Mike Morhaime explains what the MMORPG “Titan” was supposed to be and why it was ultimately canceled. The scope was probably too huge for Blizzard’s MMORPG, which was once meant to succeed WoW.
Why was Titan shelved? Titan was supposed to be Blizzard’s next-generation MMORPG and had been in development for years. In the end, it was canceled because the developers could not handle the sheer scope of the project.
This is what former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime says. He explained that Titan was meant to be something like the sequel to the popular MMO World of Warcraft. The team was quite ambitious.
“We wanted Titan to be our next generation, a kind of sequel to World of Warcraft. We involved many of our senior developers in the project. I think where we really failed was in controlling the scope. The project was very ambitious.
It was a brand new universe and was supposed to be the MMO of the next generation. It was meant to do all sorts of things and had different modes, and we were essentially building two games in parallel at the same time. They just never really came together.”
During GameLab 2019 in Barcelona, Morhaime spoke with the audience about Titan (via vg247).
Why was Titan even announced? At Blizzard, we try not to announce games that are not ready for an announcement. Or for which we are not sure whether we would even release them. Titan was the exception.
We fought. The game was in development for many years. We never officially announced the game, but we talked about working on a next-generation MMO. I think somehow the code name got out. I don’t know if we made it public.
Mike Morhaime
This is what happened to Titan: After the name and development of the project leaked, some of the developers approached the executives. They explained that the engine was not what it should have been at that point. The executives then gave the team months to think about how they wanted to proceed if they could do everything they wanted.
“They took about 2 months and then came back with a few different ideas. And one of them was Overwatch,” Morhaime recounts. “The team was very excited about this idea, and ultimately we decided to move forward and develop Overwatch.”
