Titan MMO's "horrific" collapse led to the creation of Blizzard's Overwatch

Blizzard game director Jeff Kaplan has revealed the extent to which Titan, the company's cancelled MMO, fell short of the expectations.

Titan was widely regarded as Blizzard's follow-up to World of Warcraft, and it was in some stage of development for around seven years. The first hints at the project started appearing in 2007, but in August 2013 the company revealed that it had started over on large parts of the game. It took another year for Titan to be cancelled altogether, with the company's losses estimated at $50 million.

Of course, the decline of Titan occurred at a difficult time for PC MMOs, which many saw as a contributing factor. In a new interview with Gamespot, however, game director Jeff Kaplan said that, despite the talent on the team, "we failed horrifically in every way ... In every way that a project can fail. It was devastating."

"Nobody said a word, everyone was super supportive, but I think there was this inward embarrassment of like, 'No, we need to prove that we're worthy of being at Blizzard too. We can make something that makes the company proud.' It was a trying period of time and there was a lot of pressure. The team is used to pressure, but never quite at that magnitude, and it helped to forge us in a lot of ways."

The same team is now preparing to launch Overwatch, which Kaplan regarded as, "a last chance," to escape the stigma of Titan's collapse. "I think a lot of us were asking ourselves, on an individual basis, that question. So when it came to move to Overwatch there was an extremely tight bond on the team and a ravenous hunger to show the world that we're not failures and we can make something really fun."