Blizzard book Play Nice reveals dozens of canceled games

Denizen is described as “a dungeon-crawler that was shelved due to lack of resources.” Not much more is known about it.

Bloodlines was a “space vampire” game in development at Blizzard. Play Nice reveals it was canceled because it “didn’t resonate with enough staff to justify its existence.”

At one point, Blizzard co-founder Allan Adham told employees that the studio was “in early discussions” to create a Star Wars strategy game. “Before they could even build a prototype, Adham came back with news that their Star Wars game wasn’t happening after all,” Play Nice subsequently reveals. Former LucasArts President Jack Sorensen told Schreier he “didn’t recall having any discussions with Blizzard about making a Star Wars game.” Instead of creating a Star Wars RTS, Blizzard continued to develop the sci-fi RTS idea, which eventually resulted in StarCraft.

Play Nice touches on the well-known story of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a LucasArts-inspired strategy game that followed the story of Thrall. While the game has since leaked online in full, Blizzard never officially released it, but that was not for lack of trying. They worked on it for two years, but felt that “the art style seemed amateurish and the puzzles weren’t quite clicking.” The book even includes an anecdote about Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe playing the game at a trade show and lamenting, “If you guys can’t make this work, then who can?”

Sorcerer and Zork Zero designer Steve Meretzky was brought in to see if there was a way to save the game and increase its quality without spending much more money. Meretzky would write up design documents on how to improve the game, but a few weeks after doing so, he got a call that Blizzard had canceled the game. “The cancellation cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Adham and [former CEO Michael] Morhaime knew that if Blizzard ever released a product that was widely perceived as subpar, it would destroy the company’s reputation,” Play Nice concludes about Warcraft Adventures’ cancellation. The whole game has leaked and been remastered by fans; you can watch a full playthrough below.

Amid frustrations with Blizzard over events that you should read Play Nice to learn more about, over a dozen developers — including James Phinney, Jesse McReynolds, Eric Flannum, Robert Djordjevich, and Maxx Marshall, and Justin Thavirat — left Blizzard. They founded a new company called Fugitive Studios and attempted to make a 3D action RPG, but it failed due to design and technological overambition and the fact that “one of their business partners turned out to be unreliable.” Fugitive Studios shut down within a year, and some of its developers returned to Blizzard.

Programmer Mike O’Brien was the main driving force behind Blizzard’s Battle.net, so he got to pitch his own project. It was Warcraft: Legends, a 3D spinoff where players didn’t have to worry about constructing bases, had fewer and more powerful units to command, and did so from an over-the-shoulder camera perspective. It was called a “role-playing strategy” game by Blizzard when it was announced in September 1999. Ahead of that announcement, Warcraft: Legends was rebranded to Warcraft III, but this may have been the death knell for the project.

Other Blizzard staff did not want Legends becoming Warcraft III as “they wanted to advance the real-time strategy genre, not develop something else entirely, according to the book.” Because O’Brien had “made a few too many enemies” at Blizzard, he could not get enough people on his side to support his vision. He would be removed from the project after a year and left Blizzard with fellow employees Jeff Strain and Pat Wyatt to start what would eventually become Guild Wars developer ArenaNet.

After the release of Diablo II, a lot of Blizzard North’s leadership took sabatticals or had a very laid-back management style when present. Play Nice says this meant that there were some developers who “broke off to follow whims that never materialized, like a version of Diablo for Nintendo’s Game Boy.”

Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik eventually decided to helm “Project X,” a new IP for the studio. Brevik had trouble settling on a concept because he was burnt out. After two years, Project X became Starblo, which, as its title suggests, “was a sci-fi take on Diablo” where players would “hop in a spaceship and travel between planets, collecting new guns and battling aliens as they traversed the stars.”

Unfortunately, Starblo would not see the light of day after Blizzard North’s leadership, frustrated with a lack of communication and uncertainty with the company, threatened to resign. While this move was meant to be a bluff, Blizzard parent company Vivendi accepted their resignations and forced them out of Blizzard North. Starblo was canceled as a result.

The original version of Diablo III, which emerged around the same time as Project X, was inspired by Ultima Online and a 3D MMORPG where “hundreds, if not thousands of people would be able to interact and play together.” After the turmoil at Blizzard North around Starblo, the game was scaled back to be closer to Diablo II. The project also struggled as it constantly changed direction due to feedback from different Blizzard executives. In the summer of 2005, Blizzard North was shut down, and the development of Diablo III moved to Blizzard proper in Irvine, California.

Vivendi Games executive Bruce Hack canceled MMOs based on Marvel and The Lord of the Rings to focus on World of Warcraft. Both franchises would eventually get MMOs from different game developers.

A former LucasArts and Blizzard developer named Robert Huebner started Nihilistic Software and pitched a third-person StarCraft shooter for consoles. This project would become the now-infamous StarCraft: Ghost, which followed a Terran agent named Nova. Play Nice explains that “the loose, interactive process that had been great for early production made it tough to lock down ideas as the game entered proper development” and that it constantly switched between being a stealth and action game under Nihlisitc.

Blizzard removed Nihilistic Software from the project in June 2004, and the project was given to Metal Arms: Glitch in the System developer Swingin’ Ape Studios. Swingin’ Ape started development from scratch and took inspiration from Halo as itshifted focus to prioritize multiplayer. Blizzard acquired Swingin’ Ape in May 2005, but the single-player part of StarCraft: Ghost especially was not ready as the next generation of consoles approached. Blizzard “indefinitely postponed” the project in March 2006.

