The Kickstarter MMORPG TitanReach struggled with funding issues since Early Access. Now the game has been officially declared dead by the lead programmer. In his last post, he shared the original future plans for the MMORPG, so he could “watch the world burn.”
This was TitanReach: The MMORPG by Square Root Studios was a classic open-world action game. It offered its players the usual selection of features of theme park MMOs with content such as:
- Quests and world bosses
- PvE in dungeons and raids
- Open PvP in certain zones
- A story revolving around powerful titans
- Professions like fishing and blacksmithing
However, there were no classes. The twist of the game was that while there are many skills, you could only use 5 of them in combat. This was supposed to provide a unique tactical component.
The MMORPG has struggled with financial problems since Early Access and had to halt development several times due to lack of funds. In September 2021, one of the two co-founders of the studio announced that they had found a new investor.
The secret source of funding was “very generous” and promised to fully finance the project. However, it seems that this did not materialize.
This is what one of the co-founders says: In a post on the official Discord of the game, the co-founder of the studio, √Unravel, addressed the community of the game. He wrote that the development studio is completely shutting down and TitanReach is now irretrievably dead.
He thanked the community for their support but also justified himself for the project’s failure.
[…] The journey has not been easy. No one tells you that building such cool projects as this requires much more than just love for it. A shy solo programmer was thrown into the deep end and had to deal with the company, the community, management, public and private drama, finances, and everything that didn’t feel like game development. […]
He also announced that the Discord server will be shut down in the next 7 days. The Twitter account of TitanReach no longer exists. The last update post on the official site is dated July 2021.
The official subreddit also seems to no longer exist. In r/MMORPG, the user Luna_EclipseRS, who allegedly was one of the moderators, stated that he was removed from the subreddit. Following this, it was set to “private” and could no longer be read.
The news from Unravel was not over yet.
The last post reveals failed future plans with NFTs and crypto
This is what the head says as well: In another post on Discord, one of the two co-founders of the development studio spoke about the plans he and the team had for the future. It was all about NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
The players were not aware of these plans until the last moment, and Unravel probably anticipated that this news would not be well received by many of them. He begins his post with:
Before I leave you, I want to share with you the plans we had for the future. Just so I can watch the world burn on my way out.
In the longer post, he then explains that the developers had a “great advisor on blockchain technology.” According to Unravel, nobody would be forced to use TitanReach’s NFTs and Crypto. You could create a free account and play the game without any interaction with the features.
The plan was that it would be possible to convert any item in the game into an NFT for a “small amount of in-game gold.” It was supposed to be much better than the existing “junk that plagues the NFT and crypto market,” according to Unravel.
It is now dead, but I honestly believe that we found a great setup to implement NFTs and crypto without compromising integrity.[…] Pay2Earn is something that I personally, and most of you probably don’t care about. But with this setup, we would have attracted more players into the ecosystem.
However, this will no longer happen. The reasons for the sudden death of TitanReach have not been disclosed by the developer. They are “private in nature.” Some users on Reddit speculate that the mysterious investor may have changed their mind.
