Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493
Jeff Kaplan recounts his journey from EverQuest guild leader to Blizzard designer, detailing how World of Warcraft's "directed gameplay" revolutionized MMOs despite early server crashes and the costly failure of Titan. He explains Overwatch's evolution from a cancelled MMO pitch, highlighting its hopeful tone and Tracer-centric design before his 2021 departure due to corporate pressure. Now co-founding Kensugiyama with Tim Ford, Kaplan develops The Legend of California, an open-world gold rush game emphasizing creative control over corporate demands while expressing skepticism toward AI's role in preserving human artistry. [Automatically generated summary]
Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.
Is it PvP?
It's all PvP.
In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.
I don't know what that means, but Rust players know what that means.
my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest.
So I think I won the game and we're, we're idiots.
We're reading the forums and the forums are just flaming us all the time.
Like, there's lag on this server and can't log into that server.
And that was our perspective of what was happening.
And when I showed up at that show, one of the most emotional things in my life, it was nothing but an outpouring of love.
I had believed I would never work anyplace but Blizzard.
I loved it.
It was a part of who I was.
And I felt I was a part of it.
And I literally thought I would retire from a place.
I never thought the day would come.
And that was it.
How painful was it to say goodbye?
It broke me.
Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the earth.
But you were actually working on a game.
The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made.
He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met.
In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer through and through.
Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years.
And they are truly incredible.
Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made.
Games that, to me personally, have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and happiness.
From Warcraft to StarCraft to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and more.
So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game industry giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy.
This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever.
Full of memes, luls, wisdom, emotional roller coaster moments, and of course, Blizzard video game lore.
Jeff left Blizzard in 2021 and has been secretly working on a new video game called The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff.
It is incredibly beautiful.
Set in the 1800s Gold Rush era of California.
It's an open world online multiplayer game, part adventure and action, part survival, sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and desperation, and sometimes just awe watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape.
It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and it's a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of you.
You can wish list it on Steam, join the Alpha later in March, I think, and Early Access is on the way.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Kaplan.
You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest, before you ever became a legendary video game designer on World of Warcraft and on Overwatch, which I think is a wild journey to go through from gamer to designer.
The Magic of Multiplayer00:14:23
But first, let's go way back.
When did you first fall in love with video games?
I was lucky.
I was born in that golden era of coin op.
So I literally remember the first time seeing Pac-Man.
I was with my uncle Ronnie, and he just kept feeding me quarters.
I think he wanted to play, but was too scared to.
So he, you know, his little nephew, he would just give him quarters to play Pac-Man.
I remember being at my brother's graduation in Philadelphia.
They had an asteroids machine in the lobby that was one of the first coin-op machines I had played as well.
And my brother and I would try to get the high score and we'd finally get it, but we had to go to bed early because we were little kids.
And then in the morning, somebody else had like beat our high score.
And then, you know, I grew up in Southern California in the 80s.
I was born in 72.
So, you know, I was a kid with that skateboard BMX culture where we'd ride two towns over.
We knew all the pizza parlors and liquor stores and arcades.
And we just lived in that coin-op phase.
That was that was where the love started.
And then you started to see things like Pong.
You'd go over to a friend's house, they'd have Pong, and it was just mind-blowing.
Like we're playing this thing on the TV, and it was so much fun.
Um, Atari was a big thing at that time as well.
But the big one for me was actually in television because my dad was an executive recruiter, and one of his clients was Mattel.
And he said, Hey, I they gave me this thing, and he would get discounts or free games.
And my brothers and I just loved in television, like we would just play it endlessly.
And the comparison was always like, Is this game close to what's in the arcades?
And it was just such a golden era.
Um, and I think the big moment where it really blew open and kind of hit the next level was when the NES came out, and that like NES with Super Mario was kind of gaming at the next level at that point.
And I have like warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to this day.
I remember we played Super Mario for weeks, my brothers and I.
And then I had a friend come over and he showed me all the secret stuff that I didn't know existed at the time.
And it was like suddenly the world opened up more and games could be more.
Um, and then there was like a big PC gaming push that hit me.
My parents ran their own business.
Like I said, my dad was an executive recruiter and they bought an IBM.
And this is like when it was DOS before MS-DOS existed.
And I was so disappointed because like other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore, which, you know, they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time.
And my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I.
She bought us Zork.
You know, it was just Infocom word games and where your imagination would take you.
Like Zork holds a place in my heart.
I think few games will ever touch.
It's a text-based game?
Text-based game.
You know, you just type in go west, open mailbox, you know, and it's that power of imagination.
It's why the book is always better than the movie, you know.
Yeah, so you're starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate.
Yes.
You can step into this world and you can lose yourself in that world.
Yeah, you're transported.
You're living there.
Was Zork popular?
Zork was insanely popular.
And then there was Zork 2 and Zork 3.
The trilogy.
Zork trilogy.
I see it.
And it was weird in like the sometime in the 90s, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games.
That's how they branded them.
And they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics.
And somehow that just shattered everything because the Zork you knew in your head didn't exist anymore.
Yeah, Zork was fantastic.
I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous.
But I highly recommend Zork.
There was also in those days on the PC that worked on our IBM was Ultima, which was the Richard Garriott series.
And he was Lord British.
We knew him as Lord British.
He put himself in the game.
And you want to talk about world building.
You know, there was Eu Forest and there was all the characters.
And the first Ultima I played was Ultima 2 because Ultima 1 was before my time.
And that series, it was this RPG group-based PC game.
And the worlds were just so rich.
Like you could get on a rocket ship.
You're playing in this fantasy world fighting demons.
And yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship.
And then there was just all of this sort of crazy stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world.
Like there were bouncers in the towns and merchants, but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people or kill Lord British.
You know, that was something that was super hard.
And when you're just a jackass kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over.
And Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me.
And of course, that led to Ultima Online, which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest.
Yes.
Sort of starting to build these worlds that are massively multiplayer online video games.
Can you take me to that journey?
Like as you start to get online, MMO world, what were influential?
What were fun for you?
Well, the big one for me was EverQuest.
But like you mentioned, Ultima Online sort of was the predecessor.
It came before EverQuest.
And it was like one of those unfortunate times in my life where I was actually at grad school.
You're busy.
I was busy and I missed Ultima Online.
Like I would have had that experience.
And when you hear the Ultima Online stories, they're some of the craziest, funniest.
You know, I knew somebody who they learned how to poison in the game.
And then they would poison apples, then leave them on the ground, and somebody else would be adventuring and then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse.
Then they steal all their stuff.
And, you know, Ultima Online was kind of, it was the earliest grief-based experiment.
Really like when you're treating the humans like ants in the ant farm, that was kind of Ultima Online.
So my first, like, what online gaming, what defined online gaming for me was Quake and Doom and Duke Nukem.
You know, it started with Doom and they had it, you could basically land.
You could network with your friends or you could connect with a modem and hook up with somebody.
And that was like a mind-blowing, just seeing another entity in a video game and saying that that's a person on the other side of that, that was magical, like that that moment happened and that person could be in another room or across town from you.
And Quake kind of took it to the next level.
Like that's where everybody knew what they were doing.
The systems were more refined.
And this Quake community formed with all of these, you know, great websites, mods.
The community was divided into, there were two casts of players, the low-ping bastards, the LTBs, and then the rest of us.
And I remember rolling into Quake matches, you know, on a dial-up modem with a 300-ping connection.
And I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
And just connecting with people, like I said, the websites, to this day, the only gaming website I read, I don't read any of the news sites anymore, but I read Blues News, which was like, like someone actually teased me recently.
I linked them a story.
I'm like, oh, did you hear this new thing's coming out?
And I sent the link and they're like, dude, this is from Blues News.
Like, what time machine did you just step out of?
And a guy named Steven, He slip.
I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong.
I apologize.
But it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest.
They had those programmer plan updates, the dot plan files, and guys like Carmack would, you know, they post about what code they were writing or how they had optimized something or just their personal life.
Like, you know, the Ferrari talk would always happen once they had achieved success.
And there was an id programmer named Brian Hook.
And he said, I'm leaving id to go work at Varent, which became Sony Online, to work on this game called EverQuest.
And I was like, how does anybody leave id, the greatest institution in all of gaming ever to work on any other game?
I'm like, this guy must be crazy.
Or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it.
I need to know what's going on.
And if he hadn't made that post, I never would have checked out EverQuest.
We'll talk about EverQuest, but since you mentioned Carmack and Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack?
Why was he such an important and influential human in the history of gaming?
Those early geniuses at id, like I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now if they hadn't had the breakthroughs that they had at the time.
Gaming engines were evolving, but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolf 3D, that was the first, I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game.
You'd run around, you dress up as a German, you throw a grenade.
Yeah.
To see it in 3D, and it's funny, you look back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it seems almost childish.
Like, oh, why were you so excited about that?
And you were transported.
There was the intimacy of first person, you know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you're the hero fighting the Nazis.
And then the evolution, like when Doom came out, I'm a huge Army of Darkness fan, like one of my favorite movies of all time.
And I was like, this is Army of Darkness, the video game, you know, like give me the boomstick.
Here we go.
And the graphical advances, but it wasn't just how the game looked.
It was how it played.
The smoothness kept getting better, the responsiveness, the sharpness of the gameplay.
You have to credit id in those days and Carmack and Romero.
As somebody who worked on an FPS, that wouldn't have existed without them.
Credit where credit's due.
And by the way, I would just say as a gamer, your range is incredible.
You are a legit first person shooter, gamer, but you also obviously love the more MMO world-rich exploratory kind of game.
So it's fascinating.
But yeah, there's on the technology stack that brought something like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life.
There's a threshold which you pass of realism where you can immerse yourself into that world.
I had the same exact experience with the Wolfenstein 2D, taking a step to 3D, and it was like tears in my eyes.
Like, this is incredible.
Like, my memories of Wolfenstein 3D is it was like ultra-realistic.
It's silly to say now.
Yeah.
It was a feeling like you're there.
Yeah, what an incredible age.
And some of that, the storytelling, a lot of that is the technology that brings that kind of 3D world to life.
It's incredible.
But before we get too far on that tangent, you mentioned grad school.
We should mention that you have a master's degree in creative writing from NYU and you wanted to be a writer.
You told me your main influences were Kerouac, but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, Orwell.
Writing Through Rejection00:09:48
What drew you to storytelling in that medium of writing?
What aspect of the human experience were you trying to put down on paper?
Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired and reading.
And it's the not only being transported to a different world or into a different person, but also, you know, the way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings sometimes you didn't even know you had.
And that was very appealing for me.
And the big challenge with it is, and I think this is for anybody who creates anything, is putting yourself out there.
To some degree, there's a lot of ego that goes into that moment where you say, well, I've been reading, you know, 1984 or Green Hill's a Stranglethorn, and I think it's amazing.
And now I'm going to try to write something that somebody is going to read.
That's a giant leap of faith.
You know, it's a moment of putting yourself out there completely.
And there's got to be some part of that that's ego.
There's some part of it that's masochistic.
And I think for people who want to create and build stuff, they can't help but to do it.
You don't really have an option.
That's just how you're wired and you're going to do it anyway.
And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else.
You know, that's one way to go about it.
Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot of the stories he wrote never published and he asked for all of them to be destroyed.
And then it's only because of his friend that ignored his request that we even have many of his stories.
So like to be that kind of, I mean, clearly there's some masochism there, some tortured soul.
Yeah.
But then there's also the ego, like you mentioned.
I was entertained by the story of James Joyce when he was a young man, 1819, declared that he's going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century.
And he turned out in the eyes of many to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
But there's like millions of kids just like James Joyce writers that are declaring exactly that that turn out not to be.
But that is in some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases, you have to have that ego to say, I'm going to, yeah, right.
I read 1984 and I'm going to write the next 1984.
Yeah.
And I do think ego is a big part of it.
It's one of the many lessons I've learned hearing your Kafka story is funny because fast forwarding to how my writing career ended, I literally threw away everything.
I mean, in a dumpster, I used to keep copious notes, like journals, my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea.
I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes.
And then I also kept personal journals of just, you know, to keep the writing habit up of just, you know, what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of that.
And then either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts and I threw it all in the dumpster.
What was that decision?
Do you remember that decision?
What was that?
What was that like to just take that part of your life and just put it in a dumpster?
Yeah, it was, I think it was necessary.
It was necessary.
This is like rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do, you know.
But at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated with failure that I needed the moment.
It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer.
You know, it's that moment of like, I'm not going to win this fight and you need to move on from it.
And if there was any element of that sitting around, I'd be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.
We should mention that you did give it a real try.
You've mentioned receiving over 170 rejection letters in one year when submitting your stories.
So there's a lot of rejection.
So there's a long chain of rejection.
And then what was that like?
The rejection.
It was hard.
I had moved from New York.
I did the most terrible, dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time.
I had a really great group of writer friends from grad school in New York.
And I think writing is a very lonely, solitary thing, but weirdly, writers kind of support each other and just who do you give the story to?
You know, you don't want to give it to your mom or dad.
You know, you kind of want to give it to somebody who's going to really punch you in the nose and tell you what's wrong with it.
And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.
Did you take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter, and drove across the United States and then wrote a book about it or just to take Kerouax as an example?
Anyway, sorry.
I might have been more successful had I done that.
So sorry.
So you went back.
So I moved back to California and I did it for a girl.
And I think within two months of moving back, we were broken up.
So, and I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment when it was empty in New York and I was about to close the door for the last time.
I had that like, you know, little me on the shoulder saying, dude, what are you doing?
This, you're making one of those epic life mistakes that is going to come back to haunt you.
And I ended up alone in California.
And I think it was a good three years that I structured my life where I was going to write for eight hours a day because it's that writer's habit.
Like you have to just force yourself.
This is a job.
This isn't a hobby.
Whether I like it or not, rain or shine, sick or healthy, I'm going to write for eight hours a day.
And I did.
I was fortunate.
Like I said, my dad had his company and he hired me as a research associate.
So I was calling up generating name lists for a recruiting company.
And I would take whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start at like five in the morning.
And I created all this space for me to write.
And I just, I had a dog named Jack who was, he was Jack Russell Terrier.
And so everybody's like, you're a writer.
You named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack.
I'm like, I named him after Jack Kerouac.
It's poetic and epic.
And I just look like a dumbass, but it was just me and this dog.
And I was writing, you know, all that time intensely.
And this was mid to late 90s.
So even though internet existed, email was very primitive.
And you had to send a manuscript off like printed paper to all like I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines and you had to send envelope with return self-address stamp.
So it was expensive too.
Like if you didn't have money, you were just, there was a cost to it to every single one of them.
You had to pay for the rejection letter that you would eventually receive.
Yeah.
And the like big thing that you were hoping for was that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter.
Like, oh, keep going.
Yeah.
And you'd like cling on to this.
Like it was like, oh, Glimmer Train said, you know, showing promise, you know, and you just hang on to that for like a week, you know, pretending like that was, but it was just soul crushing.
And I really stuck and I became more and more isolated.
Part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York.
I'm prone to just introversion anyway, the type of person I am, breaking up with the girlfriend at the time.
I just sort of fell into that world of like all I was doing was writing.
And it broke me.
Like I went into very deep and heavy depression.
I drank too much.
I really had a problem with alcohol.
And all those things compounded into just deep, deep depression.
And I don't, there wasn't like a magic rejection that broke me.
That would have been epic if like someone out there is like the dude, I'm the dude who broke Jeff that one day.
Finding Your Calling00:04:28
But I just had a moment where I said, this is going to destroy me.
And like, I don't want to be discouraging to anybody because I really do believe like you hear it so much, like you have to work for your dreams, never give up.
Like we're trained this way, like never give up.
The universe, actually, maybe not the universe, a group of editors at literary magazines across the United States was telling me it was time to give up as a writer.
Like I wasn't cut out for it.
And I stopped.
Sometimes, you know, closing a door is required for another door to open.
That's one of the hardest things to do is to walk away.
Yeah.
And I think rightly so, our parents, our coaches, our mentors train us not to give up.
And I think a lot of us take pride in that.
I'm never going to give up.
I'm going to do this.
Come hell or high water.
And sometimes there's that reality, especially when you're now in your mid-20s, where you have that moment of like, am I really going to be this?
Like, am I ever going to sort of find the light here?
And maybe, and it's so hard.
It's so hard to have this moment.
Maybe this isn't my calling in life, especially when you don't know what the next calling is going to be.
It's so painful because you've invested so much of yourself, of who you are, of the dreams you've had, of this whole conception of yourself.
And you're watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming isolated, suffering more and more.
And then you have to somehow figure out how to get out of that.
And it is true in that situation, the way to get out is the dumpster.
Yeah.
So cut it off.
Is there advice you can extract from that?
There's a lot of young folks who are in that same situation.
Yeah, this is one of those hindsight things where, you know, having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side, which you don't know at the time.
You know, when you're a young person in your late teens or early 20s, there's so much pressure on you.
And I really think adults don't help.
You know, every time you run into the younger nephew or whoever, and you start to say things like, Oh, what's your major?
What are you going to do with that?
What do you want to be?
It's such bullshit to do to a human being.
Yeah.
You know, you're so lost in the world.
I mean, most of us are lost our entire lives, but especially in your 20s, you're like, you're lost.
So, questions like, yeah, what are you?
What are you doing?
What's your major?
What's the career?
And so on.
That's not the point, man.
I'm trying to find, I'm trying to move through the world.
I'm trying to run through the world to find the thing that sparks my heart, to find the passion, to find what I'm meant to be on this earth for.
And they're really, I mean, that is a real hero's journey of searching as a young person.
That's a real, like, you know, all the adults with their wisdom, they've stopped searching often.
They've, they've done the lazy, the comfortable thing.
They found their thing.
And so now they look back, they don't remember how much suffering and how much uncertainty that young people have to deal with.
It's there's confusion, there's pressure.
Like the pressure we exert on younger people for having it figured out is it's insane.
So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like this sounds really trite, but focus on what you want to do, not what you want to be.
The pressure that society kind of puts on us is, you know, oh, do you want to be an astronaut?
Do you want to be a firefighter?
Do you want to be a writer?
Escaping Into EverQuest00:16:02
Do you want to be a game maker?
And I think we get lost in the trappings of like a vision of what that role is and how to perform as a fake actor in that role versus when you're off the clock and no one's asking you any questions.
You know, you're not at Thanksgiving dinner and your uncle's pressuring you into what your future is going to be for the rest of your life.
When you go home, how do you spend your time?
Like, what makes you happy?
What brings you fulfillment?
And through those paths, you're going to find out what you're going to become, not what you want to be.
It's what do you want to do?
What do you want to do?
The thing that brings you joy on a moment-by-moment basis.
Yeah, that's brilliantly put.
And speaking of which, that's where you took the pivot.
You switched to video games.
How did that happen?
Gradually, suddenly?
Gradually and suddenly.
So when I had that faithful moment where I just sort of gave up with writing, I had these days where I'd structured eight-hour chunks of just this was writing time.
You know, I sit solitary typing.
All that was gone.
And, you know, I could still support myself, which was nice.
And then I had this free time and I wasn't spending it with anybody.
I was just alone, me and the dog Jack.
And I just poured it all into EverQuest.
Yeah.
You know, I, I, it was 1999 when that game came out.
