Image credit: Kotaku

Following Blizzard Entertainment's surprise announcement yesterday that it had canceled MMO Titan after seven years of development, sources have come forward to discuss what the game--which would have been a follow-up to World of Warcraft--was all about.

According to three people speaking with Kotaku, the game was going to take place on a near-future version of Earth, after mankind successfully defended itself from an alien attack. Players could enlist in one of three factions, and locations were said to include places like the west coast of the United States, as well as Europe, South America, and Australia.

As you might expect, Blizzard's plan was to create a massive virtual world to explore, with new locations added over time as expansions, according to the report.

The game's high-level concept was reportedly that you would play a character who had an everyday job during the day but fought battles at night, sort of like the Clark Kent/Superman dynamic. Sources added that the game was split into two segments: the "real world"--where you would craft items and socialize--and the "shadow world," where you'd fight enemies

Some of the class choices were said to include Reaper, Titan, Ranger, and Juggernaut, and each had its own special abilities and items.

All of the sources Kotaku cites in its report mentioned that Titan bore many similarities to Valve's class-based shooter Team Fortress, both in terms of visuals and gameplay. One person described the game as a mashup of StarCraft II's in-game cinematics and Pixar's The Incredibles. In addition, the game would switch between first- and third-person perspectives, depending on whether you were in combat or just milling around, according to two sources.

The report goes on to say that Blizzard was aiming for Titan to offer deeply rich and living worlds, where players could run their own virtual businesses and even establish relationships with non-player characters. One source added that Blizzard even hired a handful of Maxis developers who worked on The Sims franchise to make Titan's social elements come to life.

It's important to note that the Titan descriptions mentioned here are representative of the game as it existed before Blizzard implemented significant design and technology changes last summer. Additionally, game development isn't such a straightforward process--plans tend to change frequently and, at times, substantially.

No screenshots or gameplay videos for Titan have been released, so you'll have to rely on your imagination to put together what the game might have looked like. A Blizzard representative was not immediately available to comment on Kotaku's report.

Explaining Titan's cancellation yesterday, Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime said: "We didn't find the fun. We didn't find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that's the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no."

Another Blizzard executive, Christ Metzen, added that the decision to cancel Titan was "excruciating." Cancelling the game was a costly decision, too, according to a survey of video game industry analysts.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch