In 2007, Blizzard Entertainment began working on Titan, a MMO that the company hoped could replicate the success of its earlier title, World of Warcraft. Seven years later, Blizzard acknowledged that Titan had been canceled. Now, details are emerging that apparently shed new light on what Titan could have been and how it ultimately fell apart.
Polygon has shared an extended excerpt from Jason Schreier’s upcoming book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. In the selected passages, Schreier relates that Titan was essentially two games in one. It was a superhero action title where players could fight bad guys in one part of the game, while also living out their secret identities in a Sims-like environment. That entailed the playable characters getting jobs, places to live, and even letting them cook food. However, the challenge that couldn’t be overcome was melding these vastly different experiences into a single cohesive game.
Rob Pardo–Blizzard’s vice president of game design during Titan’s development–was reportedly blamed internally for many of the issues that came up. Pardo was said to be largely hands-off on Titan while overseeing other games at Blizzard, only to come back and disrupt its progress by rejecting things that the team had already begun working on. For all of the time and effort that was put into Titan, the development team had little to show for it when the plug was finally pulled.
The silver lining of Titan’s failure is that some of the superhero assets created for this game were repurposed for Overwatch, which is one of Blizzard’s biggest hits to date. But the vast majority of the work that went into Titan may never be shown to the public. And it remains one of the cautionary tales of the video game industry.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment will be released on October 8.