And I had a friend, Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend, one of one of the few friends I had who played computer games because there was a stigma to that.
You know, it wasn't, you didn't walk around telling people you played games.
They thought you waste your time.
And my friend Vic had bought EverQuest.
I'm like, that's that game that that guy, Brian Hook, went to work on.
Is it good?
And he's like, yeah, you got to play it.
And the moment I logged in, I was just transported.
It was the world of Norath.
And it wasn't just the world itself and how it looked.
I thought the game was gorgeous.
It was the mechanics, you know, that I was this halfling rogue that, you know, had to go out and adventure in the world.
And when I killed stuff, I got experience and I needed better loot to kill more stuff, to get more experience.
And the sort of draw of progression in the game, it was amazing.
And I just lived my life of, I can't wait till the next time I log in.
There was a lot of escapism going.
It wasn't all healthy.
When all was said and done, when I finally had quit EverQuest three days later, you could type in the command/slash played to see how much played time you had.
I had, I think it was like 272 played days in three years.
So you start to do the math on like how much time in those three years I was living in that world.
It was kind of insane.
Well, that's over 6,000 hours of gameplay.
Yeah.
Wow.
So here going to perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMORPG, set in the world of NORATH, as you were saying.
First released in March 1999.
It is an online role-playing game where thousands of players create characters, group up, and explore persistent shared world.
It's widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs, helping to find raid content, guilded systems, and 3D online worlds.
That's the other component of it.
It's all humans and they group up.
Yeah.
And they raid together in the game.
Yep.
In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 people or more getting together to conquer something that you couldn't beat otherwise.
And to do successful raiding, you usually needed to join what in EverQuest, everyone referred to as an Uber guild.
So I had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I, most of the time leveling up, I was unguilded or I was in like a role-playing guild with rogues only.
And it was when I got to level 50 and EverQuest was the top level.
I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel, which on our server was the top.
Every server had a top guild.
And I was on a server called the Nameless server.
And the top guild was Legacy of Steel.
And that the thrill of getting 30 people together to go see if you could beat, you know, Nagathin, who was the Fire Dragon, or Vox, who was the Frost Dragon, and needing perfect coordination to pull it off.
It was insane how fun.
Like you would literally scream out.
You're alone in your room at home, but you felt like you were there with these people and you would audibly cheer out when you won and you'd feel depressed when you lost.
And it was a game of high highs and low lows.
And it did everything right.
It was amazing.
So that was a big leap for you to go from the proud lone warrior to a member of a guild, Uber Guild.
And then there's that epic story of you rising to the top to become the leader of the Super Guild.
Yeah.
So organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like hurting cats because, you know, everyone has their own will.
Some people are loot motivated.
Some people want the guild to do well.
Some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with.
And there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community.
It was something I suffered with.
But a lot of people, you know, anytime you're feeling sad or down, you're looking for escape.
And one of the great things video games brings us is escapism.
And escapism isn't always bad or negative.
But when you sort of abuse it to escape your real life problems, it's bad and negative.
So there's a mix of pain and darkness that pain can manifest as all part of this community.
Yeah.
And what's weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people gives you camaraderie and relief and makes you feel like you're not doing so bad in life.
But you can quickly enter a cycle of, but then you're withdrawing from life and it makes you feel that way more to where you can only get the fix from the game at that point.
So it's psychologically, there's a lot going on there.
And so you had to work with all of that.
You have to get a bunch of people together to do a raid who are all human beings going through complicated psychological journeys of their own.
Some are talking shit.
Some are just quietly lonely, just looking for some loot.
In the late 90s, everyone was talking shit.
You know what I mean?
Like the gaming culture was just a different thing back then.
But it was a great group.
It was super fun.
It was people from all walks of life.
And to coordinate these people, like you just had to repeat everything like 200 times.
Like, okay, we're going to, we're going to port from North Row.
Everybody get to North Row.
And then you'd have to repeat that for like six hours to have any chance of like 20% of the people showing up in North Row.
And I sort of like, at first I joined the guild, I was just like the bright-eyed bushytail.
Like I was like one of the few rogues in the guild.
I just wanted to be helpful.
I really admired the people running the guild.
Like we had a great guild leader.
And it was just a really fun experience.
And, you know, the guild leader one day just disappeared.
Like he quit and he was going through, you know, his own thing.
And that's what would happen in EverQuest.
Like people would just kind of disappear all of a sudden.
There wasn't a, hey, in about a month, I'm going to stop playing because I'm starting this new job.
People, people had to quit in some dramatic way where they just disappear.
And basically our guild leader stopped playing.
Did you miss them when they disappeared?
Like we should say that most of the people, maybe all of them were anonymous.
So you just have a username and you don't really say who you are in real life.
Absolutely.
In those days, there was a great stigma to mentioning your any real life info.
You just kind of kept it all really close to your chest.
And you never knew who was male or female.
Yeah, um, you kind of assumed everybody was male, safe assumptions, and then it was a surprise if they were actually female.
Um, like my wife, for example, that's how I met her.
You met her in EverQuest, I met her in EverQuest.
That is a true love story, right?
Yeah, yeah, wow.
The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, You threw years of your life away, like, you can't win a game like that.
And I'm like, I don't know, like, sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest.
So, I think I won the game, yeah, yeah.
You're like the well, actually, well, your life will be on a Wikipedia page somewhere that says, Well, here's an example of somebody, yeah, why video games are awesome.
Uh, yeah, I mean, some of I should mention as an aside for me and many people I know, yes, it's hundreds of hours, but some of the happiest hours and days of my life, like looking back, it all worked out during it.
You are pretty low, and you think, I, what am I doing with my life?
All that kind of stuff.
But, like, looking back, just all-nighters you pull playing a particular video game, allowing yourself to really fully be immersed, uh, seeing the sun come up on uh, by the way.
Many of those games for me were Blizzard games.
It's just an incredible thing that video games have been able to do.
I think you know, it used to be and still somewhat the case that books do that kind of same thing, they take you on a journey.
But video games for a long time, you're right, they had a stigma.
Like, I couldn't tell people, I felt like I was doing like heroin or something.
Yeah, I felt like I was doing the secret dark thing.
It's usually in it usually is in the dark, there's just a secret of nature to it.
Like, I'm doing something really dark and shady.
It wasn't mainstream, it wasn't, it wasn't accepted, there was a stigma to it.
And one of the weirdest parts of that is, you know, I mentioned like you could type in the slash played in EverQuest.
Well, if you did the slash played on how much TV people watch, what would that look like?
It would blow 6,000 hours out of the water easily.
Well, it in 20 years ago, it would have, you know, not today.
No, it's the phone.
Yeah, yeah.
But then it is hard to say goodbye to that world.
Yeah, those are also really painful times.
How hard was it to say goodbye for you?
To EverQuest, it was really hard.
And there were times where you try to quit.
Oh, you took a break sometimes?
Yeah, you think you're quitting for good.
You'd have those moments of like, I'm doing this too much.
I need to move on in life.
I'm going to put it down and walk away and hopefully not come back.
And there were times where you did come back.
When I finally did leave EverQuest, it was actually extremely easy because I was psychologically done with the game at the time.
It was not shortly, but not too long after a new expansion had come out at the time.
It was Shadows of Luckland, which didn't speak to me like the expansions before.
Like the one before that was called Scars of Velios, which was an amazing expansion.
And I had gotten the job at Blizzard.
And I guess I'm just an obsessive person.
So all the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest, the second, you know, the second my first minute started at Blizzard, that was my new obsession.
So, speaking of which, you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got the job of Blizzard.
As we said, you were this legendary gamer and now legendary troll on EverQuest, username to go.
You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, telling them in now famous, there's several rants.
There's a famous one where you tell many of them to do a bunch of things, including to pull their heads out of their asses.
You were loved and respected because you gave a lot of specific ways that the game could be improved.
And that's an important thing to say.
You weren't just talking shit.
You actually really loved and cared for the game, and you gave them, in the language of the time, advice on how to improve their game.
And it's funny because you look back to those messages, it's inspiring to me.
It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people because you're really legit full-time talking shit.
And now, and always have been like one of the kindest, most loved human beings in the entire gaming industry.
Anyway, how did that lead to you getting a job with Blizzard?
So, when the first guild leader left Legacy of Steel, the founder, he was a guy named his online name was Dredd.
That was his name.
He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while.
And eventually, somebody stepped up and took his position as guild leader.
And that person's name was Ariel, who was this blonde wood-elf warrior female who always refused to wear a helmet because thought their character was so pretty, wanted to show their face all the time.
So, Ariel was a great guild leader for us and made me like an assistant guild leader, raid leader, officer type in the guild.
The Guild Leader's Journey00:13:09
And over time, Ariel got busier and busier and would send me messages like, hey, I'm not going to be online, you know, tomorrow, or I'm not going to be online tonight.
Can you run the raid?
Can you run the raid?
And running the raids was very natural for me.
And it was my first experience with leadership in my life of like, how do you motivate people?
Like, what does motivation look like?
What does discipline look like?
How do you inspire people?
When do you force people versus encourage them?
You know, so it was a learning experience for me on the fly.
And I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually.
I should mention, I'm just now reading about doing a bunch of research on Justinian of the Roman Empire.
And he rose from being a peasant to being emperor.
So I see a lot of parallels in your life journey from peasant to emperor.
But go ahead.
I'm sorry.
At least EverQuest guild leader.
That's that's as much as I can say.
Uber guild leader, best guild on the nameless server.
So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier.
And then one day they contacted me and we were having this like whisper back and forth.
And they said, you're going to have to take over the guild.
I'm just too busy.
And then it came out later.
Well, let me back up a second.
I started fooling around like around this time, Half-Life One had come out.
And with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life One, one of the incredible things that those companies did back in the day was when they shipped the game, they shipped the editor on the CD.
And if you were curious enough, you could like fire up that editor and fool around with it.
So I made a Duke Nukem level and you'd send it off to like those UK programming magazines.
And, you know, you get excited because your level was in, you know, some random magazine.
And then I started making like Half-Life levels.
And Ariel had stepped down as guild leader.
I had become guild leader.
And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and says, Hey, you know, you were talking about those Half-Life levels you made.
I want to see those.
I'm like, oh, that's cool.
Like, I didn't know you played Half-Life.
Like, yeah, maybe we can get a server up and I can play them.
And Ariel tells me, no, mail them to this address in Irvine.
And because, again, to rewind in the time machine for a second, to send something like a Half-Life level over the internet would have taken like 12 hours.
So you actually like burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.
So I put my Half-Life levels.
I send them to Ariel.
And he says, you know, my name's Rob.
I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment.
I hear you're in Pasadena because you mention it.
You know, I would write about, you know, the Rose Parade and all these things on our website.
You know, I kind of, it was blogging before blogging existed.
So he knew I lived in Pasadena.
He's like, Irvine's only an hour away.
Why don't you come down, see Blizzard?
And you can also meet, and he names like four people in the guild.
And I'm like, they all work at Blizzard too.
He's like, yeah, we're all Blizzard.
And it was so weird because during that era, I didn't have a lot of money.
It was not like kind of nowadays, it feels like everybody plays every game, but you had to be selective.
So like, I never bought StarCraft or Diablo or Warcraft.
I was much more of the Half-Life Quake, Quake 3 guy around that time.
And I never played a Blizzard game.
And I just got invited to like go to Blizzard Entertainment.
Was Blizzard already legendary?
You know, with the Warcraft and StarCraft?
Was it building this like great legend of this game company that seemingly doesn't miss?
It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the legendary game.
Like it was beloved by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who hadn't played, you know, War 2 or Diablo 2 or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.
So you weren't like freaking out, freaking out?
No, I was freaking out in a different sense.
I'm like, am I going to get mugged when I like who are, is this a scam?
Because you didn't meet people off the internet.
Yeah.
So I drove down there.
I ended up, there was, there was Rob Pardo, who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft 3.
And he was Ariel, you know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all.
It wasn't this blonde what elf.
You know, I don't know what you expect at that point.
It was Rob Pardo.
To this day, a great friend of mine named Scott Mercer was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalo Min.
There was a guy named Roman Kenny who was like this totally psychotic wizard who played in our guild.
And I had lunch with these guys.
You know, we just went out to Irvine to like a restaurant.
And, you know, forgive me for the misuse of the phrase, but it was like my coming out moment.
And we talked about games having that stigma and being embarrassed about who you are and what you like.
Like up until that point, I would never tell friends, family, like I love games.
I'm playing this game, EverQuest.
It's so cool.
We just killed a dragon.
And so you were hiding this part of your identity.
And I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine.
And we're talking about dragons and swords and, you know, raid tactics and talking shit on all the people in the guild.
And I literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first time.
I just felt like so comfortable.
And that was an eye-opening moment.
And after that, after that lunch happened, he invited me for a couple more lunches down, you know, just I just thought as like, oh, now I'm, you know, I made friends with these people online.
Now we know each other in real life and they happen to work for this game company.
And another one of the lunches, they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us, whose name in the game was Barfa, the troll warrior.
And Barfa, Barfa wasn't somebody who played with us all the time, but kind of like Ariel got into the guild kind of on the side.
You know, it was one of those like inside invites of like, who's Barfa?
I don't know, but Barfa's in the guild now.
And there was at the time, it was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never done it before.
And we jumped down in this hole and we're doing this whole dungeon and everything goes wrong as it's prone to do in EverQuest.
And the whole guild escapes except for Barfa, whose troll character is so big he can't jump out of the exit.
And I had this potion that was like a really expensive potion that was a teleport potion that, you know, no one but someone in the Uber guild could afford at the time.
And I hand the potion to Barfa and I said, here, use this.
It'll teleport you out.
And I'm a rogue.
I can just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own.
So I saved Barfa not really knowing who Barfa was.
And I did it with a very expensive potion.
Having lunch, Rob introduced me.
This is Alan Adham.
He plays Barfa.
I'm like, oh, Barfa.
And we, you know, he has, you saved me in the hole that time.
Well, it turns out Alan was the founder of Blizzard.
And he was the head.
He was sort of the head of everything at that time.
It was Alan, Mike, Mike Moorheim, and Frank Pierce.
And what I didn't realize with these lunches were like, I just loved them because I felt like I was myself.
I felt true happiness being surrounded by these, you know, people who were talking about video games and I felt comfortable around.
And one day Rob logs into EverQuest.
He wasn't playing much at the time.
He said, I want you tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site.
I'm like, okay, like, I'll check the Blizzard job site.
And they had announced World of Warcraft and posted on the job site was the job for an associate quest designer.
And the funniest part of it was, I forget if it was a requirement or a plus in the job description, but they're like, we really want somebody with a creative writing degree.
I'm like, you guys set this up for me.
Like they were just looking.
And it was that hindsight moment of like, actually, these guys were just interviewing me for six months.
They were actually friends and they were really cool about it too.
And I just had the fuck it moment, like that job opened up.
I applied with all my heart.
You know, like they had a bunch of quest writing on it.
And then I went through like a pretty hardcore six-month recruiting process because they never hired designers from out of the company.
Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard.
Either they would like transfer out of other disciplines or they would come from quality assurance, tech support.
So hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them.
And they really put me through a grilling.
I met with, it was the first time I met Chris Metzen, who is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on the planet.
And you instantly, they paired me, they did this interview pairing.
There were these two guys.
It was Kevin Jordan, who was one of the original designers on WoW.
Really, he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions.
He was one of the earliest class designers, PvP designers, but he's a really quiet guy.
And they paired him with Chris.
And Chris just owns the room.
You know, Chris, you could just sit and listen to him.
He's so creative.
He's so passionate.
And the way he articulates things, like you just instantly become a fan of Chris when you're around Chris.
Chris, Kevin, and I go to lunch at this Italian place that was across the street from Blizzard.
And I remember Chris made us stop to buy cigarettes, you know, on the way to the interview.
And then every other word out of Chris's mouth was like, fuck and shit.
And I had come from this whole like corporate culture from my dad's recruiting business where I'd never imagined somebody would curse in an interview or stop to buy smokes.
And again, it was like, I'm around my people.
Like I never smoked, but just, you know, being around people who didn't care about what the corporate norms were was so inspiring.
And then my last interview was with Alan and Rob and a great programmer named Bob Fitch.
Like, I think he's one of the first five developers at Blizzard.
And they took me to an Arco station that had a Jack in the Box.
You know how like sometimes they'll combo?
It was like Arco Jack in the Box.
And that was my final interview at Blizzard was at the Arco Jack in the Box.
And I remember thinking to myself, these guys just brought me to a Jack in the Box that's in an Arco station.
I need to work here.
Like this is, these are my people.
This is where I belong.
Therapy and Jack in the Box00:03:34
Like it was the greatest thing ever.
And so yeah, that's my crazy journey to Blizzard.
Start at the bottom and end up at the top in the jack in the box.
Can you speak to, because you mentioned some of the low points in the depression through that journey, how did you find your way out?
So can you just a lot of people are sitting in those low points right now listening to this?
What kind of wisdom can you draw about finding your way out, finding your people?
There were a lot of really low points.
I'll give you the weirdest one.
I started drinking a lot, and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with until my early 30s.
And one of the things I'm most proud of today is sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now.
And I remember I was, I was just, I would like buy a bottle of old granddad and like drink the whole thing by myself and then watch the Oscars.
And I remember I was, of all things, I'm watching the Oscars, which is just such a fake bullshit environment.
But I was like, you know, I was really drunk and all those people seemed so together and successful and polished.
And I just, it made me, it was that contrast that made me feel like such a failure.
And it all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now.
I became, you know, I got in that constant struggle of try not to drink, but drink to make it feel better.
I was lucky.
My parents were very supportive of me, even in my 20s, even after I, you know, quote unquote left the house.
I went into therapy and that was very helpful.
You know, extremely helpful.
And one thing I learned is that you have to find the right therapist for you.
It's not just checking a checkbox of I went to therapy.
It's about finding somebody who sort of helps you get out of whatever rut you're in in a way that's healthy for you.
And I tried antidepressants, but I hated, I just hated taking pills and feeling like something was in me and making me feel different.
I never responded to it.
And then the hardest thing, you know, which I've never mentioned to anyone and is hard for me to talk about, but eventually I went through ECT, which is electroconvulsive therapy, a shock therapy.
And that broke me out.
And I would never endorse that as a miracle.
That was, I was at such a low point that people were very worried about me and my well-being and what was going to happen.
And that was sort of an extreme pull the rip cord, like there's nothing else to lose moment.
And I think that was the difference maker.
Loneliness Before the Team00:16:54
That and starting at Blizzard.
To find, I mean, there is a deep loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch, you're alone, like in a really deep, fundamental way.
Like in the way you weren't in New York with the writing, with the writers group, right?
And so that must have been an incredible experience just to see the guild.
Yes.
It was everything I need.
As such an introvert, you think that there are extroverts and introverts, and introverts don't need anybody.
But weirdly, I think introverts almost need people more.
And we don't always know how to engage in the right healthy ways and how to find people and how to connect with people.
And it was, it was great.
The thing that had attracted me to creative writing was the solitude of it.
And the fact that you didn't have to collaborate and you could just write what you wanted to write and it was all you, you would succeed on your own or you would fail on your own.
And that was very attractive to me.
And the thought of creative collaboration was actually off-putting.
