Although most gamers are aware of big video game successes like Fortnite and Call of Duty, the sad truth is that some video games don’t ever make it to the shelves. That is, they are cancelled before they even see the light of day.
One such game was Blizzard’s Project Titan, an hyper ambitious game set in a near future Earth where several factions are battling it out for supremacy. The game was mean to be a MMO like World of Warcraft, with a huge world to explore and combat to engage in, plus an interesting plot twist: your character would have an ordinary job during the day interacting with others as in a game like The Sims, while getting to wage war against rival factions playing as one of several classes during the night (which is something that for some reason reminds me of Atlus’ Persona games).
Project Titan was a game of undeniable ambition, then, but ended up buckling under its own weight and was eventually cancelled. And now Blizzard’s former boss Mike Morhaime has explained the reasons behind the cancellation during the Gamelab Conference in Barcelona, as reported by Eurogamer (via GameSpot).
“It [Titan] 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”, said Morhaime at Gamelab.
The game was faced with development issues as its engine failed to come together, and after years in development hell Blizzard decided to pull the plug. “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”, said Morhaime.
The game Morhaime is referring to here is Overwatch, the company’s hugely successful multiplayer hero shooter which was born from the ashes of the failed Project Titan. Overwatch was not only based on the cancelled Titan, but also made use of technology from Blizzard’s MMO World of Warcraft and took inspiration from other games such as Team Fortress too. And suffice to say, it turned out to be a hit, making it one of the biggest comebacks in video game history for sure.
Although it seems cancelling video game projects is not an unusual thing at Blizzard, with the likes of StarCraft: Ghost and Warcraft Adventures getting the axe over the years. “It’s like half the titles we work on never make it”, admitted Morhaime, going on to say that this happens mostly due to budgeting and quality issues.
But still, it’s clear that Blizzard has a reputation like few others in the industry, being behind all-time classics like Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft amongst others. And despite Project Titan’s troublesome development and failed ambition, some have still called for Blizzard to resurrect the failed project. And it can be argued that a colourful, genre-bending RPG could be what Blizzard’s needs right now or maybe not… Here’s hoping, though, that Blizzard’s upcoming games really do set the world on fire when they are released at some point in the future.
Read more: 5 video games that were cancelled