so they become more normal" as in a supporting comic book that showed Tracer kissing her girlfriend in a domestic scene.Īt this point, though, the player community has so thoroughly taken ownership of Overwatch's characters that Kaplan says he feels Blizzard employees are "just the custodians of the universe." It also means showing that "normal things are normal. That feeling only comes from challenging stereotypes with characters like Ana, a Sniper who happens to be an older woman with a complicated relationship to her daughter, Kaplan said. At any time, I could be represented in the game." "You might be from somewhere we haven't represented yet in Overwatch, but you can imagine there being an Overwatch hero or map from your area," he said. "Haven't we seen enough of that, not just in video games, but in the world?" Advertisementįurther Reading Ars’ scientific ranking of the most fun Overwatch charactersWhile many people think that diversity was an explicit goal for the Overwatch team, Kaplan said that the game's diversity just grew out of the team's actual goals of inclusivity and open-mindedness. "Is it really necessary to show dusty streets or bombed out buildings anymore," Kaplan asked rhetorically. And for an Iraqi map, the team wanted to imagine a better future for a locale that is too often used simply as the placeholder for "dirty hellhole" in media. The idealized version of Hollywood's streets that existed in the designers' heads, meanwhile, ended up being much more compelling than a more "realistic" version of the town generated based on an actual visit. Santorini, Greece became the direct inspiration for the game's Ilios map, while the Dorado map was literally inspired by a Google Image search for "a colorful Mexican town" (the actual reference image they use, though, turned out to be a photo of Manarola, Italy). it's just an outgrowth of the actual goal.įor inspiration, the team started by seeking out places people already want to go on Earth-common vacation spots. Many of the early character designs were even taken directly from work on the canceled Project Titan. Overwatch came about almost to the side of these efforts, inspired by character and class designs that were initially designed for those other projects. Kaplan says the team spent two of their six weeks brainstorming on yet another new MMO and another two weeks working on an MMO adaptation of an existing Blizzard universe (no, he wouldn't say which). There was not a lot of hope, and we were worried about what our future would be." Earth: The final frontier
Instead, in the wake of Titan's troubles, that opportunity was coming at what he called "a period of despair. When Kaplan joined Blizzard 15 years ago, he said, creating a new game from scratch felt like it would have been a fun and inspiring dream come true. Forty of the remaining team members, however, were tasked with coming up with a brand-new, Titan-replacing idea in order to avoid the same ignominious relocation as their colleagues.Īfter years working on Titan, they were given just six weeks to craft this new game concept. In the wake of the cancellation, most of the 140-person Project Titan team was forced to relocate with Blizzard's existing projects or put on "long-term loan" with those franchises.
"For various reasons, we ran into a lot of trouble on the project," as Kaplan put it on stage at Las Vegas' DICE Summit today. After years of work on Project Titan, the massive MMO that was to be Blizzard's big follow-up to World of Warcraft, the game had been unceremoniously canceled (though official confirmation of that cancellation wouldn't come for another year). Further Reading Blizzard cancels its long-delayed “Project Titan” MMOLAS VEGAS-May of 2013 was not a very fun time to be at Blizzard if you hear Game Director and Vice President Jeff Kaplan tell it.
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