During a massive 5-hour interview, Jeff Kaplan reveals details of Project Titan and why it failed, and discusses his work in World of Warcraft and Overwatch.
According to Jeff, Project Titan was a multicomplex game where you played a normal life during daylight: day job, build, housing, recreation, driving, etc., and at night you would do spy agent work like infiltrating, killing, and stuff — first-person shooter with special abilities. The Titan Project took inspiration from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims. Project Titan had a game director named Matt Brown — who was the creative director of The Sims.
During the daylight, in Project Titan, you could have a day job, build a house, and live in a neighborhood. The vision was to have a lot of people playing on the same server. One server, one world game.
Jeff described the scale of the game as something massive. For example, he mentioned building a city like San Francisco, Hollywood, Cairo, and London. The team had to figure out how to connect all these cities. Players could drive, and this was full-blown GTA-style driving gameplay.
Development started around late 2007, but ideation started around 2005 when Rob Pardo brought people from across teams to discuss a new MMORPG (long before there was a Project Titan team). By 2009, Jeff felt that Project Titan should be shut down, that it could never ship in its current form. In 2010, Jeff told Mike Morhaime that he should shut down their team. We are just gonna burn money. Project Titan was shut down in 2013.
Jeff puts the blame on team leadership, including himself. It was an engineering failure, an art failure, and a design failure. However, he says the art was the best he has seen in a Blizzard game. But there was no art cohesion. The art style was all over the place, like it came from 10 different video games. Project Titan cost $83 million.
Jeff stealthily criticized Rob Pardo. Blizzard hired way too many people early in development. He says the right way to incubate a video game is to hire a small team and to try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on and prove out that idea. Once you know what that game feels like, then you expand the team. It feels like he is comparing Overwatch to the way Project Titan should have started.
Project Titan had no roadmap and no quest flow. Suddenly, a Prop Artist would run out of props to make, and he would want to know what to work on next. At one point, Jeff asked a top technical artist to log his uptime in the TED editor engine to gauge the team’s uptime and downtime. Out of 40 hours that week, he only worked 20 hours. He was one of the top developers. To scale, that means most people had a lot of downtime.
Jeff said that it could never ship in its current form: Imagine, you are building a team of the best in the industry, and they can’t work. Not only are you just burning cash faster than anybody in the planet, it is also like imagine having fighter pilots but we don’t let them fly. The creative frustration and how it manifested and demoralized the team. It was a disaster.
There was a six-week period where a small group of developers sat down to pitch the next big idea. They were split between three possible ideas, including Overwatch. One of them was StarCraft Frontiers. Chris Metzen pitched this sketch of a StarCraft prospector gathering minerals and suddenly finding monsters. It set the player as a standalone prospector on the ground level, as this sort of Indiana Jones in space.
Taking inspiration from Chris Metzen’s prospector sketch, Arnold Tsang and Peter Lee presented this StarCraft Frontiers art of a medvac and a space prospector with a cigar in his mouth, his foot on a hydralisk skull. This concept art ended up becoming McCree in Overwatch.
The 5-hour interview touches on a lot of topics and video games, including why Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard Entertainment, and what he’s done since his departure.
