Blizzard initially feared World of Warcraft would only "be successful for five years," says former VC Jeff Kaplan

It’s been over 20 years since we first set foot in Azeroth, and World of Warcraft, despite its dips and troughs, has more than stood the test of time. However, Blizzard was skeptical it would make it this far, and as former VC Jeff Kaplan tells Lex Fridman in a fresh interview, it was this internal worry that sparked Project Titan, an ill-fated MMO that was ultimately canned in 2014.

“So, as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn’t going to last forever; WoW would maybe be successful for five years and eventually kinda age out,” Kaplan recalls. “And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn’t have another massively multiplayer online game waiting in the wings. So starting around 2006, maybe 2005, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum.” That team would begin work on Project Titan.

Creating and maintaining a thriving MMO is ridiculously hard. From Wildstar to Tera, we’ve seen plenty of solid MMOs reach the end of service over the years. Meanwhile, promising projects like Ensemble’s Halo and ZeniMax’s Project Blackbird don’t even make it to market. I’m currently fearing the worst for Riot Games’ League of Legends MMO, but I’m telling myself repeatedly that no news is good news.

Project Titan fell into the latter category. Spun up sometime around 2006, Titan was set to take place on a near-future Earth, following secret agents who led double lives. During the day, they’d have professions, while at night they’d go out and fight. “The secret agent stuff was very ‘first-person shooter, but over the top abilities,'” Kaplan explains. “And the by-day stuff, we were going to let you run businesses – we took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims.”

It’s very much a pegholed version of the free-form skilling/combat loop we get to enjoy in WoW, and I’m not sure if this structured approach, as interesting as it sounds, would have landed. To me, having to wait for, presumably, day-night cycles to roll around before being able to partake in what I want to do doesn’t sound particularly appealing. This duality also caused developmental headaches. Speaking to Eurogamer in 2019, ex-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime said that “we were sort of building two games in parallel, and it really struggled to come together.”

Fortunately, WoW’s persistence meant that, by the time Titan was cancelled (a full decade after WoW’s launch), Blizzard’s grumblings were proven to be unfounded. Though Titan represented a failure to bottle the MMO lightning twice, as we know, Kaplan and co. found a way to do it in a completely different genre with Overwatch, which itself was born from Titan’s ashes. It’s an incredible butterfly effect, but that’s a story for another day. All I can say is, all’s well that ends well.