I'd spent all four years of undergrad interning at Universal Pictures because I thought I wanted to be in film.
And it was such an unhealthy creative collaboration in the film industry.
It's a very, you know, I look up unhealthily to the film industry and admire it and, you know, grew up with all these legends who had come from there.
But it's like a caste system.
And I was on the bottom of the caste system as an intern and I was seeing how the other people who were low caste in the film industry were treated.
And it was just horrible, you know.
But games was different.
Games was very flat.
It didn't matter if you were the CEO or the boss, like the way Mike and Alan carried themselves with, you know, me who was an associate game designer, you felt like an equal.
And I think it not just the camaraderie, but the part that shouldn't be overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic.
That's what really pulled me out.
Hard work on a thing you love.
Yeah.
I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic one of us, quote, one of us post you made on April 18th, 2002, because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us.
I apologize to bring up Justinian the Emperor, but you remained a kind of peasant gamer, a true, true gamer who happens to be also be designing the games.
And so this post kind of speaks to that.
It's fascinating to read because that was at the very beginning, right?
You didn't know anything.
You didn't know the games you would end up creating.
Title of the post, If You Want Something Done Right.
You wrote, this week I accepted a position as associate game designer with Blizzard Entertainment.
Specifically, I will be designing Quest for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's MMORPG, based on the popular Warcraft series.
In addition to my duties as quest designer, I will also be expected to contribute to helping design the endgame content for World of Warcraft.
The reason I'm sharing this information, besides the fact that I have a masochistic love of reading rants and flames about myself, is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore MMORPG players.
The readers of the site have also come to know my personal opinions on what constitutes a fun gaming experience versus what feels like a complete waste of time or poorly designed encounter.
Well, you're very eloquent in this post and without too much shit talking.
You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps, obvious time syncs devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled, and quest rewards which are out of sync with the amount of time and effort required to complete them.
I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interests of the player.
And you go on to describe some of the high hopes you have for World of Warcraft, which is really fun to read because you don't realize it's going to be like one of the greatest games of all time, played by millions of human beings, just where those millions of human beings are playing for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours.
It's crazy.
It's funny that this one of us is writing at the dawn of a new age.
The final paragraph is, so with all that is going on with me, you'll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site here.
I will try my hardest to give you Slack or something to read while you should be working.
But in the meantime, there's a whole world of NPCs.
They need to learn the words Kak Sagur and Mo Faker in quotes and the like.
Although something tells me I'm already in trouble with the boss.
One of us, Jeff, one of us.
That was a beautiful, beautiful post.
Did you, in fact, get in trouble with the boss?
No, no.
My boss was Alan.
And Alan was very understanding.
And they kind of knew what they were getting into when they hired me.
And that post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now.
There's so much ego in it.
And I think that's, it's got that 20-year-old, you know, I don't know what I don't know.
I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games.
Yeah.
But there's brilliance behind that.
There's a passion behind that.
Like when you're a gamer and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest, you understand what makes for a compelling experience.
You don't at that time understand how much hard work is required to create that experience and how much uncertainty there is, how difficult it is, how many trade-offs there are, how your designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, they are different from the vision you had for it.
So all those elements you don't know.
But you have to have that ego in the beginning, right?
Yeah.
To even have the gust to try, to have the gust to put in all that work.
So what was it like?
What were the vibes of early Blizzard like?
At this point, Warcraft 1 and 2, Warcraft 3 is in production, StarCraft.
These are legendary games.
I spent probably over a thousand hours in these games combined.
I played Warcraft 1, 2, 3.
I played StarCraft 1 and 2.
I played, wow, of course, Diablo 1, 2, 3, 4.
But you get Diablo 2 with Stay a While and Listen with Decker Kane.
Stay a while and listen.
I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences just stay with me forever.
Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks.
What was it like?
What was the team like?
What were the developers like?
What was the vibes like in those early days?
It was amazing.
It was the dream.
When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office was on the University of California Irvine campus at the time.
They have this research and development park where if you're like a tech company, you can get office space there.
And Blizzard took up, when I joined, it was three-fourths of the building was Blizzard.
And there's like a building right next to it that had like Cisco and it was like all kind of techie places.
And it was so funny because you drive up and like everything was very serious and corporate.
And then outside of the Blizzard offices, it's everybody's wearing black t-shirt and shorts and throwing frisbees and playing hacky sack and on scooters and skateboards.
And you're like, okay, that's where that's where Blizzard is.
So it was that environment.
I remember walking in the door and thinking, like, it feels like I'm walking into a dorm room because it was just posters on the wall.
And there were actually like people would have futons because they'd be sleeping because we would work so much back then.
But the vibe was, it was very small.
Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002, was fewer than 200 people.
And that included there was a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North.
So Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft.
And there were two development teams at Blizzard.
It was called Team 1 and Team 2 at Blizzard South.
Team 1 was revered.
These are the RTS guys.
They made, you know, StarCraft, Warcraft 2.
And they were at that time, they're working on Warcraft 3.
Team 2 was kind of the red-headed stepchild.
Like, apparently, before I joined, they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed.
And then they finally decided they were going to make World of Warcraft.
There was a game called Nomad.
I don't know what that game was exactly, but that was what Team 2 was working on at first.
That got scrapped, and Alan steered the team towards World of Warcraft.
And there was an amazing designer named Eric Dodds.
He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone.
Him and Ben Brode basically were the core designers behind that.
But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these two key designers working on World of Warcraft for Team Two.
And then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.
And John Cash, the first day that I showed up to work on Team Two, they said, you have to go get your login from John Cash.
I'm like, John, the John Cash from id.
And, you know, John Cash has a skin.
You could be John Cash in Quake 3.
So, and then he saw me and he was a huge EverQuest player.
And you're like, he was like, you're the guy who runs Legacy of Steel.
I'm like, you're John Cash.
We had that moment where we kind of fanboyed out on each other.
And it was just the vibe was so cool there.
Like, there were very few producers.
So a game team, there are five core disciplines that make a video game.
You've got engineers or programmers who are writing the code.
You've got the art team that's making all the visuals for the game.
And that spans everything from like 3D modeling, characters, environments, to also animation, tech art, you know, making it all work.
You've got game design, which some companies don't have design.
The artists and the engineers do it.
Valve famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer.
But in companies where design is a discipline, which it very much is so at Blizzard, game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people, you know, setting up all the systems and content in a way that gets the player to navigate through the game.
So that's part of his story, part of this quest design part of it, is like how you move through the game world.
Yes.
So game designers, there's a spectrum, like same with art, same with engineering of roles within game design.
Some are more heavy on the system side.
So like any game that you've played where loot drops, you know, Diablo 4, World of Warcraft, you know, Escape from Tarkov, whatever.
If there's loot dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully what drops where and at what percentages.
That would be like a systems designer.
A content designer is somebody who's going to make quests or write storylines, or there might even be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on story.
But designers, you know, run the gambit, and then you've got these jack of all trade designers that can do it all.
So that's the design group.
There's production, which is project management.
And production is different at every game company you go to.
So if you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard, production might be very different.
They might be the boss.
They might actually be a designer or they might be more of a project manager.
And then one of my favorite disciplines on a game team that's often overlooked is sound and, you know, audio, which is comprised of the sound designers and composers.
And there are two things.
I think there are two things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they're missing.
And that's audio and lighting.
Because most of the time we're playing without these things and it just feels a little off and wrong.
And when you have a great lighting artist or you have a great composer or sound designer, like the experience, you're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise.
But that's who comprises the game team.
Is the lighting, you know, all the different kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team?
Yeah.
Lighting, you're going to have lighting under the art team, but they're going to be best friends with a graphics programmer.
And, you know, like I mentioned with design, there's this wide spectrum on the engineering team.
You have some guys who are like architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know, the server client model or the networking or whatever.
Others are more like gameplay focus.
On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team.
And on every game team, you're going to have graphics programmers who will work with people like the lighting artists or the environmental artists, character artists on shaders.
And basically any way to make the game, they'll always ask, what's your vision?
What are you trying to get it to look like?
They'll want an illustration of what should the world look like.
And they'll be the ones who say, I know how to write code that will let you do that.
So you partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist.
And that's actually the creative tension behind games and what makes game teams so unique is if we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum.
On one end, you're going to have the artists who they're creative, dare I say emotional.
You know, they are artists on that end.
And on the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers who their minds just work very differently from the most creative art.
Artists could be sitting, you have a meeting with them and they'll just sit illustrating.
If there's any piece of paper, they're drawing on it.
Building a Creative Machine00:09:02
And programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized in their thinking and everything's so logical.
And then in the middle are people like the sound designers, the game designers, and the producers.
They're kind of a little bit in all those fields, but it's the brilliance of taking people who are so vastly different in their interests and talents, but aiming them at that shared goal or that shared vision of the game that like really makes something special.
And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft, but you've also well known for working on quite small teams to create these incredibly huge games.
What is the power of a small team in this kind of context where a lot there's that creative tension?
Is it because a small team avoids maybe the compartmentalization, like the modular where people, the artists now have their own wing building where they never talk to the engineers, that kind of thing?
Absolutely.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine.
And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.
If we're a small team, let's say we're going to make a game and it's at sort of the incubation period of a game, and there's only 10 of us.
All 10 of us are in the room for every decision.
You know, I'm not a server networking guy, but I'm in the room for that discussion.
I'm not an illustrator, but I'm going to sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks like.
As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized.
It's exactly like you said.
And there's a weird thing that happens.
This is just kind of a human nature thing.
The less you interact with somebody, the more you sort of become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.
You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism rather than trust and belief in them.
And I find on smaller teams where we all know each other's names, I know what everybody's working on every day.
They know what I'm working on.
Everybody can talk to each other.
There's none of that stereotyping of a discipline.
On big, unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, well, the artists just don't get it.
They don't understand what we're trying to make.
And when you back up and you think about the statement that you just said, it's like such an asshole statement.
Like, really, all the artists don't get it.
Like, that's A, that's not true.
B, that's sort of demeaning to them.
Like, they signed up for this is their life's work too.
This game is going to be as much theirs as it is mine.
So who am I to say a statement like that?
It's harmful to a discipline to think that you understand the world and those silly other folks don't.
And you have nothing to learn from them, really.
And they're deluded in some kind of way.
That's so powerful.
Fast forwarding a little bit, when we formed team four, and which went on to make Titan and ultimately fail, and then that got rebooted as the Overwatch team.
The idea that I tried to get through to the team was to make an assumption.
And really, like Blizzard is one of the top game developers in the world.
And we were very fortunate when I was there.
And I imagine it's this way today, that we could recruit whatever talent we wanted.
The best of the best wanted to come work at Blizzard.
And if you sort of go through the paces of that and say, okay, when we recruit somebody, let's say we're recruiting an artist to make props, boxes, chairs, whatever.
That is the best prop artist in the industry.
That's who's going to show up on our doorstep.
So when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artists in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism.
So when that person speaks up and says, I think, like with Overwatch, for example, I think we should do this, you know, we should do X instead of Y. Instead of saying, well, I'm a believer in Y. Why are you against my idea, X?
You should take a moment, have a deep breath and say, man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something.
Why don't I listen to it?
I actually do for myself like this kind of thought framework or thought experiment whenever I'm talking to a new person, especially if I feel myself a little bit tinge of that feeling.
Usually it happens with like a really young person, like an undergraduate student or something like this.
I pretend that they're the smartest person in the world in my head.
And now like it puts me in the mode of like assuming I have a lot to learn from them.
And it helps.
You actually like really listen.
I literally think they're the smartest, wisest human on earth.
It helps me.
I had that like, I think, you know, I'm no expert.
I'm a game designer.
So like as much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully.
Like, I don't know.
I don't have an important job, but psychologically speaking, one thing I think a lot about is ego.
And I think about insecurity.
And insecurity we all have, like all of us as human beings have insecurity.
It just manifests itself in different ways.
And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes.
So like some people, for example, use their insecurity to rip other people apart.
Some people destroy themselves through their own insecurity.
Some people destroy everybody with their insecurity.
But I had that moment as a young lead when I first was made a lead on like World of Warcraft, where I felt it was very important to be right and to, you know, be shepherding the correct idea.
And I actually got pulled aside.
Like Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple people who weren't game designers.
And it's always tricky as a game designer because constantly everybody's throwing ideas out on a game team.
Like there's no shortage of ideas ever.
And we were in some meeting about something and these people kind of threw out these ideas.
And I wasn't mean to them, but I very kind of systematically like an insecure, you know, ego-driven new lead would do.
I kind of, well, let me tell you why that's wrong and let me tell you what we're going to do instead.
And after the meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me aside and he said, you're a very smart designer, but you shouldn't do what you just did to those people.
You should always listen to what people have to say and try to make their ideas work.
And I just over and over, I was like, okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let's try to make it work.
And it went from this kind of thing that I didn't believe into to actually like a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director.
And some of the best ideas have come from developing other people's ideas where your first reaction is like, no, that's wrong.
And then just kind of sticking with it and going, but how could we make it work?
And the most gratifying part when it succeeds is they get all the credit.
And you've sort of elevated this person whose idea wouldn't have been championed, whose idea by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know, early 2000s would have just said no.
Horde vs Alliance Unity00:14:11
Now their idea is the thing everybody in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving, and they get all the credit.
I should give context to the listener who don't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan, that you're one of the most humble and always give credit to the team for everything and anything.
And so everything we talk about today, I know you're probably resisting constantly giving credit to the team on everything.
So you're the famous hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team, right?
So just as a small aside, thank you for your humility through your career and thank you for always celebrating the team.
But let's talk about WoW.
Let's talk about World of Warcraft.
Tell me what the early days of developing WoW was like.
Maybe we should talk about what World of Warcraft WoW is.
Going to perplexity here.
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online RPG where you create a character, level it up, doing quests and dungeons and progress your gear and power in an open fantasy world called Azeroth.
At a basic level, you move, use abilities from your action bar, follow a quest, and gradually learn a combat rotation that fits your class.
And there's all kinds of characters and roles and classes.
You pick a race, appearance, starting zones, small racial bonuses, and a class, how you fight, what your role is in groups.
Can you continue filling some of the gaps?
What is World of Warcraft?
World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world.
Like it's a world that you can live in with real other people, and everybody's kind of living out their fantasy.
Chris Metson, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft, and really like Alan Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard, calls Chris the heart and soul of Blizzard.
And it's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game, you're making Chris's imagination at some point.
And Chris famously said the lead character of World of Warcraft is the world.
And I always believed that.
So you're trying to create this place that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable and gorgeous.
And, you know, it should feel massive.
And it really is.
It's, you know, can take a half an hour to get from one end of the world to the other.
Um, but it's this world you're living in.
Uh, the world is divided into two warring factions: there's the horde and the alliance.
And that was a very important, very controversial decision that was made by Alan Adham, was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.
And in the early days, there was a really strong division.
Strong division.
Like, yeah.
You pick a side and then you hang around with only people your kind.
Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you.
Like the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their horde tattoo, like that's epic.
It's like, it's become who they are.
Like if you were to say, like, hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me.
We're alliance on Tichondreas.
You'd be like, dude, alliance.
Like, okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore.
But the Horde Alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed race.
They had all the races kind of like WoW did, but they could all group with each other.
And Pardu and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision Alan was making.
And we argued, Alan, Rob, Bob Fitch, and I would have lunch every single day.
And we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW.
Rob wasn't even on WoW at that time.
He was finishing Warcraft 3.
And we would fight over the Horde Alliance split, if it was a good idea or not.
And Alan had, he came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.
And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions.
And he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team.
You weren't a loner in the world.
And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side.
And Rob and I just argued and argued against it.
And then sometime before beta, Alan retired.
He went on to run a hedge fund of all things, like got super into poker, got super into finance, left, and retires like, I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kind of nuts.
And Rob takes over as lead designer in Alan's stead.
And to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was go, speaking to what we were speaking about earlier, he said, Alan's a smart guy.
The fact that he was fighting so hard for Horde Alliance, we got to do it.
And Rob and I sort of changed our point of view and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in.
And so, you know, the early days of WoW was, it was a great team.
It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to.
You know, we had Mark Kern running the team.
Shane DeBiri was, you know, legendary Blizzard developer.
Bill Petrus was the art director.
And then we had Metzen, who was sort of like, Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be.
I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother.
And then there were a lot of us who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types.
Like, for example, the guys building the dungeons, they hired out of the Quake community.
And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO designer on the staff at that time, it was, you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers.
They started building Quake dungeons as like Quake levels as the dungeons.
At one point, WoW was even made in QE Radiant, which was the Quake engine.
And then they later, you know, retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine.
So we were like this hodgepodge, like the bad news bears is how I would describe the WoW team of this mix of veterans and then people like me.
Like, I'm just some fucking idiot, you know, who played a lot of EverQuest.
And I end up as EverQuests.
Yeah, like, okay, we're going to design World of Warcraft now.
And I've said this later with hindsight.
I think a huge part of WoW's success, especially with the early WoW team, Team 2 in its earliest formation, was that we didn't know what we were doing.
You kind of like it's that Titan was the example for me.
Titan was the attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft at Blizzard, and we failed horribly.
And we had the best of the best on that team.
And it's because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.
World of Warcraft was a bunch of people, like a very successful, sure-of-itself company who had made StarCraft, Diablo, Warcraft with a bunch of Yehoos, basically, who was like, yeah, we can compete with Sony Online.
At the time, they were making EverQuest II.
If we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced, and EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest II.
It wasn't, oh, cool, World of Warcraft.
It was EQ2 was going to take, you know, the chalice and run with it.
And then, of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies.
And they had a brilliant designer on that, a guy named Raf Coster, who had come from that Ultima Online.
And he's just a really smart game designer.
If you can ever watch one of his lectures, like he lectured a lot at GDC, and we're like, oh my God, they're making EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies.
And they have the Star Wars intellectual property.
We're fucked.
Like, how are we going to compete?
And everybody had seen the success of EQ, EverQuest, and everybody was going to make an MMO.
And it was just a question of who was going to win.
So you're feeling this immense pressure.
You have this small team of just this hodgepodge of this unlikely team that kind of looks fast forward into Overwatch, the heroes in Overwatch, but working extremely hard.
You told me about crazy, crazy work hours and not because you were forced to, but because you wanted to, because your heart was in it, because you're like, this is everything.
Like you loved it.
Yeah, the games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime.
It's just called crunch.
Like, do you crunch or not?
These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon.
If we were to work overtime, somebody write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime.
Back then, we worked insane, and I mean insane hours.
The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours.
That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft 3.
This was in my, I think, War 3 shipped on July 3rd, 2002.
So this would have been like late June, early July, probably late June.
And I had nothing to do with War 3.
I should just say that.
Like in the credits, I'm additional help or additional testing or something like that.
When I showed up in May of 2002, it was all hands on deck World of Warcraft for E3.
We got through E3 and then all hands on deck, the whole company, get War 3 out the door.
For shipping Warcraft 3.
For shipping Warcraft 3.
And because I had not been involved with the game at all, and I was a brand new, wet behind the ears game designer, they're like, you're just going to help test whatever we tell you to test.
So we're trying to gold master, and there's a crash that happens rarely.
If you run one of the cinematics, like you have to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels, and then there was a crash that happened.
