Blizzard designer Jeff Kaplan has said the company’s cancelled MMO project Titan was an “utter failure”.
The game was officially cancelled in 2014 and had been in development for more than seven years at the time.
In an interview with GameSpot, Kaplan spoke frankly about the project, and said, “We failed horrifically in every way… In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating.”
“You’re only as good as your last game,” he continued. “My most recent game was an utter failure called Titan that got cancelled.”
Blizzard creative director Chris Metzen joined Kaplan for the interview – the first of three on the studio’s upcoming arena shooter Overwatch that was developed from the remnants of Titan.
Discussing why Titan failed, Metzen commented, “We were feeling the success [of World of Warcraft] and thinking, ‘We could do another one of those. How hard was it? Maybe there was a little bit of pridefulness and thinking we’d turn right around and rock one out.”
The longer the game’s development went on, however, the higher the pressure and the grander the ambition of the team behind it. “We got a little squirely under the weight of this giant idea that we were chasing where we lost some connectivity with each other,” Metzen said.
Blizzard eventually decided that the only option was to cancel the game. “At the point at which we, how would I say it, shut Titan off, we were pretty low,” Metzen added. “And being very honest about it, we weren’t used to feeling that way. We had had so much good luck, and failing was rough, and it tested us in ways we hadn’t been tested before.”
Rumours suggested that Titan was a sci-fi MMO shooter instead of a World of Warcraft in space but little was ever officially confirmed about the game.
Overwatch enters open beta on May 5th and is set for release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 24th.
