“We failed to control scope. It was very ambitious.”
Titan, the MMO positioned to succeed World of Warcraft, was allegedly canceled because Blizzard Entertainment wasn’t able to control its scope and ambition.
Reported by VG247, Mike Morhaime, co-founder and former president of Blizzard Entertainment, revealed this during a speech at Gamelab in Barcelona, Spain.
“We’ve tried really hard not to announce any games that weren’t ready to be announced, or we weren’t sure that we were going to release them,” said Morhaime. “Titan is an exception to that where we wanted it to be our next generation, our sequel to sort of World of Warcraft. We took a lot of our senior developers and put them on this project. And I think where we really failed was we failed to control scope. It was very ambitious.”
The Fall of Titian
“It was a brand-new universe, and it was going to be the next generation MMO, that did all sorts of things, and it had different modes, and we were kind of building two games in parallel at the same time. It sort of never really came together,” continued Morhaime. “We struggled. The game was in development for many years, and we didn’t announce the game, but we had talked about that we were working on a next generation MMO. I think that somehow the codename did get out there. I don’t know if we released that or not.”
Ultimately, Morhaime revealed the game’s engine wasn’t coming together, and the team began focusing on other projects – notably, the highly-successful Overwatch. “What ended up happening with that game is, at some point the team basically came to us and said that the engine really wasn’t where it needed to be, and the team had grown to a point that it was really difficult to get the engine to where it needed to be while keeping the team busy. And so they wanted to basically take some time to redo all the tooling and the technology to be able to be more productive making the game.
“And instead of doing that, we asked the team to take a couple of months and think about, ‘what’s one idea that we could do going forward? Think about a couple of other ideas, where if we were to start right now and do anything we wanted, what other things could we do?’ And they took about two months, came up with a couple of different ideas, and one of those ideas was Overwatch. And the team was very excited about that idea and we ultimately, you know, of course, decided to move forward and make Overwatch.”
Video Game Industry Crunch
Morhaime also discussed crunch in the video game industry with Eurogamer at Gamelab, saying “Blizzard has definitely evolved around crunch… In our early days we crunched crazy hours to get the games done. I think if you’re a small studio, you’re living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort – or at least it did for us. I can’t speak for other companies and I’m sure there are better ways of doing things, but for us, I don’t think we would have been as successful if we hadn’t put in everything that we had.”
However, Morhaime said crunching to ship games is ultimately harmful, saying “That is not sustainable, and we need to find better ways of working, and so, I think you’re finding companies are doing a lot better these days, managing sort of controlled crunches where people are working really hard, but they’re not working 24/7. They’re taking breaks, they’re sleeping, and I think the larger companies are able to hire more staff. And actually even the smaller companies… are able to get funded to do the work they want to do better than in the past.”
The History of Titan and Overwatch
Blizzard Employees have gone on record about Titan in the past, including designer Jeff Kaplan who claimed “we failed horrifically in every way… In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating.” During DICE 2017, Kaplan detailed Blizzard’s road from Titan to Overwatch – the team for Titan reportedly consisted of well-over 100 developers. While much is still unknown about Titan, reports indicated Titan was a sci-fi MMO set on a near-future version of Earth.
Regardless of Titan’s doomed fate, Overwatch became a highly-successful hero shooter. In our Overwatch review, we called the game “Amazing” saying “Overwatch is an incredible achievement in multiplayer shooter design. It bobs and weaves almost perfectly between being the quick-fix adrenaline hit you might want after a long day of work, and the thoughtful, strategic multiplayer experience that becomes the center of evening-long binges with friends.” It ultimately became IGN’s game of the year 2016.
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Colin Stevens is a news writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
