VGA ceremony, Pearce spoke with gaming blog Destructoid, confirming Titan as at the very least a working title for the studio's much-speculated upon new massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

"Titan is… the media is not meant to know anything about that," Pearce said. "It's our next-gen MMO, and we've only started talking about it in a limited fashion because we want to leverage the fact that we're working on something like that for the purpose of recruiting--getting some of the best talent in the industry on that."

Blizzard has been teasing out pieces of its next big project since 2007, when it confirmed that a non-World of Warcraft MMOG was in development. The game, which Blizzard does not see as a competitor to WOW, will be an all-new property with, according to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, "a little more broad appeal."