Awhile back Blizzard, the studio behind a World of Warcraft and Overwatch, had a “next generation MMO” within the works called Titan. However like many other Blizzard projects the game was officially canceled back in 2014. The reasons were unclear at the moment of the cancelation. However, recently the company’s founder Mike Morhaime whom is no longer with Blizzard had some words to say about the project during the Gamelab convention that is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain this week.
He revealed that the game was canceled simply because it was too ambitious of a project stating that Blizzard was unable to “find the fun and passion while creating the game.” While speaking to Eurogamer, Morhaime stated, “We failed to control scope. It was very ambitious. It was a brand new universe, and it was going to be the next generation MMO that did all sorts of different things, it had different modes. We were sort of building two games in parallel, and it really struggled to come together.”
Jeff Kaplan, Game Director for Overwatch, also did work on Titan. His remarks for the work on Titan were brutally honest to say the least about the ambitious project “We failed horrifically in every way … In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating.” The shut down, the cancellation of Titan wasn’t a total loss as Overwatch was then created.
The decision to go along with the creation of Overwatch was “one of the best decisions that they made” according to Morhaime. “We took something that wasn’t going to ship for a very long time, might never have shipped, and turned it into an awesome game.” So it seems that even though one huge project that the company just couldn’t deliver on gave birth to an all new gem on it’s on.