Blizzard Details the Rough Road From Titan to Overwatch

"We were very nervous about what our future was."

By Vince Ingenito

Jeff Kaplan, the Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment, took the stage at DICE 2017 this morning to discuss video game world building, and wound up talking about Project Titan - Blizzard's cancelled MMO that went on to become Overwatch. While the relationship between the two is by no means a secret, Kaplan went into greater detail about the stressful transition period than he has previously.

As has been widely reported, Project Titan was in development for nearly seven years, and was officially cancelled in May of 2013. Kaplan spoke briefly on the difficulty of walking away from a project after emotionally investing in it so heavily for so long. He then went on to outline what happened to the Titan dev team once the decision was made.

According to Kaplan, around 140 people were working on Titan at the time of cancellation. Of those, 80 were assigned permanently to other projects within Blizzard. Another 20 were dispersed as what he called "long-term loans," which he defined as personnel temporarily reallocated to other teams for anywhere from six months to two years.

The remaining core of 40 ex-Titan team members were then given a mere six weeks to come up with a new direction for the now defunct project. As Kaplan put it, "We were in a period of despair. There wasn't a lot of hope on the team. We were very nervous about what our future was."

It has been reported previously that the idea for Overwatch sprung forth from one of Titan's PvP modes, and while Kaplan doesn't contradict this fact, he adds that before they arrived at the idea for Overwatch, they spent four of their six weeks working on two more MMO concepts. One of them would have launched a new IP altogether. The other, though, was going to be set in an existing Blizzard universe that hasn't gotten the MMO treatment. Kaplan, of course, betrays nothing here, calmly adding that there are "a lot of choices for you to figure out which it was."

Jeff Kaplan on stage at DICE 2017.

At this point, Kaplan's story re-connects with what we already know: that some character designs being worked on by Arnold Tsang, the Blizzard artist who would end up being Overwatch's Assistant Art Director, provided the original spark of inspiration for what is now a well-known and highly popular cast of characters.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. Follow him on Twitter and help him sort out his Street Fighter 5 character crisis.

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