Titan, the next-generation MMO in growth for years at Blizzard, was ultimately cancelled as a result of the developer didn’t handle the sheer scope of the mission.
That’s in line with ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime, who revealed that though unrelated to the identical universe, Titan was thought of a “sequel” to World of Warcraft internally because it was so formidable.
“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,” Morhaime informed an viewers at GameLab in Barcelona as we speak.
“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.”
Titan happened in a universe targeted on historic delusion and featured time journey, and would have been a subscription primarily based MMO had it been launched.
“It was a brand-new universe, and it was going to be the following technology MMO, that did all types of issues, and it had completely different modes, and we had been sort of constructing two games in parallel on the similar time. It kind of by no means actually got here collectively.
Years of growth on Titan meant Blizzard’s personal know-how struggled to maintain up with the calls for of the event workforce, and different tasks – Overwatch, for one – grew to become financially extra enticing and manageable. Titan joined the 50 % of Blizzard’s mission that find yourself on the shelf.
“We struggled,” he stated. “The game was in growth for a few years, and we didn’t announce the game, however we had talked about that we had been engaged on a subsequent technology MMO. I feel that one way or the other the codename did get on the market. I don’t know if we launched that or not. But ‘next generation MMO’, I bear in mind it in an entire bunch of slides, principally focused at analysts and buyers as a result of we had been a part of a public firm.
“But after we did lastly, what ended up occurring with that game is, sooner or later the workforce mainly got here to us and stated that the engine actually wasn’t the place it wanted to be, and the workforce had grown to some extent that it was actually tough to get the engine to the place it wanted to be whereas conserving the workforce busy. And so that they needed to mainly take a while to redo all of the tooling and the know-how to have the ability to be extra productive making the game. And as a substitute of doing that, we requested the workforce to take a few months and take into consideration, ‘what’s one concept that we might do going ahead? Think about a few different concepts, the place if we had been to start out proper now and do something we needed, what different issues might we do?’
“And they took about two months, got here up with a few completely different concepts, and a kind of concepts was Overwatch. And the workforce was very enthusiastic about that concept and we in the end, you realize, after all, determined to maneuver ahead and make Overwatch” added Morhaime.
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