Project Titan Canceled, Here's What we Missed

SO!  There was some big news yesterday!  And I… didn’t report it! 

Yeah, I suck, feel free to scorn me in the ressesses of your mind, but don’t worry: I’ll report on it today, AND I’ll add some sweet bonus info that we’ve learned since the announcement yesterday, alright?

Alright.

Titan, Blizzard’s mysterious next entirely new MMO, has been officially canceled by Blizzard. 

A little history.  Way back in 2007(!) Blizzard revealed that it was going to be working on an entirely new IP and MMO called Titan, which would have been a completely different beast than that other MMO it’s currently got going, whatever it’s called.  But other than that momentary reveal, that was pretty much all we knew: in the seven years following Blizzard had been famously tight-lipped about the project and its development , refusing to even detail the smallest chunks of info.

But that all changed yesterday, as in an interview with Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime said, when asked about Titan’s development:

“We didn't find the fun. We didn't find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that's the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no."

Here’s the thing—seven years Is a long time to be working on a project, and in something as fluid as game development it’s hard to be sure exactly what it was we’d be getting. So it’s hard to mourn the loss of something we knew nothing about, but today Kotaku reached out to several testers of the unfinished game and former employees to asked them exactly what Titan was.

Here’s what we learn:

Titan was a Sci-Fi MMORPG set in a near future where the earth managed to fight off an alien invader.  You, the player, joins one of three factions currently engaged in a cold war with one another, and you have to maintain a sort of double life: In day, you did a normal, everyday 9-to-5 job: you were a mechanic, a cook, a business owner… but during your breaks or after work, you got a call from your agency and you were asked to join other players in shoot-em-up combat... which you could refuse if you'd really rather just keep working your day job.   Astatically and gameplay wise, paralells were drawn between Titan and Team Fortress 2/Starcraft, as it could be either first or third person and many of the classes (Jumpers being mobile fighters, Titans being tanks, Rangers being sneaky snipers). 

The world was split in two: the “real” world, where you socialized and did your job and hung around, and a “shadow world” where you engaged in PvP and PvE.  The switch between the two worlds would involve you hopping into an elevator and changing outfits, Superman-Style.  In fact, one tester called it similar to Pixar’s The Incredables in that regard.

One the major goals of development was to make the world and its NPC’s feel alive.  The hope was that NPC’s would react to you and your friends differently depending on your history or how often you dropped by.  To accomplish the feel of a living world, one employee said Blizzard hired people who worked on The Sims to help construct the AI.

Of course, these are all pipe dreams, as officially Titan has been canceled: but it’s still a lot more interesting and sad to know what we missed.  Sounds like it could have been pretty crazy.

Oh well.