Only a few people know all the details of the big MMORPG “Project Titan” from Blizzard. Now there is new information about the game that we will never see.
Blizzard has always had the peculiarity of announcing games comparatively late and often burying them in the development phase.
Over the last 30 years, there have been many projects that never saw the light of day. One of them was a StarCraft game about Nova, another was a point & click Warcraft adventure with Thrall in the main role. A planned survival game has also been canceled.
However, the largest of these canceled projects was probably “Project Titan”, which was developed in the early 2010s and discontinued after around 7 years of development work. This was supposed to be a new, big MMORPG from Blizzard – but it was never released.
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Project Titan – The MMORPG hope that died early
Although Project Titan is well known in the gaming world, many details about it are still obscure. All we know roughly is that Overwatch was born from the remains of the game at some point – the character designs in particular are said to have been largely adopted.
Journalist Jason Schreier spoke in a podcast with the Limit Break Network about some of Blizzard’s internals that he got hold of to research his new book. New details also came to light.
According to Schreier, in Titan you should slip into the role of a character who goes about normal everyday things during the day – almost like in a life simulation, like The Sims or Animal Crossing. This included fishing, photography and even full-time jobs.
However, that changed drastically when night fell, because then you revealed your role as a superhero and could fight crime. Different hero classes should provide different experiences here.
Titan was the beginning of the end
According to Schreier, the failure of Titan was the trigger for Blizzard to go downhill afterwards. Because the situation showed “Bobby Kotick that the promise of ‘You just let us do it and we’ll create a hit for you’ was no longer valid”.
That was exactly the reason why Bobby Kotick tightened the thumbscrews at Blizzard, because then Kotick began to assert his influence more and more and, among other things, argue more with Mike Morhaime.
Morhaime tried to protect the teams from this influence for a long time, but ultimately gave up after a few years and left Blizzard too.
According to Schreier, Titan not only consumed $80 million before it was discontinued, but also incurred high opportunity costs. These are costs that arise from not noticing something – i.e. during the time that Project Titan was in development, other titles were not being worked on instead. A large part of the 7 years of development time was lost.
Not only did the developers have to be paid during this time, they also didn’t work on other games that would ultimately be completed.
The fact that Titan ultimately died was due not least to the high expectations that Blizzard had. It was supposed to be a game that could compete with World of Warcraft and take the MMORPG genre to the next level – before other game companies would beat it to it.