And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it.
And then they needed somebody to just over and over again, I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug.
And I sat there for 30 hours and just watched cinematic for 30 hours straight.
And it was the funniest thing.
Like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave at the, which was a trickle out.
Like everybody kind of trickles out like at different hours.
You know, the family guys go much earlier than the single guys.
And then watching everybody show up again the next morning and they're all like dressed different and they look all refreshed.
And I'm just like in the same position, you know, like eyes are beat red.
To the Sound Drago, the cinematic.
Yeah.
But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched.
The date slipped.
So you do this thing.
I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, We're going to crunch early so we don't have to crunch later in the project.
And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us.
Like I really genuinely believe that he believed in that.
But with games, anything can happen.
And they're just, we slip uncontrollably all the time.
And we slipped and it sort of created just this death march, endless death march that like to this day, members of the WoW team will remember like Newport Rib.
If I say that, they'll have like twitches because like they would cater the dinner.
They'd bring it in at like six or seven at night.
And everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express.
It was like the worst diet ever.
I actually like Newport Rib, no shade on them, but you can only eat so much of it.
And the carpets are stained and like dudes are falling asleep on the couches.
Crunch and Newport Rib00:03:33
And it was an unhealthy work environment.
It gets pinned on because at a lot of places it is executive driven and it is mandated from the top.
But the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself.
I just wanted to.
I remember, you know, coming in on Memorial Day, like with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day and working through Christmas.
And those were things I wanted to do.
I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.
Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because, yeah, okay, you could say that's unhealthy, but I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career, that have been at companies that do crunch for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love.
And it's some of the most fulfilling years of their life, months and years of their life.
And they also, it's not just fulfilling, they grow from it.
They learn from it.
And it, you know, and when they, especially when they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible it was.
Of course, when you're going through it, sometimes it's extremely difficult.
You don't know.
And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it's supposed to be a month or two.
And then it turns out to be a half a year.
And then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan type game where you never actually ship it.
And it's heartbreaking and the pain that's all, but then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was.
I think like my reflections on it many years later and having gone through like pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled, I think where crunch is problematic and people are good to be vocal about being opposed to it is when it's forced and unnecessary.
There's a lot of like, hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay, kind of, which I think is not necessary.
I don't think executives who take off and work 40-hour week should be telling anybody to stay late.
I think that's wrong and immoral.
But to me, as an individual, as long as I'm not telling other people to do it, my life's work is my passion.
And I want to do it as much as possible.
I find myself, I don't think I've ever worked less than 10 hours in a day.
Like that 10 hours is like a normalish day to me.
And I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it.
It brings me pleasure and fulfillment.
And all of that said from a place of caution, especially in this era when people are very touchy about it, I don't try to impose that on anybody else.
I don't want anybody to feel like they're obligated to, but please understand it's what makes me who I am, that work ethic.
I enjoy it.
I actually, some of my fondest memories are from those wow crunches.
And then looking back and reading some of these stories is pretty cool because me as a fan on the receiving end of some of those video games, you bring joy to millions of people.
The Joy of Work Ethic00:15:19
It's awesome.
Let me ask you about quests, but first, quick bath and break.
It's okay.
Yeah.
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Choose Wisely, my friends.
And now back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan.
Okay, we're back.
So I think it's fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest, consisted of maybe that's simplifying it a bit, but standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours.
You helped develop with WoW, I would say a revolutionary idea of quest-driven leveling, where there's a story-driven, quest-driven guide through the world.
And it so happens that as part of doing that, you're also leveling the character.
So the leveling is both fun and is the engine that drives the story that then also immerses you into the world and pulls you in more and more and more and more.
So take me through this process of developing that idea of quest driven design.
Sure.
Yeah.
There were actually a lot of people involved in it and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways.
Alan Adham was the lead designer on WoW when we first sort of decided we were going to have a quest-based game.
We used to joke that like EverQuest barely had any quests in it.
Yeah.
It did have quests.
They just, they weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way.
You kind of had to seek them out on a website.
And Alan knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of World of Warcraft.
And so he hired me.
That was my entry-level position at Blizzard.
And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagel, which was hilarious to me because Pat was the, he had this funny title of HR and facilities at Blizzard because it was such a small company.
So like if you sent an application in, Pat would deal with the application or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it.
And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat.
And then on my first day, they put Pat and I in an office together.
And he's like, yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer.
And so Pat and he was the most wonderful guy.
We had so much fun.
So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system.
It was Alan's idea to have it in the first place.
And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all.
And the idea was at first, we actually on a whiteboard in Alan's office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date.
And EverQuest had had, you know, I think four or three expansions at that point in time.
And we're like, wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has.
It's going to be a lot of quests.
And it's kind of up to me and Pat to do it all.
And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number.
And Pat and I started working on like the design of the system and how it would interact.
And Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface, you know, like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that.
And we split up the world into like two zones.
He was going to take Elwyn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans.
And I was going to take Westvall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwyn for the humans.
Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen.
And those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions.
Chris is like artist, storyteller, world builder, extraordinaire.
And he'd sort of describe what he wanted going on in those zones.
You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas.
So we finished Elwyn and Westfall, and we did like a team play test.
And our assumption was because the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up.
It was a level-based game.
You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit.
And so the way people played EverQuest is they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you'd usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find.
So like fast respawn, kind of easy things to kill.
And that's how you would progress through EverQuest.
And I remember Alan kind of telling us, like, hey, the quests, when Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures are.
You'll do a quest, and then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards.
And that's how he imagined it would work.
So we kind of set up the world that way.
You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwyn.
I do a dozen, 20 quests in Westfall.
And we do this team playtest.
And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, etc.
And they play World of Warcraft.
I think we played for like an hour or two, and we only did Elwyn Forest.
And the overwhelming feedback from our team, and these are people who really didn't play EverQuest.
They're like, my God, Pat, that was horrible.
I ran out of quests like right away.
And we're like, wait a second, you expect to just have quests just keep going.
And they're like, yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way.
And we kind of had an oh shit moment right after that Elwyn Forest playtest where we realized like we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were going to need and we changed.
We developed this philosophy.
That's kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general.
At this point I've heard it outside of Blizzard other people in the industry which is, you design it along the path of least resistance.
So basically what that means like in EverQuest, the path of least resistance, if you wanted your character to hit max level is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which to some people think is very boring.
To me I would do that for eight hours because I think that's fun.
But we decided in World Of Warcraft we said, why don't we make the path of least resistance?
So in this case, the way to get the best experience the fastest, not to be killing creatures in one place, but we'll overload the experience into the quests themselves and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything.
It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines.
It sort of did a lot for the game and I think it was like a fundamental change in the genre.
Like, if you look at the things that Everquest was very popular and very successful and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players and WOW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players and I think the fundamental difference there was that WOW allowed you to play as a single player, And what makes an MMO,
massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there.
And they're so important, or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead.
But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.
And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of the game design, the game design way of describing it is directed gameplay.
And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay.
Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you'll have those moments where they'll be like, you'll come up to a log and press triangle to duck or else or whatever the duck button is.
Left stick to duck to go under.
And that's like the ultimate in directed gameplay.
Like they're telling you exactly what to do.
On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate it.
The ones who hate it are like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
Like you dropped me in this world.
I'm supposed to dig or something.
And that's the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they're going to cycle out.
Not all players need it.
And what WoW did that it doesn't seem like an innovation.
It doesn't seem like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional, but really wasn't.
I mean, I think it's absolutely revolutionary.
It basically changed gaming.
It changed the way we see games.
And it was so successful in part because it became a mechanism by which you could spend hundreds of hours, thousands of hours in the game.
I mean, it's kind of a like obviously, it's one of those, all these great ideas are always like this, right?
In retrospect, you're like, well, obviously, if you make the path of least resistance quest-driven gameplay, then it's going to be the reason that most people play.
But it is true that I'm with you.
And I both like the quests and cow level.
Yeah.
I guess you have to design for everybody.
That's the tricky thing.
Like, how do you fine-tune this?
If you think of it as a loop of like accept quest, kill 10 rats, turning quest, ding, level up, that loop.
Like, how do you fine-tune that so it's maximum fun or fun for the maximum number of people?
How difficult is that?
It's extremely difficult.
And not everybody's good at doing that.
We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick.
So we're all different types of gamers.
But if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was or the type of gamer I want you to think I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.
By playing lots of games, you cannot be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit out of as much as you can and understanding on a deep level.
And the weirdest part about it is you're not just looking for the greatest hits.
You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game.
And also, like a lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong or lacked the correct interface or they didn't put the right visceral polish on it.
There's an executional aspect to all of it.
When I'm playing, I'm not only like thinking about what makes this fun, I'm thinking about what makes this not fun, but I'm also watching everyone around me.
My wife plays games, my kids play games, and understanding like, well, what do they do?
And how are they different to me?
Why are they finding enjoyment in this?
Why are they not?
What's frustrating?
What did they miss?
And being raw honest with exactly what you're seeing.
I mean, if I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am, why do I enjoy the cow level?
And why above that, why do I enjoy loot?
Why is loot so fun?
Like what, what is what is it about opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff?
I mean, that might be like at the core of what I enjoy about gaming.
That and walking around a beautiful world with nice music.
As a game designer, I'm at best a quack psychologist.
You know, we can motivate you to do some weird things.
The two driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic.
And all of us at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, we can shift from being intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated.
Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is too simplistic.
Like, for example, on the loot boxes of Overwatch, there is a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a business person or whatever, like not a commercial person.
But beyond that, we also had a really good team who said the visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes, the graphics, like the way things spill out and animate, all of that is as satisfying as well.
And you're trying to, like, there's the lizard brain part of it of like, how does it, like, I see chest.
I know I'm going to, it's going to feel good.
It's going to feel good.
And then there's the spreadsheety part of it of what does it have?
Is it an upgrade?
And I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things, you know, tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic.
Shared Gaming Experiences00:10:01
There's like when I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction.
And, you know, these are just like basic things like plot and character development and setting and theme and whatever.
And there's no like textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet.
But I think about like elements of fun.
What are the things that create fun for players?
And they're not the same.
Like it, it really, every human being is different.
Like progression is fun.
Sense of progression that I'm investing.
I'm putting an investment into this game.
And then the game is recognizing my investment.
Things like leveling, things like the amount of gold you have.
Those are all investment based.
There's mastery.
There's just pure raw skill.
Creativity is one.
And hand in hand with creativity is customization.
And some of those can be aesthetic.
Look at my customized character, and I have the black curly hair, and I put an earring in my character, and I'm customizing in that way.
The other is customizing my build.
I'm going to come up with the Whirlwind barbarian, and I'm the first to do it.
These are all elements of fun that designers can tap into, and in fact, are frequently tapping into, but they're never defined anywhere.
And I find that players drift.
Like, I'm the type of player who's not really loot-motivated.
I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer.
And often, that takes me on the detour of being loot-motivated because there might be a dragon or a demon somewhere that I can't beat without this level of armor and sword.
So now I'm loot-motivated for some period of time to get back to being content-motivated.
Or if I'm having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look at the skills and abilities that my character's using.
And I have to go into creativity mode.
Oh, he has that one AE where he, Area of Effect, where he puts a curse on me.
And, you know, if I had this counter ability to the curse, I could beat the boss to get the loot to get to the next boss.
These are all cycles that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.
And ultimately, enjoying and discovering what the world gives you has to offer to you.
And you have a lot of hats as a gamer.
So you love the RPG MMORPG world, but you're also a big shooter guy.
Can you explain to me what fun in a shooter context is?
We'll talk about Overwatch as a specific kind of fun, but you're also a huge fan of the ultra-realistic shooters, Call of Duty.
What is the definition of fun there?
There's a lot of skill and mastery.
Off-the-cuff, flippant comment would be clicking heads.
You know, I'm just trying to click heads.
Okay.
There's an intimacy also to the first-person camera.
And now, not all shooters are first person.
There is a large trend these days to third person.
I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened that third-person shooter door.
And you're seeing games like Ark Raiders or third person.
But to me, nothing is as pure as first person.
Like you're literally living in the world as that being.
You can look at your hands.
And it's that pure visceral test of skill: can you click on the thing fast enough?
And when it's PvP-based, you know that's coming at you.
Could you lay out for people who don't necessarily know what PvP and PVE is and single-player, multiplayer, massively online multiplayer?
So PvP is player versus player.
So that means a combative, you know, if Lex and I are up against each other, we're attacking each other.
We call that PvP.
You can get killed by another player.
Player versus environment is anytime you're shooting computer controlled opponents.
So if it's a game about dragons, the dragon is the E, the environment in PvE.
And we should say that PvP and PVE, the P might be multiple players.
It could be five versus five, six versus six for PvP.
And for PVE, it could be like raids where it's multiple people, large groups of people going against the AI.
Yep.
So single player, that's a game that you play totally by yourself.
Like you don't play with anybody else.
You can't play with anybody else.
It's not networked to play with other people.
For example, I'm playing a game called Story of Seasons right now on the Switch, which I just play by myself.
I have my farm.
There's a town.
I'm meeting people in the town and no one can come and join me and interact with that.
So it's a very controlled experience.
Single player games are very difficult or they can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create.
Like if you think of a game like Uncharted or Last of Us, that's made by Naughty Dog.
Like those are kind of the preeminent best single player games you could talk about.
They're very handcrafted.
Every experience is made just for you.
One up from that is what I call co-op.
And these terms become interchangeable.
So I'm using some semantics here.
But co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together, but we're sharing an exact same experience very intentionally.
And it's me sharing that experience only with other people that I know.
So a great example of a cooperative game, maybe one of the best of all times, was Left 4 Dead, which is a game where you and three other people go in and you fight like hordes of zombies and you try to progress through to the end safe room.
It's a very cooperative experience.
A game like Diablo 4, you can play cooperatively with other people.
Now, one up from that is multiplayer.
And that's when you're engaging with strangers who are in the same world that you might not have the same cooperative goals as.
You might have very opposed goals to them.
You might PvP them, or they might just be random strangers that you pass in a town or city and never see again.
And then massively multiplayer, which is what the MMO online sort of stands for, massively multiplayer online game.
That's when you're breaking into thousands of players.
And the world's become really, really big at that point.
And by the way, we should say that the co-op could be remote connection, but there's also, what would you call that?
Couch co-op where you have two people.
Some games really design well for the experience of two humans sitting together and playing the game together, which is a really tricky thing to design for.
But if it's done well, it's a really fulfilling experience.
Like with a friend, with a loved one, you can play a game together.
And Diablo 4, I should say, is an example of a game that does that really well.
They do couch co-op.
Like two people can play Diablo sitting together.
And there's a real intimate experience in that.
Couch co-it's funny because it actually like predates the couch even.
Some of those old arcade games would have two joysticks on them and then you could play with somebody else.
Or there's famous game Gauntlet had four joysticks and four people playing together.
And then anybody who grew up in that early console era, like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one.
We would sit and we play NHL 93 on the couch.
And anybody who lost, you'd lose the controller.
And you could play that with up to four people playing.
Or I remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal Kombat.
And we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis.
And it was the house rules were, you know, whoever lost.
So whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddy's apartment and there's five people there, you're constantly cycling everybody in and out.
But there's just a magic to multiplayer of engaging and sharing in the experience with other people.
That's why I've always, I've never made a single player game.
I have great admiration for them.
I don't know if I could do it.
The challenge, the reason I love multiplayer so much, the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game, it's like, imagine if you were going to be a movie director and you were going to have all these actors and set designers and props and writers and scripts and all of this stuff.
Emotional Player Stories00:04:47
And your goal was to get a certain movie made.
But we're going to ask you, the director, to just, you're going to leave the room.
You can set it all up ahead of time.
And then you're not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it.
And now you need the actors to have an experience.
And it's just kind of the wildest, funnest experiment.
From a designer-creator perspective, because you don't know what the players will create.
So that's fun to see.
You lay out the chessboard, you lay out the world, and then you get to watch what they create together.
That's true.
I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games.
And that really hurts me because, like, I actually love story in games.
And I counter that on the anti-shitty story guy.
And what I mean by that is, like, A, the most magical stories that I've ever heard come out of video games are player stories about, you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion and then I met him in real life.
Like, that's better than any video game writing that I've heard in a long while.
The player story is so much more interesting.
You know, Lex, why do you like the cow level so much?
And tell me about some goofy time, like a loot goblin drew you into the most danger, but there was another player there.
And then, you know, like, those are the stories that I think are more interesting from games.
There are some exceptional writers in video games and some exceptional games at Story.
You know, I've mentioned Naughty Dog.
Like, they're kind of on another level.
But Valve has amazing writing.
The writing behind Half-Life 2, Mark Laidlaw, the writing behind Portal and Portal 2.
I think it was Eric Wolpa, who's hilarious, just amazing.
And Rockstar.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.
And that's a game where you can see the expertise and mastery of the game design and the narrative design.
And the fact that you can have those player stories of just the goofy shit.
Like I remember because the controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who's playing on console.
Like, I always get confused about like taking out my gun and putting it away, and what's you know, the L1 and L2.
Like, as a PC gamer, I'm just like, let me bind this stuff to where I want it.
And so, like, you know, a guy in town rides by and he's like, howdy, partner.
And I go to like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, hey, what's up back?
And I just whip out my saw-off shotgun and like blow his fucking head off.
And then the whole town is like, suddenly I'm like under, I'm wanted, and I'm being chased.
And then there's a train that like takes out the posse.
And it's like those stories.
And the fact that Red Dead can have, you know, this like touching, heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his journey, but you can also have, you know, the player story of blowing off the poor guy.
That's a combination.
Yeah.
And then Rockstar does a really good job with, you know, even in Grand Theft Auto with the radio, it could be kind of a side aspect of the game.
That great writing there can create, help create the world with humor, with color, with depth, with heartbreak, all that kind of stuff.
There was a moment in Red Dead where it there's the Daniel Lenois song.
That's the way it is.
I just, I love Daniel Lenois.
So the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and like was able to get that song out of him.
And there's this moment where you're like riding back and they start that song.
And everything up to then had been gorgeous, like more of a score.
There's Woody Jackson, who's like a really amazing game composer.
He had done the score for that.
And so nothing had been like lyrical with words.
And then they played the Daniel Lenoir song and there's like the quotes are coming back from like Dutch and Arthur Morgan.
Designing the World00:14:58
And I'm just like, God damn, this is like, this is art.
You know, this is like, I know it's supposed to be entertainment.
I know it's a business, but the top of the pyramid is art.
And it just hit me emotionally.
Yeah, there's certain games where, you know, I mean, that moment, and you just imagine the number of people who shed a tear during that moment.
And that's just a reflection of how much you're invested into this world into these characters.
That's a beautiful thing.
I have to ask you about this image that you sent me.
It's super cool.
So yeah, I would love it if we could nerd out about it a little bit.
The zone flow for the original World of Warcraft.
There's a bunch of zones.
It'd be awesome if you kind of talk through how this world is built.
Take me to that time when you're designing this before anyone else got a chance to play it.
All wow stuff.
It would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world.
And, you know, it's so fun hanging out with Chris because we had whiteboards all over the place.
And, you know, hey, Chris, we should make Eastern Kingdoms.
What do you think it should be?