After StarCraft: Ghost didn’t pan out because it was for last-generation consoles, Swingin’ Ape pitched some other projects as Blizzard’s console division. One such idea was “creating a different StarCraft spinoff,” but Swingin’ Ape was eventually shut down so Blizzard could refocus on World of Warcraft.

Diablo III director Jay Wilson and Left 4 Dead designer Mike Booth came up with an idea to “do for Minecraft what World of Warcraft had done to EverQuest: take the core idea, fix everything they didn’t like about it, and give it the Blizzard polish.” They started prototyping a game called Avalon. Wilson had to take a sabbatical as he battled depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder in the wake of the deluge of harassment and death threats he received over Diablo III’s rocky launch. Wilson left the Avalon team and started working on World of Warcraft when he returned to Blizzard. Avalon was eventually canceled.

Team 3 Director Josh Mosqueira was given free rein to explore what was next for the Diablo franchise. First was a game code-named Hades. “The camera would be over-the-shoulder rather than isometric; the combat would be punchier, akin to the Batman: Arkham series; and the game would have permadeath,” Play Nice explains. Unfortunately, Team 3 struggled to adapt the Batman: Arkham combat formula to multiplayer, and Mosqueira became hard to track down. Blizzard decided to restart Diablo IV from scratch after Mosqueira left Blizzard in July 2016.

After the player-created Defense of the Ancients map and game mode became very popular, Play Nice reveals that Blizzard considered “creating an official version of DOTA for Warcraft III or even developing a sequel in-house.” But when they tried to recruit DOTA designer Icefrog, Blizzard did not want to accommodate his list of requests that included full creative control. Blizzard ultimately ignored the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) trend that DOTA kicked off. In the years that followed, Riot Games released League of Legends, which became very popular and resulted in the poaching of several Blizzard developers. Icefrog would work with Valve to make DOTA 2.

After the success of World of Warcraft, a similar treatment for Starcraft was considered. “The natural next step seemed like a World of StarCraft, but they struggled to envision StarCraft lore fitting into an MMORPG, so instead they decided to develop a new fictional universe,” Play Nice reveals.

That new fictional universe would be Titan, a game where players control superhero characters in their everyday and heroic lives. Unfortunately, there were political battles behind the scenes between Chris Metzen and Rob Pardo, so Titan constantly changed direction, and little progress was made. Metzen wanted a superhero universe similar to Marvel and DC, while Pardo wanted its characters to be more like secret agents or spies.

The idea was that there would be “Titan Town” where players didn’t focus on combat and did things more similar to Animal Crossing, and a separate part of the game with combat based around different superhero character classes. Blizzard had trouble connecting those two parts of the game to create a compelling core gameplay loop and was hampered by lackluster development tools. In 2013, the project was rebooted and eventually became Overwatch, but this MMO development misfire cost Blizzard over $80 million.

Jeff Kaplan initially had ambitious plans for the Overwatch franchise. “They’d start with this first game, which was limited to player-versus-player multiplayer, then add a story and computer-controlled enemies for the sequel before culminating in an Overwatch MMORPG that would finally execute on the vision of Titan,” Play Nice says of Kaplan’s overarching vision of Overwatch. That’s not how the franchise ended up evolving over time.

As part of an incubation program Allan Adham started after returning to Blizzard in 2016, a Warcraft game that played like Pokemon Go, code-named Orbis, was in development. Orbis was eventually canceled because of developer attrition, its scope creep, the pandemic, and unengaging combat.

Play Nice describes Orion as “an experimental mobile RPG with asynchronous turns. It was helmed by former Hearthstone director Eric Dodds and a few of his old Team 5 colleagues.” It was fun to play in a room with others, but less fun on the go, as turns could take hours. It was canceled in favor of dedicating more resources to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2.

StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm director Dustin Browder was working on a first-person StarCraft shooter code-named Ares. It was “heavily inspired by EA’s Battlefield” and was in development for over three years with over 50 developers. However, it was canceled because Activision executives disliked Battlefield and were ambivalent toward StarCraft. Like Orion, its staff was moved to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 development.

Warcraft III: Reforged was originally an ambitious reimaging of the RTS. It would’ve had a rewritten script to bring its lore more in line with World of Warcraft’s and some missions and characters would have been rdesigned. These concepts were eventually dropped due to a lack of time and funding, and Warcraft III: Reforged was hated upon its release in January 2020.

Play Nice briefly mentions that Allen Adham worked on a canceled “turn-based StarCraft game in the style of Civilization” as an incubation project.

Andromeda is described as a “high-fidelity action game, like Sony’s God of War, in the Warcraft universe.” When creative director Alex Afrasiabi was let go from Blizzard due to “misconduct in his treatment of other employees,” the project was canceled.

Activision Blizzard Studios had been working with Netflix to create shows based on Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft. These shows were canceled, potentially because Netflix poached Activision Cheif Financial Officer Spencer Neumann.

NetEase, the company that made Diablo Immortal, also worked with Blizzard on a mobile spinoff of World of Warcraft set in a different era than the PC MMO. This project, code-named Neptune, was canceled in spring 2022 because Blizzard and NetEase’s contract negotiations were not going well, and China had frozen the release of any new video games.