A bit of a legend among the World of Warcraft community, Blizzard was rumored to be working on the game as the successor to its flagship MMORPG since the 2000s. It was confirmed in 2014 the company had been working on Titan, but the project had been canceled.
Now in 2019, Co-founder and former President of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Morhaime shed some light on the failed endeavor.
Morhaime spoke at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona yesterday on Blizzard’s efforts with the title, particularly on its trouble with direction during development.
He further touched on the auction house in Diablo 3, which was removed after ultimately proving to be a hindrance to natural game progression.
The pitch was basically an evolution of a sort of Team Fortress-style game in a superhero universe. It was going to leverage some of our best technology from Titan and World of Warcraft. We were going to take some characters and worlds from the Titan universe design.
We thought we could make a really compelling game with much tighter scope control. And I think it was probably one of the best decisions that we made. 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.
Blizzard is known to toss about 50% of its in-production titles, a staggering but unsurprising percentage. The developer’s last standalone release was Overwatch in 2016, and its last large release was last year’s World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth.
We designed it without an auction house initially, and when you have an auction house in a game that’s dropping tonnes and tons of loot, it’s way cheaper and easier to get second-hand items from the auction house.
The developer will be launching World of Warcraft Classic to all WoW subscribers in late August.
Morhaime had many other nuggets of information about Blizzard’s development process and history that are well worth the read for any fan. Even if Diablo fans are a little miffed at last year’s Diablo Immortal reveal, there is surely more in the works from the famed developer.
