Titan, the next-generation MMO in improvement for years at Blizzard, was in the end cancelled as a result of the developer didn’t handle the sheer scope of the undertaking.
That’s in response to ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime, who revealed that though unrelated to the identical universe, Titan was thought-about a “sequel” to World of Warcraft internally because it was so formidable.
“We’ve tried actually onerous to not announce any video games that weren’t able to be introduced, or we weren’t certain that we had been going to launch them,” Morhaime advised an viewers at GameLab in Barcelona immediately.
“Titan is an exception to that the place we wished it to be our subsequent era, our sequel to kind of World of Warcraft. We took lots of our senior builders and put them on this undertaking. And I believe the place we actually failed was we failed to regulate scope. It was very formidable.”
Titan happened in a universe targeted on historic fantasy and featured time journey, and would have been a subscription based mostly MMO had it been launched.
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“It was a brand-new universe, and it was going to be the following era MMO, that did all kinds of issues, and it had totally different modes, and we had been type of constructing two video games in parallel on the identical time. It kind of by no means actually got here collectively.
Years of improvement on Titan meant Blizzard’s personal expertise struggled to maintain up with the calls for of the event staff, and different initiatives – Overwatch, for one – turned financially extra enticing and manageable. Titan joined the 50 p.c of Blizzard’s undertaking that find yourself on the shelf.
“We struggled,” he stated. “The sport was in improvement for a few years, and we didn’t announce the sport, however we had talked about that we had been engaged on a subsequent era MMO. I believe that one way or the other the codename did get on the market. I don’t know if we launched that or not. However ‘subsequent era MMO’, I bear in mind it in a complete bunch of slides, largely focused at analysts and traders as a result of we had been a part of a public firm.
“However after we did lastly, what ended up taking place with that recreation is, sooner or later the staff mainly got here to us and stated that the engine actually wasn’t the place it wanted to be, and the staff had grown to a degree that it was actually tough to get the engine to the place it wanted to be whereas maintaining the staff busy. And they also wished to mainly take a while to redo all of the tooling and the expertise to have the ability to be extra productive making the sport. And as a substitute of doing that, we requested the staff to take a few months and take into consideration, ‘what’s one concept that we might do going ahead? Take into consideration a few different concepts, the place if we had been to begin proper now and do something we wished, what different issues might we do?’
“And so they took about two months, got here up with a few totally different concepts, and a type of concepts was Overwatch. And the staff was very enthusiastic about that concept and we in the end, you recognize, in fact, determined to maneuver ahead and make Overwatch” added Morhaime.