When former Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime left the company in April, he had worked at the studio he helped co-found for more than 28 years. Morhaime was at Blizzard before it was called Blizzard, when it was named Silicon & Synapse and when its employee count was three.
He decided to leave to spend more time with his family, Morhaime told an audience at Gamelab conference in Barcelona today, attended for Eurogamer by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell. The talk was hosted by GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi, and Morhaime’s wife and four-year-old daughter were in the front row.
“We wanted it (Titan) to be our sequel to World of Warcraft. I think where we really failed was we failed to control the scope. It was very ambitious.”
Ambitious, Morhaime explained, meant next-gen MMO systems in a brand new universe with different modes. “We were building two games in parallel at the same time. It sort of never really came together,” he said.
Titan was in development for many years with a lot of senior staff moved to it at its inception. While it was never officially announced, the codename, “Project Titan”, got out. Over time, devs realized that the game “really wasn’t where it needed to be”. The bulk of development was being poured into upgrading Blizzard’s engine to meet the needs of the game.
Blizzard’s legendary, never-released Titan was meant to be the studio’s big follow-up to World of Warcraft – a revolutionary new MMO with all the studio’s learnings built in.
“We failed to control scope,” Morhaime said. “It 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.”
Blizzard’s 50 percent release rate has been mentioned briefly before, but it is still an astonishing statistic to see: half the games Blizzard begins to develop never see the light of day – which amounts to some 14 tit26les canned throughout Blizzard’s history.
“There’s a saying that ‘perfect is the enemy of great’ because if you strive for perfection you’ll never ship. But I do think that there’s so much competition out there,” Morhaime said.