"There is definitely a lot of Titan influence in Overwatch"

We sat down for an in-depth chat with Blizzard's Jeffrey Kaplan, game director on their upcoming 6v6 shooter Overwatch, about the concept of the game, Blizzard's design philosophies and much more. This is what he had to say about the ties the project has to the cancelled MMO Titan that he also served as game director on.

"There is definitely a lot of Titan influence in Overwatch," said Kaplan. "We spent a lot of years working on Titan and we thought a lot about that universe as we were working on it. So there are game mechanics. There are technology concepts. There are art concepts that we wanted to carry over from Titan. But at its core Overwatch is a brand new game. When we started the project we completely reset. We completely redid the artstyle. We completely redid the technology of the game. And the whole concept is completely different. Titan was really going to be this big giant MMO and I think as players are realising Overwatch is an epic game at heart, but the scope of it is really razor focused. It's a competitive 6v6 shooter. The game design is drastically different."

"We tend to take influence from all the previous projects we've worked on so bizarrely there's definitely Titan influences in Overwatch, but there's also a lot of World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft influence. One of the games that we look at the most and talk about the most around Blizzard is Hearthstone, believe it or not."

If for some reason you'd rather read the highlights of the interview than watch the video version - there's this handy article.