Blizzard's canceled World of Warcraft follow-up was a "1 server, 1 world" MMO with GTA and Animal Crossing influences, ex dev says, but it was so big it "could never ship"

Blizzard Entertainment's scrapped MMO, Titan, is a well-known not-so-secret at this point, but one the game's developers and eventual (now former) Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has spilled almost all of the project's tea.

For those not in the know, shortly after World of Warcraft became a global juggernaut, the studio began work on another similarly massive online RPG. Blizzard itself has never shed too much light on the project, apart from the fact that it was officially canned in 2014 and a few of the same developers used some already made assets to create what would become Overwatch.

Overwatch co-creator and former director Jeff Kaplan tells the Lex Fridman podcast that development on Titan began because "there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn't gonna last forever" and it "would be maybe successful for five years" before aging out. "And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game sort of waiting in the wings," he explains.

So, Blizzard got to work on a game that was set in a future version of Earth where players lived seemingly normal lives by day and did "cool secret agent stuff" by night, according to Kaplan. "The secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter but [with] over-the-top abilities like you would see in Overwatch because that's where they came from."

And then the daytime loop would have let players engage in mundane activities, like holding a job, running a business, or building a house. "We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, The Sims," Kaplan adds, before shouting out former Sims creative director Matt Brown, who actually joined the Titan team.

What became Titan's downfall was just how big and ambitious it was. Kaplan recalls that the game included GTA-style driving and an incomprehensively large world that recreated Hollywood, San Francisco, the lands between, as well as global cities such as London and Cairo. Plus, unlike WoW, Blizzard planned for it to be a "one-server, one-world" game. "It was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a brand new engine, a brand new team, brand new IP."

While the game's ideation process began sometime in 2007, around two years later, Kaplan says he "knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist." He remembers even going all the way to the top and telling Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime to shut the project down, though that wouldn't happen until years later.

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