And he would just tell you the story of each of these as he's just drawing.
And Chris is a really talented artist.
So the map would be gorgeous.
I have lots of like photographs of Chris maps that he would just kind of whiteboard up.
He's like, you know, here's the Dwarven Lands.
There's wetlands with Cosmodon up there.
And that's where this, you know, tribe of dwarves were from.
And then the, you know, humans are going to be down with Elwyn Forest.
And in Westfall, there's, you know, this group called the Defias Brotherhood.
And they have a place called Deadminds.
So I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit.
Like as a game designer, you want to capture the experience that's in people's heads.
So, like, take Burning Steps, for example, supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
That doesn't feel like where you want to start.
It feels like where you want to end.
So, you kind of work the world flow in a way that puts that at the end.
But there was also kind of some magic to the original starting areas where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between the dwarf hometown was called Ironforge.
The human hometown was called Stormwind.
And we allowed you to fly for free.
So, like, these little newbies who were, you know, level five or something, if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I'm like, oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come.
You know, I'll come to Ironforge and we'll hook up and I'll just fly out to you, which is the magic of World of Warcraft.
You have to fly over Burning Steps and Searing Gorge, and you look down and you're like, holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous.
And it plants that seed of things to come.
So you've designed some incredible quests.
Is there any that stand out that you're proud of, ashamed of?
I mean, you are famously have designed the Green Hills of Stranglethorne quest.
One of the most infamous quests in the history of WoW, of gaming, where you had to collect a bunch of pages.
Yeah.
Green Hills of Stranglethorne.
Maybe can you comment on that one or any quest that you just springs to mind?
Green Hills of Stranglethorne holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst WoW players back in the day, it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests.
But it holds a really special place in my heart.
First of all, it's one of the few times that I just like wrote a short story that's actually in the game.
It's me paying homage to Hemingway.
And the guy who gives you the quest, his name is Hemet Nessingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway.
There's another quest giver there that's Kerouac's name, also mixed up.
And then it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever, but is actually a dip shit.
That's the Green Hills of Stranglethorne, like summed up.
So I wrote the story over, it was, I think, winter break, like everybody was gone.
And I just was so happy to be in the office.
You know, I'm at Blizzard by myself writing late at night.
And the whole idea, and this is, this is very much what I call ant farm designer, which is bad, which is, you know, you're the game designer who's playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they're going to do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer.
But I hadn't learned that yet.
And there's a really great famous Sid Meier quote where he says there's three types of fun.
Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.
And we catch ourselves.
We're like, you know, we got to be really careful.
It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us.
So, this Green Hills of Stranglethorne quest was like an ant farm design.
I'm going to write this honestly, probably pretty shitty story.
I haven't read it since 2003, so God only knows if it's any good.
But I wrote the story and then I divided it up into all of these different pages.
And the quest giver, Hemmett Nessingwary, wants you to put together like the stories: he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorne Vale.
And some, when you're doing quest design, you're really thinking about the player flow and you're directing them from quest giver hubs out into these destinations, and you want them to do all the destinations.
But sometimes we would do these bridging quests where you could do anything in the zone, and it sort of had this overlap.
And so, the pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorne could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorne Vale.
And it was kind of like that McDonald's Monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not going to win.
But where I really went south, I don't think the idea in a vacuum is horrible.
But where this really fell apart was the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't set up.
Like the pages didn't stack, there wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in.
So players had very limited bag space.
And as they're fighting in Stranglethorne Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all of these pages.
And they only needed so many.
Like, you might get unlucky and you have like three page fives that are just junk in your inventory.
And I might have like eight page sixes.
And then everybody, and this was the goal, like the designer trying to puppeteer everybody.
Everybody in Stranglethorne chat is like, hey, I'm looking for a page six.
Anyone got a page three?
And that was like my fantasy as a designer: like, and then they're going to be social and meet each other, and players are going to be appreciative for each other.
But really, all everybody did was just no, eventually, no one did the quest, they just were super annoyed where they went to the auction house.
So the quest is famous in that it was so aggravating and annoying.
Um, and it just became a way, it not only became a way for me to learn from my mistakes, but because I was very open with the fact that I didn't think it was good and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work.
Like it's always easier if you're the first one to go out and say, Hey, guys, I think I made one of the shittiest quests in the game, and here's why.
And then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it.
I mean, again, you continue to speak with so much humility, but WoW turned out to be one of the biggest games of all time, both in terms of popularity, how many players play it, revenue, and critical acclaim.
And then you rose to become a game director of WoW, helping release Wrath of the Lich King, which by many is considered to be the greatest expansion.
I mean, there's a million questions I can ask here, but maybe this is also a good place to ask about the famous Blizzard polish.
So, Blizzard as a company has historically, and you were certainly a big part of that, delivered these games that were just Got so many pieces right and well functioning and well coordinated and just feel finished in a way that a lot of other games don't get right.
So, what does it take to take this gigantic game, this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people, and deliver it in a way where it's like it all just works to have a level of polish is like a studio-wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody.
Like, no one can be satisfied with a bug.
Every game is going to have bugs, and Blizzard games have bugs.
It's a question of how quickly do you fix them and with what urgency.
And as players ourselves, if we're playing as much as anybody else, we're going to be motivated to fix the bugs.
There are some really tactical aspects to it, too.
The quality assurance department at Blizzard is the best in the industry.
Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard, they're passionate gamers.
Many of them want to be developers themselves.
And they're not just doing it for a job.
They do it because they fucking love the game.
And the relationship we tried to develop between us on the development teams and QA was extremely tight.
And whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA members up with the development team as possible.
Depending on the logistics of, you know, in the early days, we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us.
We were very fortunate on the Overwatch team to have a large amount of QA sitting with us.
And then developing that relationship, you know, in the early days, there were these fears of like, well, QA can't talk to the developers and trying to shatter that because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out, you would just say to them, like, hey, dude, just message me anytime.
Here's my home number.
Like, call me, if there's a bug, if you think we're going to get raked over the coals on this, you got to speak up.
I don't care what the chain of command is.
Like, we got to fix this thing.
So, QA was amazing.
I mean, so can you speak to QA quality assurance at the peak of the craft?
What does it entail?
Like, you're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out particular slices of that experience that can be improved.
Yeah, people simplify the role by just, oh, these guys just get to play games all day.
And then, like, let us know if there's a bug.
They are so systematic in the way they test stuff.
They come up with these plans that are actually amazing of like who's going to test what.
There's a lot of regression testing that goes on.
Within QA, there also be compatibility testing.
The Blizzard compatibility department was amazing.
Like, they had every card, every machine, every configuration, and they would roll through to make sure there wasn't some quirk that was going to come up on some video card or some motherboard that you weren't expecting.
But it was all very systematic.
It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game.
And then, as a developer interacting with QA, you would find that there were certain specialists.
Whether, like, for example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players that like we all were shooter players when we were making Overwatch, but I'm not like esports level shooter player.
I'm like, you know, Gen X or remember Doom, how good I was type of shooter player.
But we had, you know, a couple of these QA specialists who like they could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay, you know, and then you sit that person with an engineer and say, hey, I think there's some input lag here.
That's amazing.
And sure enough, they'd be right.
But you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA or just even on like World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA and that they built out a full raid team to do the raids.
And then you're not only like looking for bugs, like, hey, the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just like sunk through the world and the game crashed, which would happen.
But like if you really value QA, you're asking them, what do you do?
What do you think?
You're, you know, like 10 million people are going to see this.
Your opinion, multiply it.
You know, it matters.
What do you think?
Hot Fixing at Speed00:03:04
You know, are you having fun?
Oh, yeah, this is cool.
This isn't cool.
So QA was important.
The other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to architect your game to be hot fixable.
And what a hot fix is, games, there's a couple ways to fix them.
The way most of us know, because all the software we have gets a patch, you know, you have to update it.
You have to download a new version of it.
Windows, you know, you get that annoying message, like there's a new version of Windows and takes, you know, a few minutes and you update it.
You know, obviously we patch our games and that's where we fix a lot of bugs.
But if you really want to run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hot fix the game on a dime.
And what a hot fix is, is a server patch that no one's client has to go down for.
It's because you're dealing with a huge number of players and you discover an issue and you want to respond to that issue really quickly.
Yeah, there's there's emergency issues like something's crashing.
Like the worst case scenario is anytime the server's crashing or an Overwatch, like a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero.
Like someone found an exploit and you have to disable a hero from the lineup.
You want to turn around that hot fix.
If you can in a half an hour get that hero back live, you might have somebody who only plays that hero.
And the only reason they're going to play Overwatch is because that hero is active.
You don't want to wait for patches and you want to hot fix as fast as you can.
And then also to improve the game quickly, to just even settle stuff too.
Players feel it.
Like they, that's where there's this idea of like the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel like any product, you know, your iPhone or Android or like any computer consumer product, you can feel when there are people who loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf.
And games have that as well, where you can feel the like heart and soul of the developer in the thing.
And some of that's like the joy and delight of like that there's a cow level, right?
That that's, you know, you can feel the humanity of the development team through that.
But another part of that is like, do they clean up their fucking yard?
You know, does this game work?
And it's not just the bugs and the crashes.
It's like when balance gets wacky and stupid and, you know, suddenly everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding and no one else will play anything else.
Three AM Customer Support00:15:15
You're like, we should probably fix that, you know?
Those were the days I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.
One-handed.
Yeah, it brought so much joy.
So a lot of people modern day think of you as Jeff from the Overwatch team.
My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team.
I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.
I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.
But y'all must have forgot you were the game director of WoW in an era when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world.
Just, you know, looking back, what wisdom can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming that changed gaming forever?
Where it's millions of people playing this video.
It was my first game I worked on.
And I joined it as this entry-level dude.
I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for 35K a year.
You know, that's what I was making.
And very shortly after WoW shipped, you know, Alan left his lead before the beta or like right around the beta.
And then Rob took over as the lead designer.
And then he left the team very shortly after WoW shipped to go start StarCraft 2.
And he put myself and Tom Chilton in charge.
Tom is a designer who he was a great partner of mine and a great leader.
And he actually came from Ultima Online.
And so I always looked up to Tom because he had a lot more experience than I did.
And this is like early 2005.
The world was on fire.
The servers were barely running.
WoW had taken off like gangbusters.
And they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW.
And at the time they promoted me, my title, I didn't even have a lead title.
My title was senior game designer.
And Tom and I were running the design of WoW at that time.
So I thought it was totally normal.
And I thought what we were experiencing with WoW was just normal for making a video game because it was the first video game that I had worked on.
I thought it was the funnest joyride because we were working on WoW.
Were still working insane hours, and then I'd get home, eat dinner and then me and my wife would log in and play WoW, you know, for four hours, and then I'd go in the next day and I'd work and it was just this.
My whole life was World Of Warcraft and I loved it.
Like I loved everything from, you know, the creative meetings with Chris Metson and just what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the simplest, dumbest design stuff that like we as game designers, like you, want to talk about, why a button is in the lower left versus lower right and what does that mean?
That's like two hours of discussion.
And is there a better way?
Like the 10,000 minutia problems were thrilling to me.
And then also the big disasters, like the big I had.
Uh, in the early days of WoW we didn't really have all the processes in place for like, how to deal with being a successful online game and I literally had GMs like game masters these are customer support guys calling my home phone at three in the morning.
Like I remember this, one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorne Vale and they figured out a way to exploit it and this GM calls me panicked.
It's three in the morning.
He's like I'm just spawning.
Uh, what did we call them?
Uh, guardians of Blizzard.
They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touched anything.
We used to have them when we were in the beta, like off in the distance of places players weren't supposed to get, in case they cheated their way there.
And this Gm is just spawning them all over Stranglethorne Vale because he's worried because the players are exploiting.
It's like three in the morning and i'm talking in hushed tones because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed.
I'm doing this because it was actually like before the cell phone days, when I actually had a landline.
But that's just how and I loved it.
I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutiae um, and I felt like through the running Wow Live, which was me and Tom together with an amazing team, we kind of learned how to be the WOW TEAM and putting wo in a box and shipping.
It was like only chapter one in the 12 chapter book essentially.
And that first, how to run the game, how to patch it, what type of content, how to deal with emergencies, what should our customer support be like?
I mean, we would debate, should we have a launcher or not.
You know, in the early days the only reason the launcher existed in Wo was to run anti-cheat on your machine and we had a moment where we figured, Figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher.
And it was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Moorheim.
He's like, You got to bring the launcher back, guys.
And we're like, Why?
He's like, There's no better way for us to talk to our players.
And I remember trying to hide the launcher.
And to this day, Mike was right.
Like, that launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had.
That's essentially what Battlenet has morphed into these days.
But all those decisions, and when it came time to make Burning Crusade, you know, at that point, Tom and I were leads.
We were full, they had actually promoted us.
There was, there were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard.
They were disenfranchised.
If you can believe it, like we just shipped World of Warcraft, and this whole group just walked out the door.
I was actually sitting, my desk faced Moorheim's office, and I watched them all go in and quit.
And they were the group that formed Carbine, which made the game Wild Star.
Ended up taking them 10 years to make.
And they were just really unhappy with World of Warcraft.
And they were unhappy with, I don't know what they were unhappy with.
They were unhappy enough to walk out the door right after we had shipped WoW.
That's incredible.
But what is it?
Just because they put their heart and soul in the game and they maybe get exhausted in a certain kind of way.
Yeah.
And I don't want to, it's not fair of me to speak on their behalf.
I think they were promised some compensation that they didn't immediately see.
I don't know if the game, like, here's the weird part when you make a game.
When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that's the best the game is ever going to be.
And then you work on it.
Like, you know, games I worked on take five years.
You know, Overwatch was two and a half, three years.
Every day you get close to ship, the imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality.
And you're always shipping this like greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere near matches the imagination of the inception of the idea.
So you become disenfranchised with the concept.
In some sense, you're shipping, you're constantly in a state of disappointment.
You're basically shipping a lesser thing than you've been dreaming about.
You're doing less and less and less, saying no and no and cutting and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's difficult, psychologically difficult, but nevertheless, the result when you zoom out is one of the greatest games of all time that millions of people played for thousands of hours.
It's just what did it did.
You ever have an experience, a realization how huge WoW was in terms of not like statistics on the server and so on, but the cultural impact it had.
The first time was the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005.
So when WoW shipped, and this is so weird to tell people, but on the team, not everyone, but a lot of us were very demoralized after WoW shipped.
There were all sorts of issues with the servers because the game did way more successful than we expected it to do.
And the server load was just nuts.
Like we were just, we were doing our best to hire database programmers, you know, because we just didn't know how to deal with the sheer scope of the game.
But when you're an individual, like, and at that time, like I mentioned, there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard.
They went and formed a couple notable studios.
One was Carbine.
The other was Red 5.
And we lost like kind of our core people.
Like when Red 5 started, that was our team leader.
That was Mark Kern and our art director, Bill Petrus.
They quit.
When Carbine started, it was, I think, all of our animators and some of our best programmers.
And it's really demoralizing when you lose team members like that.
But then we were also underwater.
Like the servers aren't running.
We're not able to keep up with demand.
And we had to start putting patches out.
And now we're making patches.
Like for a while, we had one animator who stuck around.
And then eventually he left also.
But you're doing like, okay, we got to now do a patch without an animator.
A lot of our art team was gone at that point.
And you're trying to keep the ship afloat.
And the morale was just in the shitter.
Like everybody felt very down on Team Two, the WoW team was called Team Two.
And that we had somehow failed.
And during that time, there was this idea to do BlizzCon.
And the way that started was EverQuest had done these like meetups because they knew it was like a big guild social game and people would get together at like some hotel ballroom and you'd sit with your guild at like a banquet room table.
And to give credit where credit's due, I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become BlizzCon.
It was Pardo who said, Blizzard's bigger than that.
We're not just one game.
And I know everybody's focused on World of Warcraft right now.
We should do BlizzCon.
And at the time, we had a game called StarCraft Ghost was in development and that was getting ready to show.
And there was Frozen Throne, which was the expansion to Warcraft 3.
But like, we knew we were going to make StarCraft 2.
And then there was a lot of motion happening with Blizzard North, which is a whole separate story.
But there was like, hey, we could really do a cool show.
That's this BlizzCon thing.
And at first, we kind of announced it and it just was crickets.
You know, when you're like excited about something, you're like, man, everybody's going to love, like, we're doing BlizzCon.
Everybody's kind of like crickets.
What's BlizzCon?
Who cares?
And we're idiots.
We're reading the forums and the forums are just flaming us all the time.
Like, there's lag on this server and can't log into that server.
And that's, that was our perspective of what was happening.
And then, like I said, give Mike Morheim credit where credit's due.
He kept us, he kept us committed to that launcher.
And they put the BlizCon tickets on the launcher, which they hadn't done before.
It was on the website.
And so everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this, like, hey, we're doing BlizzCon in Anaheim.
Do you want to come?
Sold out instant, like instantly sold out.
And when I showed up at that show, it one of the most emotional things in my life, it was nothing but an outpouring of love.
And up until that point, your perception was because you're just reading online.
And it was the perception is such hatred because people who are passionate online, they express themselves in the harshest ways because it gets attention.
You know, that's the lesson I should have learned from my early days.
And it's such an unfortunate thing because then you met these people in person and they loved World of Warcraft.
And all they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft.
And it's incredible.
It's a fascinating thing to me about human nature, and it's absolutely true.
And I wish it was a thing that could be solved.
But then again, maybe not.
Maybe that's just the way it is.
But in person, all of the people that are passionate about a particular topic and whatever that topic is, it could be games, it could be the conferences, technical conferences.
They're all mostly full of love.
And just the way they talk about stuff, they nerd out.
Even the disagreements are drenched in this respect and appreciation and love for the game, for the topic.
And online, you're right.
Vulnerability Online00:09:05
I don't know if it's because of popularity or clicks or so on, but it's just the way of speaking on the internet is more mockery and cynical.
If you say, I love this thing, here's an apple.
I love apples.
I love bananas.
I love X, whatever.
You just get made fun of.
Yeah.
And then, so what the lesson you learn from that is, well, I'm just not going to speak up when I love something.
I'm going to instead speak up when I, maybe how much I hate another thing that's similar to it, or maybe join in when we're making fun of a particular quirky thing, about don't you hate it when bananas are too ripe or too versus, like not saying the calling out the elephant in the room is, we're all gathered here today because we love the thing.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's an aspect of the internet that I think is jarring to a lot of people, depending on the game.
But if you go to Discord or Reddit or so on, in the communities that love a particular video game, there's a.
If you're not used to it and I don't often go so when I go, it's like wow, there's a lot of like pretty intense kind of mockery and derision and so on, but get used to it pretty quick and you understand it.
Just, I wish there was more love.
I feel bad because I played a role in the earliest development of some of that online culture.
It really was social media before it was called social media.
Um, you know, I ran I, I actually I had this reputation for being edgier than I really was.
Um, there were a couple notable posts that survived 30 Years that people like to look back on, but they don't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill.
And that's unfortunate.
I think a lot as a game designer about the design of social media.
And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works.
And that's how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.
And usually, unfortunately, it's more in the negative direction than the positive direction.
You know, if I say that's that's a pretty nice mug, I've seen nicer, but I like this one.
No one's interested in that.
