Jeff Kaplan Revealed Overwatch Was Created Out of a Canceled Blizzard Game That Was 7 Years in the Making

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Jeff Kaplan Revealed Overwatch Was Created Out of a Canceled Blizzard Game That Was 7 Years in the Making

A follow-up to the wildly popular World of Warcraft, Titan was an ambitious MMO project that Blizzard had canceled in 2014. As Blizzard prepared to reveal its upcoming game, the hero shooter Overwatch, was actually constructed using some of the leftover materials from Titan.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

It became evident why the company had been so eager to make the announcement a month and a half later. Eleven years have gone by, Overwatch has grown to be a mainstay of the Blizzard franchise and one of the most played games in the market. However, one can’t help but wonder what might have occurred if events had turned out differently.

Overwatch was distilled from Project Titan‘s failure

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Overwatch stood up. | Credit: Blizzard Entertainment.

Titan was supposed to be a revolutionary new MMO game that would transform the genre in the same way that World of Warcraft had done years earlier. However, Titan became too large and ambitious for Blizzard to manage. After roughly seven years of development, Titan was canceled in September 2013 before Blizzard could even formally reveal its existence.

November 2014 saw the release of Blizzard’s brand-new multiplayer shooter, Overwatch. In part, it was put together using the remnants of Titan. Speaking about the reason for this failure, here’s what Overwatch director and former vice president of Blizzard, Jeff Kaplan, stated (via

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

):

In general, when you’re working on a game, you usually have a sense of where the team morale is at, and sort of the team sensibilities in terms of how successfully they feel the game is going. And also you have a sense of the game itself — is it fun, is the technology working, are the tools to make the game working — and in general, what happened toward the end of “Titan” is we realized that so many of the elements we had enjoyed experiencing working on other projects were just not working.

Overwatch, one of Blizzard’s biggest hits to date, was made using some of the superhero assets made for Titan, which is a bright spot in the game’s failure. However, it’s possible that most of the work that went into Titan will never be seen by the general public. And it continues to be one of the video game industry’s cautionary tales.

Why was Titan actually canceled?

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Titan might be the biggest setback in the gaming world. | Credit: Blizzard Entertainment.

Titan‘s development, the issues that occurred behind the scenes, and its eventual cancellation have all been the subject of some stories. However, a lot of it had been rumors.

We now know more about what transpired with the project thanks to Jason Schreier’s book,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Entertainment. Details from a section of the book that delves deeply into Titan and its development issues were shared by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

ahead of the book’s October 8th release date.

Blizzard didn’t want to wait for another game to be a “WoW killer,” according to the book. However, an “Overwatch killer” is already here. Rather than doing it themselves, they planned to develop another MMO that would keep players in the same ecosystem. Although there had been discussions about creating a game akin to World of Starcraft, the general consensus was that StarCraft could be used in an MMORPG.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Jeff #Kaplan #Revealed #Overwatch #Created #Canceled #Blizzard #Game #Years #Making

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

0

• Quote