World of Warcraft follow-up Titan was cancelled because it was too ambitious
PUBLISHED ONJune 28, 2019 7:21 AM
Blizzard cancelled Titan — the planned follow-up to World of Warcraft — back in 2014 because it was too "ambitious".
The game developers were supposed to release the planned MMO game as a follow up to their hugely successful World of Warcraft franchise, but founder Mike Morhaime — who has since left the company — has said the project "struggled to come together" because the developers didn't "control scope".
Speaking at Gamelab in Spain, he said: "It was very ambitious. It was a brand new universe, and it was going to be the next generation MMO that did all sorts of different things, it had different modes. We were sort of building two games in parallel, and it really struggled to come together."
Instead, Blizzard developed Overwatch from the ashes of Titan, and Mike believes green-lighting the multiplayer first-person shooter was "one of the best decisions that we made."
He added: "We took something that wasn't going to ship for a very long time, might never have shipped, and turned it into an awesome game."
Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, who worked on Titan, remarked: "We failed horrifically in every way ... In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating."
Titan was officially axed in 2014, and Mike said at the time the company just couldn't "find the passion" for the overly ambitious project.
He said: "We set out to make the most ambitious thing that you could possibly imagine. And it didn't come together.
"[Blizzard] didn't find the fun... didn't find the passion."