11 Fascinating Gaming Moments That Almost Happened
2. Overwatch Was Nearly An MMO
Few could've predicted just how influential Blizzard's Overwatch would become when it released in May 2016, but it's a simple truth that the industry has been changed drastically by the title, which has managed to influence everything from first-person-shooters, to Battle Royale, to even micro-transactions themselves.
Loot boxes - randomised crates of loot that can be acquired either through bulk purchases or through levelling in the game - are an ever-present force in most major releases in 2019, and have courted controversy at every stage. It was Blizzard's hero shooter that popularised the trend, but it almost never came to be.
Speaking at BlizzCon 2017, Overwatch lead designer Jeff Kaplan remarked how that, in the wake of MMO Titan's cancellation, Blizzard was asked to pursue a brand new MMO IP. The resulting concept became Crossroads, a class-based MMO set on a planet that would've brought all the beings in the universe under one roof. A number of the classes designed went on to become Overwatch's now iconic heroes, as did several others from an also cancelled StarCraft spin-off, but it was only later that development switched into the hero shooter we know today.
It was only through Titans' cancellation that Blizzard were forced to reconsider their plans though, with developers forced to go back to the drawing board and look at how the medium initially inspired them. Unsurprisingly, those developers pointed towards the old arena shooters of the nineties, which came to inform Overwatch in a pretty significant way.
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