I have to either love this thing or better, this thing's a crime against humanity in some way.
And it's very self-reinforcing, and everybody sort of feeds into it.
And especially when you're young, I got to see this kind of interesting thing.
So I was at, I spent, as we were talking about here from Pasadena.
I've been spending a lot of time in Caltech and working on robots.
And we get to see students come in from high school, undergraduates, come in and like a tour, hang out with the robots and middle school also.
And the interesting thing you see, the younger they are, the more prevalent this effect, which is all of them are kind of afraid to show that they think a thing is awesome.
They're all, you could just feel they're checking, is it okay?
Yeah.
So they're, they're kind of like, the default mode is whatever, this, everything is stupid.
This is stupid, you know, that, because that's the safe place to be.
It's a real act of vulnerability.
I would say it's an act of courage, especially for a young person to be like, holy shit, that's awesome.
Like, I'm going to, if I think this is awesome, I'm going to be the nerd.
I'm going to take the risk and be made fun of for saying, I love this.
In that case, I love this robot.
So that's an actual psychological effect that also young people are dealing with in person also.
So I think I just want to say for young people listening to this, be vulnerable, be courageous, and say you love a thing if you love a thing and do more of that on the internet.
I think people make up the internet, people build the internet, and young people more than anybody else to find the future of the internet.
So put more love out there in the world.
If you love a video game, if you love Overwatch, say you love it.
I couldn't agree more.
You know, as somebody who's taken a lot of heat online, like any game developer, you just get destroyed doing what you do.
You must get destroyed, you know.
And it doesn't matter.
You get a hundred compliments.
It's the one, you know, you, and you're, you're supposed to read it and supposed to be fine with it and have it not affect you.
It'll stay with you for years.
You know, I have those.
And I think of it like the cheesy, the cheesy way I think about it is like, is there some kind of social Darwinism going on?
And my big worry is that there are creators like now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you know, make online videos, whatever, whatever creator means to you, make games.
Now, part of the skill set is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen.
And I, I make up these scenarios in my head of like, would Van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on like how many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime or in a week.
Like how many influences could comment on his music directly to him versus like, if I want to insult Brad Pitt right now, I can just go on 10 different devices and do it.
And it's like that level of access is very dangerous.
And I worry that there is a whole group of people who's receding from us that will never see the brilliance and they're being shut out by the negativity.
There's a very real example was Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds, who was the game director of Diablo 3.
And he took so much heat, it just affected him to the point where he essentially retired from making games and went and, you know, wrote novels.
I was very happy for him because, you know, I'm glad he found his place.
And I think he's getting back into making games now.
But we lost, we essentially, like, think how many people loved Diablo 3 and played the shit out of Diablo 3.
And Jay is one of the people you have to thank for that.
And yet that community basically removed him from making games for like 10, 15 years.
And it feels criminal to me.
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is a call to action.
Again, people out there support, support, especially young creators, support them.
They need it.
Like, you think negativity has no cost, but it does.
You're robbing the world of some of the great creations.
And also allow creators to suck and to improve.
Because that's what the process of creation is like is to take risks and take risks being vulnerable, being cringe.
So doing the thing that like the embarrassing failure where you're standing there in a silly clown outfit on stage dancing and nobody's laughing.
And comedians go through this all the time.
They talk about this all the time when they bomb, right?
The act just doesn't work.
And you have to go through that.
And you have to support the creators through that journey.
In order to have great things, we need to support those folks.
So after shipping WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, again, many consider it to be one of the great expansions for WoW.
Supporting Creators Through Failure00:14:53
You stepped down as WoW's game director and switched to developing Titan.
This epic huge game that promised to be the sort of the MMO to end all MMOs.
I mean, it's kind of a legendary vision for a game, right?
It's gigantic with a lot of, like you said, a brilliant team, a team that's now hardened and knows how to do a great game.
But it was canceled after seven years in development.
So, tell me what was the vision of the game and what happened.
Sure.
So, as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn't going to last forever.
WoW would be maybe successful for five years and eventually kind of age out.
And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game sort of waiting in the wings.
So, starting around, I want to say 2006, maybe 2005, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum.
And we were working on Burning Crusade.
Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of Titan development.
We didn't even really have a team then.
And I remember being like embroiled in Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings.
And Rob pulled a group, you know, from kind of across the company.
And we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going.
And eventually it started in earnest, like real development around 2007.
The first team members joined.
And it was a real ambitious project, including like building a new engine from scratch.
I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John LaFleur, who was just a stellar game programmer.
And the engine, which ultimately failed for Titan, ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him.
And the idea behind the game, it was going to take place in Future Earth.
And the players played as secret agents.
And by day, they all had day jobs.
And by night, they went off and did cool secret agent stuff.
And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but over-the-top abilities, like you would see in Overwatch, because that's where they came from.
And the by day stuff, we were going to let you run businesses.
We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, The Sims.
We had a brilliant game designer and game director named Matt Brown, who was the creative director on The Sims.
He came over.
And so we had this vision that there was going to be all this like daytime business house stuff.
You could build a house.
You could live in a neighborhood.
And beyond that, there was also a vision on the technical side, game design and technical side, that unlike World of Warcraft, which the modern day term for is that it's sharded.
So meaning people play on different realms or servers.
And a WoW server, I haven't been on that team in a very long time, but back in the day, you might have 5,000 people on a WoW server before they'd have to spin up another WoW server.
The big idea behind Titan is that everybody would play on one server.
It was a one-server, one-world game.
And the world was massive.
It was going to take place in future Earth.
And we were literally building like, we have what we call Bay City, which was San Francisco.
We had, you know, Hollywood, and then we had to build all of California between that.
And we also wanted to build like Cairo and London.
And there's this realization of like, how do we connect all of these?
The game had driving in it, like full-blown, like GTA-style driving.
It was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP intellectual property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over.
Like the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure out, like, are there aliens or not aliens?
You know, like, all that sounds kind of dumb and fun.
But when you're building a game, like you, especially world building, you have to have rules.
That's, it's what makes world building work is that like this exists in this world and this doesn't.
And, you know, why?
It's like, because someone said so, and just the way it needs to be.
But that development started in 2007, kind of as ideation, brainstorming, early work, really got going in late 2007.
And then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King.
And it was, we had the, like, we always did like a champagne toast.
I still remember it because it was election day.
I think it was like election day and my birthday and the day Obama got elected.
And then I left the WoW team on that day.
It was like memorable in all those ways.
And then I joined the Titan team.
And that game, we went on like the fast forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013.
That was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of.
And probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist.
And by 2010, like after numerous times trying to convince the powers that be that like this game is not going to happen.
It's in trouble.
I remember going to Mike Moorheim in 2010 and like you're going to the CEO of, you know, at that time, Blizzard was a big company.
And I'm like, you got to shut us down.
We're just going to burn money.
What was your intuition about why?
So like, from my understanding, there was a few issues.
So one was such a gigantic world, which by the way, is a beautiful dream.
This kind of universe simulator, because I love every game you mentioned there is great.
I empathize with the dream.
I would love to play that game.
But one of the issues, as I understand, was it was unclear what like the quest flow is.
Like, what are you supposed to really do in this game?
What's the thing that connects all of the pieces together?
So it was a multifaceted failure for many reasons.
Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself included.
Like there's just no getting around that.
And then on top of that, like a lot of games you can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the, you know, the servers didn't work or like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game or design failure.
Like it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly.
We failed on art, engineering, and design.
And I'm cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan.
My criticism isn't of the art that was created.
My criticism is that we never had any art cohesion.
So the art looked like it could have come from 10 different games.
And we should say it cost $83 million across those years.
So large team doing a lot of stuff, but not conversion towards a game that could actually ship.
Correct.
As like a game designer, I use semantics a lot.
And I like to define my semantics so people know where I'm coming from.
Talking about ideas versus vision for a second.
Ideas are easy.
Ideas, you know, I can have 10 and 10 seconds.
You know, let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse, you know, whatever.
Like you can, I want a secret agent by day is, you know, doing all this cool shooting stuff.
By night is running a flower shop.
You know, ideas are just infinite, at least on creative teams.
You know, you have no shortage of ideas.
What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea, but shepherd it into existence.
And you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost.
If you need a team to make it, you need a team to believe in the vision of the idea.
And then there also has to be a technological plan for the idea.
There has to be a design plan.
There has to be an art style for the plan.
There has to be a pragmatic production reality to the plan.
And Titan kind of was like, that was the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height.
You know, we were over being hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft.
I don't know if people are going to like it.
And we were now in the era of like, we made World of Warcraft.
We can do no wrong.
This next thing is going to be the best ever.
And there was also a lot of what I call anticipatory hiring or like there's opportunity hiring and then there's also anticipatory hiring.
I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy.
I won't hire anybody on any team until like we're feeling like we got to work overtime or like we might not ship if we don't get, you know, somebody else in here.
And Titan kind of had that hubris of like, well, we're going to build a really big world.
We don't know the story of the world yet.
We don't really have it mapped out what it should be like.
We don't have the art style really defined.
We don't know technically how we're going to make the art or what the constraints of it are.
But we know we're going to build a really big world.
So let's just start hiring environmental artists.
And like in one year, we would hire like 70 environmental artists from all over the world.
You know, we're getting visas and like the top tier talent because at the height of World of Warcraft and nobody knew the team that they were coming on.
It was Blizzard's next MMO top secret.
And they, you know, their first day at work, like some, you know, poor guy from Belgium just shows up and he's on his first day at work and he's like, oh, are we making a world of StarCraft?
Is that?
And they're like, no, dude, let me show you what.
And he's like, what is this game?
You know, we were in that world and we hired way too many people.
The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on, using other engines, using art from whatever.
You prove out that idea.
And once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team.
You know, the cliche of idle hands is the devil's work or whatever.
You have these like brilliant team, huge, and we don't have a roadmap for what we're making or how we're going to make it.
And now you're having to deal with all these people.
Like they're coming into your office.
You know, you're trying to figure out what is the quest flow.
What, how do I design the quest system for Titan?
How can we prototype it?
And we're like, oh, this prop artist over here is running out of stuff to do.
What props should he make?
Should he work on Chinatown or the Hollywood set?
And you're just making up busy work.
The engine didn't work.
When we would run playtests on Titan, we would have to tell the team, stop checking in because it slows us down.
We have this really great technical artist, a guy named Dylan Jones.
And he was on Titan with us.
And I remember in like the last days, we asked him because he was a very active user.
Titan editor was called Titan Edit or TED, which is to this day, TED is the proprietary tool for Overwatch since Overwatch came from the Titan engine, which was Tank.
And we said to Dylan, I want you to log your uptime in the editor in TED.
And in a 40-hour week, he was only able to work for 20 hours.
And you can imagine you're building a team of the best in the best in the industry and they can't work.
The Two-Year Ambition00:13:26
So not only are you just burning cash faster than anybody on the planet, it's also like, imagine having fighter pilots, but we don't let them fly.
Yeah.
Like the creative frustration and the way that that manifested itself and how demoralized the team got.
It was a disaster.
And so many elements of that were done completely differently for Overwatch, which turned out to be this incredibly masterful execution on a short time scale with a small team with a clear vision.
I read that sort of if you were to compare Overwatch and Titan, so the defining characteristic for the Titan team that said yes to everything and the Overwatch team said no to everything, meaning focus, like deep, deep focus on the execution of a very clear vision.
And maybe that's the process of designing games, like you said, is, you know, on a team that's full of incredible ideas because it's creative minds, it's constantly saying no.
It's a really painful process, but perhaps it is the responsibility of leadership to just keep saying no, which sucks.
I guess it sucks to be a leader on the team in that sense because you're constantly saying no.
Being a creative leader, you're in two modes: you're pushing or you're pulling.
And whatever mode you're in is the exact opposite of the team.
When they're not thinking outside the box enough or like elevating the vision enough, that's when you're pushing them.
Like, come on, guys, you know, don't worry about the schedule.
We got, you know, capture hearts and minds, inspire people.
And when they're going a little crazy and they endless source of great ideas and really fun development, that's when you got a pull and say, guys, we need to ship this.
The best feature we can add for the player is shipping.
That was a common phrase that we had.
So when Titan was canceled, I mean, that must have been a gigantic heartbreak for everybody.
And there was this moment when the plan was for the Titan team to be disbanded and moved elsewhere, but you fought for keeping some part of the Titan team, the core of the team together.
And Mike Moorheim gave you six weeks to come up with a pitch for a new game.
And you talked about this process.
And you've mentioned that there are three possible ideas, directions.
You're thinking about a StarCraft MMO, maybe an MMO in a new IP called Crossworlds.
And then the third idea was Overwatch.
Can you take me through those six weeks?
Yeah, the six weeks, it was supposed to be the greatest time ever, if you think about it, because you're a game developer at Blizzard and you get to come up with a new idea.
So that sounds awesome.
Like to everybody at Blizzard, to all game developers, it sounds great.
But we were probably the most demoralized we'd ever been in our careers.
At least I was.
You know, I didn't know if I was going to be fired.
I didn't know if that was the end of my career at that point.
And so it was like a really serious, kind of dire environment that this was happening in.
And we were given two criteria that we had to hit for these pitches.
The first one was that we had to ship within two years.
And that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game.
That's crazy.
But for a Blizzard game, it's kind of insane.
And then the second, okay, the second is even more ambitious and crazy: whatever we made, whatever we pitched, had to have the potential to have World of Warcraft-like revenue.
Yeah.
Right.
And to date, at that point, there was one game that had World of Warcraft-like revenue, which was World of Warcraft.
So immediately, I just threw out the revenue thing because it's all fucking monopoly money to me.
Like this game money is, it's insane, and I just don't think about it.
That's someone else's problem.
But I did want to be as realistic as I could about the schedule part of it.
So most of our team, the Titan team, was 140-some people.
Most of that team got moved to go work on Here's the Storm, the D3 expansion, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone.
So immediately, a large number of the team was gone.
Then we had a bunch of like what we called temp loans, people that someday were going to come back to us, but we loaned off for like six-month tour of duty.
And then there was a very small team.
There was a group of engineers that was mothballing Titan.
So it exists somewhere at Blizzard at that point.
And they were also deconstructing the engine because they knew it didn't work anymore.
And to make a new game, it had to be way reconsidered to sort of what it is today.
And then there was a very small creative group that was supposed to come up with these three pitches and given six weeks.
And we just sort of arbitrarily decided, let's spend two weeks on each pitch.
The ground rules that I sort of led with is you have to be all in for the two weeks on the pitch.
So if we're, you know, pitch one was a StarCraft MMO and we have to live and breathe and want it more than anything.
And I kind of warned everybody, I said, at the end of this two weeks, you're going to think this is the only game idea.
And you're not going to be invested in the next, but we're going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one.
And the StarCraft MMO actually really loved that pitch.
It was called StarCraft Frontiers.
And the concept was like less of your playing like Space Marine, like it was less armies.
StarCraft the RTS is always about the three races and the giant armies.
And kind of what made Wow Wow and separate from the Warcraft RTS series was that instead of being like a footman in the army in World of Warcraft, you were like a lone adventurer, you know, make your mark on the world.
So we had this idea.
It was this old Chris Metzen drawing of a space prospector.
And I love that idea that like somewhere out in like where all the giant StarCraft battles were happening, you know, thousands of Zerg and Protoss and Terran, there's like this like lone prospector on some planet, like going through like a mysterious dungeon, you know, looking for minerals, but finding monsters.
Like it was that kind of spirit of more on the ground level.
I didn't even think about that because my intuition with the StarCraft MMO would be the soldier as part of the army, right?
The prospector.
That's such a beautiful vision.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Looking for the resources and on the way finding the monsters.
You want to be on the ground.
Like, what's it like on the ground floor?
And I don't want to be a minion in a giant army.
I want to, I want to be Indiana Jones in space, you know.
So then there was this Metson picture of the prospector.
And then two of the most amazing artists, Arnold Tsang and Peter Lee.
Arnold's the great character artist.
Peter Lee's the great environment artist.
They did this concept art for Frontiers that was Metson's space prospector.
He's smoking a cigar and he's got his foot on a hydralist skull.
Nice.
And then there's like a medvac in the background and they're on this like big alien planet.
And like that picture, you just wanted to like, here's my money.
I'll pre-order now.
Like sign me up for that game.
That picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch.
We redid it.
But yeah, that was where McCree actually came from.
So that was the StarCraft Frontiers idea.
We kind of went all in on the design.
We had a world design.
We had class design, like how the classes would work, what progression might look like.
And you also have to think when you're trying to design an MMO, like what could expansions and live content be like.
And we put together a really good pitch.
We all knew there's no way you can make this game.
Like this, even though it was more focused than Titan, It's five years on Blizzard's best day with nothing going wrong in perfect scenario, five years to make that game.
Um, probably with you know 150 to 200 people, like these 40 people are not making that game in two years.
So, as much as I like, again, that was an idea, not a vision, because it lacked it lacked the path to reality.
You know, there's that's a legit large-scale MMO in a world that you haven't quite developed in the way that an MMO needs.
It was really crafted for the art of the real-time strategy formulation of StarCraft.
And since space, it's it would take, I mean, it would be incredible, but it would be a five-year and realistically even more like an endless thing that you'd spin on on that team.
You're making the StarCraft game.
How do you get from planet to planet?
Is it a cutscene?
No one's going to want a cutscene, but we should probably make it a cutscene because that's easy.
But well, we got to have space flight.
That you're adding like three years just by saying we got to have space flight.
You are, and then how do you make a space game without space flight?
We've all played them, we know, we know those games.
So, so are you essentially when you're brainstorming like that?
And by the way, it's such an incredible thing that for two weeks, you're just really falling in love with the game altogether and trying to figure out if it's actually possible.
So, if you're developing that, are you just constantly trying to say, like, what is the simplest possible thing we can do that's a complete world?
Like, are you constantly trying to simplify, or are you allowing yourself to go big?
So, when you're brainstorming and you're with the team and you're the creative leader, it's guys, what's amazing?
What's big?
What, what's what do players need?
There's there's a Blizzard design value called what is the fantasy?
What is the fantasy?
You want to be in space, uh, you want to be in the StarCraft universe, and then your job as the game director.
And if you have a great creative director, art director, tech director, the director should be scoping it back into reality.
The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes a production problem.
You give it to the project managers or the executives or the producers to say, No, there's not enough time, or you guys should hire more.
Because, right, like what do executives, what do those types have at their disposal?
That they can hit you with meetings and Outlook and tell you that you can hire more people.
That's not really how you get the game made.
That's why they get paid the big books.
The scoping, your best case scenario is when your tech director, art director, and game director are doing the scoping.
Um, because then you know, like this part we got to spend big bucks on, there's no getting around it.
This part we can cheat.
Um, if you have a giant team and one guy's job is just to make props, you know, crates and chairs, the guy's going to make the, you know, that's a triple-A awesome developer who's going to put his heart and soul into it.
If you let him, he'll take, you know, six weeks to make a crate.
You have to have that moment where you're like, I kind of need 200 crates, so just spend like a couple hours on that one.
And that's a hard thing to say to somebody.
You're doing this kind of scope carving while also talking about what is the fantasy.
So you're, there's a tension there that you're constantly dancing with.
So you're allowing yourself to think big, but then scoping it down and doing that, what, on a scale of days in this case?
