Keep pulling the thread on Jeff Kaplan.
Jeff Kaplan's new video game is titled "The Legend of California."
The decision to divide World of Warcraft players into two opposing factions, the Horde and the Alliance, was a key design choice championed by Blizzard founder Alan Adham.
Blizzard founder Alan Adham retired from the company approximately nine to twelve months before World of Warcraft was released to start a hedge fund.
Jeff Kaplan believes Blizzard's failed MMO project, Titan, suffered because the development team was composed of too many experts who were overconfident in their ability to create a successor to World of Warcraft.
A fundamental design philosophy for World of Warcraft was to make questing the "path of least resistance" for character progression by awarding more experience points for quest completion than for repetitive monster killing.
A key factor in World of Warcraft's mass-market success compared to predecessors like EverQuest was its design that allowed players to progress effectively through the game solo.
Shortly after World of Warcraft shipped, a group of disenfranchised developers left Blizzard and formed Carbine Studios, which went on to develop the MMO WildStar over a 10-year period.
The development of Blizzard's canceled game, Titan, cost the company $83 million.
Another group of core World of Warcraft developers, including team leader Mark Kern and art director Bill Petras, left Blizzard to form the studio Red 5 Studios.
Blizzard's ambitious MMO project, codenamed Titan, was in development for seven years before being cancelled.
The game engine developed from scratch for Blizzard's cancelled MMO Titan was later repurposed and successfully used for the game Overwatch.
The cancelled Blizzard MMO Titan was set on a future Earth where players would lead double lives as civilians with day jobs and as secret agents with first-person shooter abilities similar to those later seen in Overwatch.