Jeff Kaplan says he wanted Blizzard to cancel Titan years before it became Overwatch

Jeff Kaplan has shared a few more details about Blizzard’s canceled MMO Titan, including that he pushed to shut the project down as early as 2010. In a recent interview, Kaplan said he felt the game “could never ship” in its current form and told then-CEO Mike Morhaime that Blizzard was just going to keep burning money on it.

According to Eurogamer’s report, Kaplan said work on Titan began around 2005 or 2006. The pitch was a pretty different kind of MMO: players would have regular day jobs, then head out on secret-agent missions at night. Those missions were played as an FPS with special abilities, in a futuristic setting modeled after California, with multiple cities and drivable areas between them. Concepts for places like a futuristic London and Cairo were also mentioned.

The bigger issue, Kaplan said, was that Titan never really came together. Art, engineering, and design weren’t lining up into something cohesive, and he said he could already see that by 2009. That tracks with what’s been said about Titan over the years: it was a massive project, but one that struggled to find a workable shape before Blizzard eventually scrapped it.

That cancellation led to Overwatch, which reused parts of the team and some of the broader hero-shooter ideas. So none of this is exactly new history, but Kaplan’s comments do make it clearer how early some people inside Blizzard thought Titan was in serious trouble.