Yeah, we had two weeks.
So, and I don't think we were, I was working on weekends, but we weren't getting the group together.
So it's, you know, like 10 working days.
And then you like shut it off and go to idea number two.
Class Meetings and Vision00:06:22
Yeah.
Idea number two was Crossworlds.
That was a Metson vision for a universe.
And like, I'm, I'm glad Metson's back at Blizzard, and I hope they make this game someday.
The way Chris described it was there's a planet on the edge of the universe.
It's like the Maas Icely spaceport with all these, you know, freakish aliens and people from all walks of life.
And it's kind of seedy and criminal.
And there's traitors and smugglers and diplomats.
And but this one planet is sort of the planet that they've agreed to like meet on.
And this is like the neutral place.
And then the game was going to take place on that planet.
So this is awesome.
Yeah.
So that was more of like a world IP driven one that was really inspired by Chris.
And that allows you to play with different characters.
I like that.
I like that idea a lot because it's a meeting place of different worlds.
And then you can allow your imagination to drive what the worlds from which they came from are like.
So you don't have to design those worlds.
No, you don't have to design them, but then they're yours.
Like if the players really are reacting to like the green people planet or whatever, and someday you're like, hey, what expansion should we make?
I don't know, green people planet.
Yeah.
Like, let's do it.
I like it.
So it was actually that it was crossworlds.
We were working on crossworlds and like the StarCraft Frontiers, you know, for Frontiers, we were having the class meetings, you know, how class progression worked, like the game designery stuff.
And on Crossworlds, we were having a class meeting of like a big decision in like RPG type games is always, are you doing like skill-based or class-based?
And it's usually some combination of those.
But class, class-based, you're like choosing, I'm going to be a warrior, therefore I use sword and shield and I do these things.
Where more of a skill bases, everybody's kind of an avatar.
And then the skills that you pick define.
So I might take that I know how to use swords.
So you're kind of making those decisions.
And with all things game design, there's no right or wrong.
It's all trade-offs.
So the trade-off decision we were making is like, oh, I think we want to be class-based with this crossworlds thing.
And we were in a design meeting.
And one of my favorite designers of all time is a guy named Jeff Goodman.
He was one of the original WoW encounter designer.
He designed like Anyxia and all the big raid bosses.
Like if someone has a favorite raid boss, Jeff probably designed it.
And he just kind of off the cuff said in this meeting, he said, I wish instead of making like six classes, I wish we could make 50 classes.
And I wish instead of having like, you know, a hundred abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had like one or two things that was really interesting about them.
And then the class meeting ended.
Like we designed our six classes in that meeting.
And then the meeting ended.
And I was back at my desk and it just stuck with me what Jeff had said about the way he wished he could design the classes.
And then I also had, we had this directory of all the amazing Titan art.
And I started pulling up Arnold Sang's characters.
Arnold's vision and his art is second to none.
And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed.
We had a class called the Jumper.
And the jumper could like teleport forward and rewind time and come back.
And the jumper used dual-wheeled pistols, which was at the time designed after my dual G18s from Modern Warfare 2.
It was my favorite loadout.
I was just cribbing Infinity Ward.
That's where Tracer's guns came from.
And we had all these like different guns, like some that bloomed and some that, you know, had this like really crazy recoil.
And we had other types of guns.
And I took every version of like the Titan jumper and I just distilled it into what I thought was the best version of the jumper, which was, you know, the dual-wheel pistols, the blink, the recall, and time bomb.
And then I took Arnold Sang art and I went, you know, to Arnold and I'm like, what if this wasn't like a class?
You know, who is this as a person, not a class?
And Arnold, oh, what if she's British and her name's Tracer?
And like that was the origin of Overwatch.
And some of the pragmatic part of that was I knew that Jeff Goodman was going to be on this team.
And I knew that Arnold Sang was going to be on this team.
And it's a play to your strengths moment.
Like, what could we make in two years with the talent we have?
And what is realistic?
Like, what could we realistically make?
And so then I just sat there and I sort of went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named the Gun Jack who became Reaper.
We had actually the Ranger got split out and became 76 and became Bastion of all things.
You're describing the game of Overwatch where exactly that vision from that meeting came to life where you, as opposed to having a small number of classes with a large number of skills, you have a large number of heroes with each their distinct look, distinct set of skills.
Maximizing Fun with Structure00:16:05
Yeah.
And personality, the personality was a big part of it, like capturing, this isn't some generic the jumper.
It's this person, Lena Oxton, you know, and she, she has a life and we're going to, you know, make you interested in her.
Yeah, there's like a deep backstory.
And it's also what's interesting about Overwatch is that backstory is not like revealed in a direct way.
It's, it's like seeps in indirectly throughout the game.
So the backstory is implied.
Yes.
And it's told not directly.
So there's a lot of ideas like this.
And so you're, this is the thing that the team converts to.
Yeah.
Well, and it was funny because like we're having these crossworld, like people are, you know, writing design docs and doing concept art for crossworld.
And, you know, we'd have some brainstorm meetings every day.
And I put together, it was a seven-page deck, Overwatch deck.
And it was called Monetized Shooter at the time.
Yeah.
And it just said monetized shooter.
And then the first slide was League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos.
And then I had like six heroes like sloppily designed.
And as everybody was working on Crossworlds, there were two, you know, co-leaders of that team four.
There was, you know, Chris Metzen was there and Ray Gresco.
And I remember Ray coming over.
Ray is like a phenomenal game developer of all time.
He like wrote the Dark Forces engine, was the production director on Diablo 3.
He and I killed Titan.
And then he's at my desk looking over my shoulder.
And he's like, well, what are you working on?
Is this the Crossworlds pitch?
And I'm like, no, this is like another idea that I'm just working on on the side.
And I show him the seven slides.
And he just looks at me and he says, go show Metzen this.
This is what we should make instead.
And then I went and I showed Metzen, like, hey, this is, this is just an idea.
And then Metson was like, yes, you know, like, this is what we should make.
And I showed Arnold and it was Arnold's art.
And then Ray tells me, he's like, because we would, every morning we get the team together because we were in those like dire, you know, dire straits and we're midway through at that point.
And Ray and a producer named Matt Holly said, tomorrow morning at the meeting, you're going to pitch this monetized shooter idea.
It was called monetized shooter because originally when I pitched it, it was free to play and you had to buy the heroes, which is fucking terrible.
But at the time, I actually thought that was a good idea.
And I'm walking down the hall with Matt Holly to go like pitch this to this group, you know, out of, we're supposed to be working on crossworlds.
And they're like, you got to pitch this idea to them.
And Matt Holly stops me in the hall and says, you, Jeff, you cannot go into that meeting.
I refuse to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says monetize shooter.
They'll hate that.
And that's not the spirit of who we are as, you know, creative development.
I'm like, yeah, you're right.
Like, well, no one was supposed to see his deck anyway.
You guys were all looking over my shoulder.
And he's like, you need to put a name on it.
I'm like, it's Overwatch.
Like right on the spot, I said the name was Overwatch.
And where that had come from was when we were working on Titan, I was really angry about this.
We did this fake, I did not do this.
Another leader on the team did this of this fake, like we're going to put up whiteboards and everyone gets to vote for their favorite name for Titan.
But the person who did it already had a name in mind for the game and just kept pushing towards that name.
And the thing that got the most votes was Overwatch.
Overwatch in Titan was like a police group, essentially.
But somebody had written Overwatch on that board and it got the most votes.
So I basically named the game Overwatch to like high-five my team and kind of middle finger.
Yeah.
Like, don't act like it's a democracy when it's not.
Yeah.
So it's a middle finger.
Yeah.
So Overwatch and then, I mean, the rest of history.
So what in that slide deck is that in that slide deck, did you already have a kind of crawl, walk, run idea of the way this would be developed?
So my deck was terrible.
People actually, there's a thing called a Jeff deck, which is it's always gray with black writing and then the default like PowerPoint blue shapes because I just don't bother making it look good.
Yeah, um, besides dragging Arnold Sang's art, you know, desecrating it into my deck.
Um, we put together, we had this amazing game designer on the Overwatch team, a guy named Jeremy Craig, um, who's now actually game directing a game over at Bonfire.
Um, Jeremy, not only was he a great game designer, but he had the ability to sell things better than anybody else visually.
So, Jeremy took my shitty deck, and then we had lots more like creative brainstorms.
We thought through the game of Overwatch a lot more.
And then he made this gorgeous pitch deck that we pitched.
We first had to go through the Blizzard production and game directors for them to approve it and give it their thumbs up.
Then we had to go through the Blizzard executives, then we had to go through Activision.
And in that deck, because we had to speak to schedule, we had to speak to two things that were tough to speak to.
One, we had to speak to schedule.
And we came up with this concept of crawl walk run.
We had identified the reason Titan failed is we just tried to run.
We tried to come up with the next World of Warcraft.
But if you think about World of Warcraft, it had Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 to build upon to even get to the point where people gave a shit enough about that world to want to live in the world of Warcraft.
So the idea was that instead of trying to cut right to World of Warcraft, let's try to honor Warcraft 1, essentially.
So this first game is just to establish that there's a universe you might give a shit about.
We also knew that the timeframe we were given of two years, there was no way to create a compelling PVE experience.
So we just kind of randomly put dates in a slide of crawl walk run, thinking it was aspirational.
And really, we were just trying to save ourselves.
Like, don't cancel the, don't cancel us.
You know, this team can make something great.
The other part that we had to talk to too was like a mobile strategy.
Like at that time, it was like everything has to be also on mobile, which I think is the dumbest thing ever.
And so literally, what we did is this was Jeremy's brilliant part.
We had a picture with all the boxes, and then one of them is like a tablet with just a fucking Photoshop of, you know, Arnold's art on it.
And we're like, and also it'll be on mobile.
Brilliant.
Yeah.
But I think this crawl walk run idea is really nice.
So that the initial idea is you would have basically a shooter with all these different characters, all these heroes, and then the walk would be the PV version of that co-op.
And then if people really fall in love with the world, then you build a big MMO around it.
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And now back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan.
And we should also say that there's a whole world that was built around Overwatch.
And one of the ideas was, so Warcraft is a very particular kind of world.
StarCraft is a particular kind of world.
Diablo is a particular kind of world.
And you wanted to bring Overwatch to Earth and make it positive.
You give this talk where there was a lot of respect paid to the sort of dark, gritty, post-apocalyptic games on Earth.
Also give a lot of respect to the ultra-realistic first-person shooter games like Call of Duty.
And you wanted to create something more that paints a vision of a near-term hopeful future and fun and more sort of surreal versus like ultra real.
So it's interesting to talk through how a world comes to life, how you think about that world, how you create the tone of the game, how you think, how you craft in this vision, not just like different characters like Tracer and so on, like what the personalities, but like bringing the world to life in which they will be.
What was that process like?
The process was a blast.
And like the goal was that bright, hopeful future.
And the other phrase we used all the time on the team was a future worth fighting for.
If there's going to be all this fighting, like the it kind of has to be worth it for something.
Picking the locations in the world was the funnest thing.
You know, there's just a group of us who would sit around and like, where do you want to go?
You know, Santorini looks amazing.
And you're looking at pictures and like, let's make that place.
You know, in a video game, people are going to spend hours and hours in a location.
Resist the urge to do the common, I call them the cargo container mazes that you see in every game.
And I know why they exist.
They're easy to make, but we kind of wanted Overwatch to be this world tour of great places that you'd want to go to.
Or in the case of like Oasis, it's like, okay, maybe Iraq back when we were making this game wasn't the top of people's list, but what is the bright, hopeful version of what that could look like?
So we just really tried to sell this idea of these aspirational locations.
One, just to get people thinking about different places on planet Earth and how awesome they all are.
But also from like a pure game design standpoint, you're going to spend a lot of time in the environment.
So the environment should be pleasing and not oppressive.
Can you go through some of the heroes that you ended up putting in the game?
Maybe a good way to do it is which are your favorites?
And what's, from the best of your knowledge, are the internet favorites?
My favorite, I have a couple favorite heroes.
Obviously, Tracer.
She's the OG.
The OG, the cornerstone.
You know, we put her on the front of the box.
She was that moment of we should just take the best of the best.
And we know this gameplay is good and solid.
And it's so simple.
Like the mechanics are very easy to explain to somebody.
It's very easy to pick up the first time anybody hits recall for the first time and they try to wrap their mind around like, wait, does that mean if I, you know, and they're mapping out the possibilities.
And by the way, we should say that it's a PvP game with six or six at first, and where there's three distinct roles that people take on those on the team.
And those roles at first, I guess, were not required.
Like you can reallocate those roles as you wanted.
And then to maximize the fun, you add a little bit of structure.
You enforce two per role.
And the role being tank support and damage.
Yeah.
So that, and then there's all the kinds of heroes that are associated with the different roles and people pick, and there's lore and some people are probably like hardcore just one particular hero and and and so there's a lot of personality and story and community that builds around each of the heroes and, but at the end of the day, it is just a fun shooter.
Yeah, our goal was to pay homage to the shooters before us that we loved.
There's no way you can talk about Overwatch without talking about Team Fortress 2.
Uh, Team Fortress started as a Quake mod um, which was brilliant and I played tons of.
Then there was Team Fortress Classic that came out with Half-life One and then Team Fortress Two.
I think everything about it blew everybody away when it came out in 2007 and there's obviously just huge influence there.
But the shooter mechanics of Overwatch are.
They harken back to what people call the arcade or arena shooter uh genre, which pains me because I never, back in the day, I didn't think of Quake as a arcade shooter, was it's almost an insulting way of saying it.
But just the fast movement um, really epic over-the-top weapons.
You have a low time to kill, or ttk that players call it, meaning you're very survivable, you can take a few hits where in a game like Call Of Duty or Counter-strike, if you get shot in the head, you're just dead right away.
So it was supposed to be this explosive, larger than life, fun arcadey shooter um, with a lot of teamwork involved.
And so you said Tracer, up there, she's the OG.
Who else Mcree um?
Mccree is another.
Like i'm somebody who's attracted to the simplicity and design and I did not design Mccree's Six Shooter.
The way that gun feels is phenomenal and to capture the spirit of that, we had a designer named Mike Heiberg designed the High Noon Ultimate, um.
And then just all the care and love the team put in, like when he does the ultimate, we roll a tumbleweed across the screen like every time um.
Simplicity in Design00:05:05
It's a very simple hero, but the simplicity is what I like best in design.
I'm not a fan of when somebody starts explaining you know in any of these games whether they're Mobas Or hero shooters, and they start like, this guy throws orbs, and he throws three orbs, and then he runs out of his orb bank, and then he can call the orbs back, or he can cash the orbs.
And I'm just my head is spinning, and I'm like, just give me a fucking good gun, you know, and I'm done.
Simplicity is everything.
What about Reinhardt, the tank?
Reinhardt was actually my main.
So I played the most of Reinhart.
That was another amazing Jeff Goodman design of this guy who just has a shield.
As soon as you give somebody a shield, they know what to do.
They go into protector mode.
The shield was designed to shoot through.
The shield has since been copied by like every hero shooter since, and even non-hero shooters.
And then he just has a giant rocket hammer and he does a charge ability.
It's really interesting where the charge ability came from.
I was playing a ton of Left 4 Dead 2.
And you could play in versus mode where you could be the enemy zombie guys.
And there was an enemy boss zombie called the Charger who had that charge ability.
And I thought the reason that ability was so cool is because it's a commit.
Once you press the button, you're a runaway train.
And watching Reinhardt's charge to their deaths is kind of hilarious.
And it's what separates a great Ryan from a shitty one.
You've explained that the Overwatch matchmaker process is designed to keep players at a 50% win rate.
I think it's just a fascinating topic.
Not to get too philosophical, but you can't have the up without the down, hence the 50%.
Can you speak to the complexity of what makes a good matchmaker?
The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design and engineering tasks you're ever going to tackle.
And they're thankless.
It's very hard too, because I think most people, and they're not being disingenuous, like if you ask a gamer, what do you want?
They're like, I just want a fair match.
Like, just make it even.
And the reality of what they want is they want a match where they're slightly better than the other guy.
Yeah.
Like they want it to feel like it was close, but then win.
And you can't architect that.
Like it's a zero-sum situation.
So there's got to be winners and there's got to be losers.
The other really core problem, and we would study this all the time when people would complain.
You know, you see a Reddit post and somebody would say, I had a six-game losing streak.
This is so fucked.
It's the worst matchmaker ever.
Oh, Reddit.
Yeah, right.
I love Reddit.
But we would look up that person's account.
I would do that all the time.
I love looking at people's accounts and seeing what would happen.
It's like, yeah, he had the six-game losing streak.
He had an eight-game winning streak before that.
There was no post about how awesome is this.
And the human psychology doesn't allow for that.
One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch, and this is, I think we did the right thing in the moment.
It's, you know, like I, I wouldn't go back and redo it.
But if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team focused.
And we put all of our eggs in you noticing if the team won or lost.
And we downplayed your individual contribution as much as possible.
There wasn't a scoreboard.
We had a medal system, but the metal system was, in my opinion, it was not good because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals.
And on the losing team, they would use that.
They would weaponize it against their teammate.
Well, I'm the top kills and all you guys are making us lose.
And it's like, okay, you're the top kills by like one and you guys still lost.
So I would, if I was to redo it today, or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay the team factor and try to put more focus on individual contribution because that's just how people play.
They're selfish.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
It's just, it's that human nature they can't help.
And in terms of how they experience the game, in terms of how they derive joy from it or how they see the challenge of the game, it's individual.
Even when you're on a team, you're still feeling individual, fundamental individual experience.
Individual Experience in Teams00:04:41
Let me, as a small aside, before I forget, since we mentioned first-person shooters so much, outside of Overwatch, what are some of the great shooters of all time that you've played?
Quake is the greatest.
Quake is GOAT.
Yeah, Quake is Goat.
There's a lot of contenders up there.
What have you logged the most hours in outside of the games?
Okay.
Can you, okay?
A lot of folks have written to me that I need to play Rust, the video game.
I have not.
I have not even looked into it.
Somebody on Reddit said it has a steep learning curve.
I would like to give it a chance because I've spoken.
You have to meet spoken so highly of it.
So can you explain Rust?
Yeah, Rust is an open world game.
It's a procedural map.
So it means that every time it's different, you're always on an island and it resets every month.
Is it PvP?
It's all PvP.
In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.
I don't know what that means, but Rust players know what that means.
Everybody who plays Rust loves it.
Sounds to me like they're in a cult.
So with all due respect, please don't write me letters.
They're too busy playing Rust.
They're too busy checking on their base, making sure it's not rated to write you letters.
It takes place.
It's basically it's open world.
You can do whatever you want.
There's not really any directed gameplay to it.
But at any time, any other player can kill you and take anything that's on you.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And then you build what Rust players called bases and you upgrade the base and you try to make the base as safe as possible to store your stuff.
And then you can make explosives and blow up other people's walls to get into their base where they're keeping all their best stuff and take all their shit.
Like permanently?
Permanently.
Like, it would be like PvPing and WoW.
Imagine in World of Warcraft if somebody could not only kill you, but take everything that's in your bank and make you level one the next time you log in.
Wow.
That's very stressful.
The beauty of Rust and why it's so good is you can't have the high highs without the low lows.
Like real low lows.
Real low lows.
Wow.
Like debilitating, like, am I ever going to play this game Lowe's?
You know, like you spend a week building the world's most perfect base and getting tons of loot.
And then there's what's called online rating and offline rating.
Online rating means that my enemy is, I can see that they're in their base right now, and I'm going to try to attack them while they're in their base.
Offlining, which is like all Rust players will say you're the scum of the earth if you offline someone.
And then all Rust players also offline people all the time.
Yeah, it's gamer etiquette.
Yes.
Offlines when, like, hey, I think that my neighbor logged off for the night.
You know, they just played six hours.
I've been watching them.
And now there's no activity in their base.
So I'm going to like blow up their walls and take up all their stuff when they're not here.
Yeah.
So Rust because real life is not hard enough is what it sounds like.
Yeah.
I want a great tag.
If I want more stress in my life, I'll play Rust.
Yeah, I can't wait.
So, okay, so that's one that sounds like a unique experience and a great joy.
So quick number one, Rustin up there.
Call of Duty.
Call of Duty just says.
You know, there's a lot of haters.
Like Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 were the pinnacle of Call of Duty, with Black Ops being a very respectable, you know, third.
But you're never going to get a better gun feel from a game than like just study the visual effects, the animation, the modeling, the sounds.
Every aspect of shooting a gun in Call of Duty is so masterfully done.
And then the maps, like the flow of the multiplayer is just great.
Overwatch League Reflections00:15:06
Like those, there's a map called Crash from Call of Duty 4 that Aaron Keller and I, Aaron's now the game director on Overwatch.
We just sat and studied that map or terminal from Modern Warfare 2, just studied the maps of just like this map design is off the hook.
So Call of Duty is definitely up there.
So even though you were not thinking about it, Overwatch ended up being a gigantic success.
So did you start thinking about in this framework of crawl, walk, run, about the walk, the PVE piece?
Yes.
So the PVE piece was what Overwatch 2 was supposed to be.
And I don't know if people know this or not, but we started working on Overwatch 2 in 2015.
So Overwatch 1 didn't ship until 2016.
So before Overwatch, and it wasn't like work in earnest, it was like pitching the game.
I remember I spent a lot of time.
It was myself, Chris Metson, and Michael Chu sort of brainstorming a framework for what like a campaign could look like.
And we had this idea of like a cooperative PvE shooter.
And we actually pitched it to the team before we launched because we were trying to put a bunch of runway in front of us that worked against us.
And it's one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career was Overwatch 2.
There were two points of failure for me.
The first was I had people on the game team who didn't like PvP or competitive shooters.
And they really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, but they wanted to kind of do it on their own terms in like a PVE setting.
So even though Overwatch is this like runaway success and everybody's talking about it, they felt like they couldn't really engage with it.
And so, like, people on the dev team are like, okay, thank God we, you know, shipped that PvP thing.
When do we start work on this other thing?
So, that came from a genuine place of excitement.
And then, the other point of pressure was from the executive team.
And this was both the Blizzard and more so the Activision executive teams.
And they started really putting the heat on, well, you said Overwatch 2 was going to be out in 2019.
And they're referring back to these slides that were just crazy dates.
Like it was, you never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive.
Like you might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain on it.
So you just threw some dates because the layout looked good.
Yeah, this is just all bullshit.
This is just in the same way we put like the tablet, you know, we just put Overwatch, like put Tracer on a tablet and say we have a mobile strategy.
So the executives started getting really angry at us that Overwatch 2 was slipping, slipping.
And so when Overwatch 1 took off, I remember very early, we were in like May of 2016.
And that year, the Olympics were going to be in Rio, I think.
And, you know, I always like to pay respects to like when a big event is happening.
I'm like, hey, we should do like an event for the Olympics.
You can't call it the Olympics or else they sue you.
So you just, even though you're advertising for them to a bunch of kids who want to play video games and not watch the Olympics.
But we also had like these two developers, Mike Heiberg and Dave Adams, like worked on this quirky, like they made soccer in Overwatch.
We called it Lucio Ball.
Like they made a map and they made these mechanics.
We're like, yeah, let's do an event called the Summer Games.
And we do a live patch that's the Summer Games.
It's extremely successful.
And then after that, we're like, yeah, let's do Halloween's coming up.
Let's do a Halloween event.
How cool will that be?
And our fans just loved these events, but there were two groups that were struggling with it.
One was that group I told you on the dev team who was like, oh my God, you guys are over scoping the patches.
Why are we doing this Halloween event?
We should be doing, we should start work on Overwatch 2.
We shouldn't be this focused on the live game, which was fucking nuts.
Like that was just crazy.
There's this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave.
Most games fall off the back of the wave.
They don't catch the wave.
No one plays it or plays it for two weeks.
If you're lucky enough to have caught the wave, ride it till the end.
And my instincts at that point were like, let's just keep how many more of these live events can we do.
So yeah, so now there's this wave and the live game and events, but the pressure on creating Overwatch 2 was building.
Yeah.
We had a coalition on the team that was really wanted Overwatch 2 built instead of the live events.
And then the executive pressure became monumental.
And what would have been correct was to do more world events, like keep it going.
But the major derail was Overwatch League.
And we really like the weirdest part about Overwatch League is I believe in it.
You know, I helped pitch it along with some other people.
We thought it was like the future of esports and doing regional-based teams, ensuring minimum player salaries and player protections.
Like there was a lot of very good about Overwatch League.
And there would be teams associated with particular cities.
Yeah.
And it'd be international.
It'd be a real competition.
So the dream, the ambition was really huge there.
Yeah.
The teams part of the dream was more of like regional-based player protection, try to make esports more of a first-class citizen because there were all these stories about like shady teams, you know, screwing their players over.
Where it got away from us was there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much so.
And then it got overmarketed to the people buying the teams.
They went on this road show where they had a deck basically, and like you can put anything in a deck and sell anything.
And they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.
And we got a bunch of billionaire investors in these teams.
And when 2018 started, like, for example, the day I got back, they said we signed this huge deal with Twitch for streaming of Overwatch League, like a media rights deal.
And that means that here's all these commitments we made for Overwatch League of like in-game stuff that had to exist.
Like a lot of it was integration with Twitch and camera control and that kind of stuff.
The other part of it was a bunch of skins and, you know, uniforms for all the teams, which was not just getting the art in the game, but there was huge technical challenges to like how all that worked and was efficient and hit the right, you know, memory footprint and all that kind of stuff.
And so all of your plans at that point kind of go out the window.
Like you're not going to work on new world events.
You're not really even focused on Overwatch 2.
You're just kind of treading water.
There was a lot of talk of like, oh, God, you know, the deal, like the deal didn't go well.
And we've got to do make goods to make the deal better for them.
I'm like, just give them some money back, you know?
Like, if you, the deal isn't what people wanted, like putting it on us, the Overwatch team, to like support this beast.
Yeah.
And it was a great idea that the wrong instincts and sort of I don't know how to phrase this in a way that's not damning, but there was too much focus on let's make lots of money really fast.
And a lot of people got dragged into it.
And while Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, like the Overwatch League players, they were awesome.
I love them.
The Overwatch League staff at Blizzard, some of the nicest, most motivated, great creative people, like all these organizations got built and they were all great, but it was a house of cards waiting to fall.
And it became more about the money versus the quality of the experience of the different teams playing together and actually building this ecosystem of esports.
The financial reality kicked in where these teams, now we didn't just have executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch.
We had all these people who basically invested in the game, and then they started to express their opinions.
Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person events and there's going to be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that.
And I think really quickly, everybody learned, like, yeah, we can't do in-game events when you have a London team and a Shanghai team.
And like, how does this work?
So that fell apart super quickly.
The merch was good, but it wasn't going to be making NFL level money, whatever insanity anybody thought that was going to be.
So everybody quickly defaulted back to, hey, didn't Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year?
What can we sell and what can you give us?
That pressure comes onto the team.
And then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2 and all care and love that we had for like the live game and the live circle.
Let's just make events and new heroes and new maps.
We're losing all these resources.
And it got to the point, you know, my exit at Blizzard, I believed in Overwatch 2.
I think we could have made a great game.
I have a lot of hindsight of like how I would have designed that game differently with what I know now versus what ultimately we didn't ship.
And I'm not, there's Overwatch 2 is out now, but it's not the Overwatch 2 that we planned and announced.
So when you're referring to Overwatch 2 in this conversation, you're referring to the PVE version.
The PVE version.
Which, by the way, I would have loved to play.
I'm one of the people that were Overwatch is great, but the PvP, but I would have loved to play the PVE version.
I think everybody would have loved to have played it.
And there's a misconception online that all I cared about was PvE and I didn't care about PvP.
All of the Overwatch 2 PvP maps were something that I said to the team over and over: we have a PvP audience.
If we get anything right, it has to be the PvP.
We would be lucky to welcome these PVE players, but that's not guaranteed.
So it was never a PvE-only focus.
It's just almost expanding it to also the.
And what eventually broke me was it used to be like in 2016 and 2017, I felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game as a game director, you know, working with Ray Gresco as the production director.
It felt like we were running Overwatch and we were very, very successful and doing a good job.
And I think the fans were happy.
And then as we transitioned, you know, Overwatch League was the best intention.
You know, my parents always say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That was the Overwatch League.
And it ended up being an Albatross.
And then Overwatch 2 was the same thing.
And what it boiled down for me, like what sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called in the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says, He gives me a date, which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020.
And he said, Overwatch has to make in 2020.
And then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of.
And then he says to me, if it doesn't dollars, we're going to lay off a thousand people and that's going to be on you.
And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career.
It felt surreal to be in that condition.
And as somebody who's worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they're like, there's Fortnite has 1,400 people working on it.
The Layoff Ultimatum00:07:25
If you just hire 1,400 people and make it free to play, we'll make that money.
Right.
And that was, I had believed I would never work anyplace but Blizzard.
I loved it.
It was a part of who I was.
And I felt I was a part of it.
And I literally thought I would retire from the place.
I never thought the day would come.
And that was it.
I was like, it's, we're done here.
Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.
I mean, Blizzard is one of the greatest companies in the history of Earth.
They've created so many incredible video games.
It's so difficult to create so many hits.
And they were done not by chasing money.
They're done by small, incredible teams, the hodgepodge that you describe, taking big risks and falling in love with the thing they do and then just chasing it, working extremely hard.
And just because you figured out a way how to make a lot of money doesn't mean it's not at the core this incredible creative journey that's incredibly difficult to pull off.
And just because you got a bunch of really smart, creative people who have somehow figured out how to pull it off multiple times in a row doesn't mean you can just treat it like a machine every single time.
It's this beautiful journey of a hodgepodge of weirdos working together.
And weirdos have to run that thing.
If you ever have a chance to create something special, you have to have weirdos at the helm.
And the degree to which you don't have weirdos at the helm, creative minds at the helm, and you're a business person at the helm, get out of their way, right?
You can't, you cannot have the meetings like you're describing.
And I don't just speak about this particular company.
It's just the entire industry.
I just, there's so much joy to be had if we keep creating great games.
And I just hope we get to see those great games.
I think there's a message to creative people out there and people who make stuff.
We're generally, we're so focused on the love of the craft that we get lost in it and we love doing it.
And we're not cutthroat and we don't have that kind of ambition.
We have a different kind of ambition.
But there's this whole world, especially as soon as you're lucky enough to have success that are very cutthroat and very ambitious.
And for whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them.
And we need to stop giving ourselves World of Warcraft when we made it.
There was no CFO at Blizzard.
You don't need a CFO to make World of Warcraft.
You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.
You don't need to bring in, just because you're making a lot of money, it doesn't mean you need to now start adulting by bringing in a CFO.
You can figure it out.
And there are great finance guys.
Like, I've worked with finance guys who get it and get out of the way and respect, and they're gamers, and they sort of understand.
But like, I wish developers would understand their own value more and stop handing the golden goose to people who don't deserve it.
How painful was it to say goodbye?
It broke me.
I think after you've been at a place like Blizzard, which I revere, I love Blizzard to this day.
I have nothing but warm, fond memories.
I mean, there's those moments where you're like, I wish that hadn't happened.
But on the whole, that place is mecca for game development.
And everything I have is due to Blizzard.
They provided for me and my family, made me the person I am.
So separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things.
And I was very sad when I resigned.
And I didn't realize how broken I was until recently, like the morning grieving I had gone through of like, I think I'm a little fucked in the head for not being there anymore.
How could I give that up?
How could I not be there anymore?
It was, it was really, really painful leaving.
Can we just speak to, I don't know, I don't think we can give enough love to Blizzard.
It's a legendary company for me personally, for everybody, for millions of people, created some of the greatest games ever.
They made the games before they just ran the company.
So they knew what each of us as developers beneath them were going through and they protected us.
They shielded us from all of the nonsense.
And even when they would align with a business person, they had a COO in the early days named Paul Sams.
And Paul protected us.
You know, they just, they found great people who got it.
The company when I joined was like 95% developers and like 5% operations.
It's when I left, it was, you know, 50-50, and that's like a 4,500-person company.
That love of the games and the respect and good treatment for game developers really turned it into the place that it was.
Just the commitment to excellence, the high-quality bar.
And then finding these passionate people like Chris Metzen or Sam Didier, they were like the visionaries of early Blizzard, Alan Adham, of just these worlds that we're still making and we're still playing in today.
It was infectious and it was inspirational.
And you wore the blizzard blue with an esprit de corps.
Like you felt proud to be part of it.
And you felt like you had made it to be there.
And everything you did, you did wanting to respect and honor those who had come before you.
I know it sounds almost cheesy saying it that way, but it really had that sense of reverence.
Like you knew you were part of something special.
You didn't take it for granted.
Esprit de Corps at Blizzard00:07:06
Yeah, that's the sense.
Reading everything, that's the sense I got.
Everybody that was a part of it that truly, truly, truly honored that time.
Just to take that small slice, what were some of the brains?
You mentioned Chris Mudson.
You gave so much love to so many people on the team, but I got to ask about Chris Mudson, who I would, by the way, love to do a podcast with at some point.
What were the brainstorming sessions of him like?
It seems like those are pretty awesome.
They were the best.
Like you could walk into a room.
Like the way I would work with Chris is early on when I was more junior, it was just sort of getting creative direction from him.
Hey, Chris, I'm about to work on this zone called Westfall.
What are your ideas?
You know, how could I capture them in gameplay?
Well, that won't quite work.
How about like this?
It was more like that.
Later on, like I still remember the first discussion I ever had with Chris about Wrath of the Lich King.
I went up to his office, like, hey, we're finally doing it.
We're doing the Northrind expansion.
You know, what excites you about Northrind?
And that's all you had to say.
And he would draw a map and he'd start pulling up old like Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 1 manuals and, you know, showing you like pictures he and Sammy had drawn and like maps and he all of it.
He would just go on for an hour and then I would sort of digest.
I just listen, taking constant notes.
I'm photographing his whiteboards all the time.
And then I go back and start to put those into design flow of like, okay, what's a zone?
What's a dungeon?
What could be cool?
What should come first?
What should come last?
You know, Lich King, for example, we wanted to try a very specific design to counter a problem we had in Burning Crusade, which is everybody entered through the dark portal through Hellfire Peninsula.
All the server programmers hate you because everybody loads into the same zone at the same time.
Lich King, we split him up for better player flow.
Plus, it's more interesting.
The more choice you have, you know, Sid Meyer says games are a series of interesting choices.
So we give him two starting zones.
But that was the flow with Chris.
And so often we would just like, okay, in that first meeting, Chris had put a zone called Grizzly Hills on the board.
Well, I don't know anything about Grizzly Hills.
Hey, Chris, talk about Grizzly Hills.
If you didn't interrupt him, he'd just go for an hour and you have no idea how much of it he had pre-thought about or had existed in previous lore and how much of it he was just making up on the spot.
He's just that charismatic and captivating.
Creating these worlds and being able to brainstorm through them and together.
I mean, that is what you're doing.
As a consumer of those worlds, you kind of take it for granted that they're incredible, but like you're crafting them.
Like you're looking at a blank sheet of paper and then together coming up.
My job as I saw it working with Chris was I had to, on World of Warcraft specifically working with Chris, is I was like the translator into gameplay of what Chris wanted, how to get it to play like how Chris wanted.
So my favorite story is we're working on Burning Crusade and we're in this meeting and Chris is like, he's the gentlest, sweetest guy, but because he carries himself with such confidence and everybody's in awe of him, the junior developers get kind of intimidated by him.
So we're in this meeting and we're talking about Silver Moon City because we're introducing the Blood Elves.
And Chris is like, and Silver Moon City, it's got the tallest fucking tower in all of Azeroth.
I mean, it is the tallest thing.
You know, it's mind-blowing, the awe of it.
Only the Blood Elves could build it.
Fast forward, like two weeks later, I'm walking through the hall and I see a bunch of level designers and artists.
They're all like crowded around the screen.
And on the screen, they've dragged Black Rock Mountain and Carazon and the Stormwind Cathedral.
I'm like, what the fuck are you guys doing?
And they're like, well, Chris said that the Silver Moon Tower had to be the tallest thing in World of Warcraft.
And so we're measuring how tall all of these other things are so we can make the tower taller.
And I'm like, guys, Chris doesn't know how tall the burning steps, you know, and the cathedral and Stormwind is.
What Chris means is just make the tower really fucking tall.
You don't need to measure it.
And they're like, oh, okay, that's okay.
Like, are you willing to take the heat if he's like, I'm willing to take the heat on this one, guys?
Yeah.
It's just a feeling.
It's a vibe.
It's a vibe.
Yeah.
And I also just personally have to give all the love in the world for the current Diablo 4 team because I've spent most recently out of the Blizzard games, spent a huge amount of time in Diablo.
And they've created some, and it's not just the loot.
All right.
It's the whole experience, the art, everything together.
And the season they've created, they've created a really wonderful world.
So I could see, I could feel how much effort goes into that.
They're crushing it.
And I think Diablo 4 in like modern times is one of the best worlds that have built.
And they know, they understand Diablo players.
Like that community is so hard and so demanding.
And that team is amazing.
Yeah, there's a lot of richness.
It's like, it's really, I mean, I don't know how often you get that, but it's really the perfect Diablo game.
They've really like evolved a lot, grew a lot.
So there's this whole mathematical component of just so many numbers everywhere.
And it's all balanced really masterfully.
And then, of course, you have to come up with new content with the seasons and they figure out ways to do that.
So at a crazy pace and still make it super fun.
They're a great live team.
Yeah.
And for me personally, like I said, the co-op and the college co-op experience have been really like that aspect of it is really great.
It's just all of it.
It's one of the greatest games in recent history.
One of the things I wanted to mention, because this is a powerful speech, is sort of instead of doing some kind of corporate goodbye as you were leaving Blizzard, you allegedly shared with your team a video of David Bowie giving advice.
And people should go watch this clip.
Letting Go of Projects00:08:47
But if I may read it, Bowie says, never play to the gallery.
Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.
I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations.
I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.
And the other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you're working in, you're not working in the right area.
Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in.
Go a little bit out of your depth.
And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.
Speaking of which, you are just about in a place to do something exciting after leaving Blizzard.
You told me that you tried to take some time off.
How did that work out for you?
Not so well.
My wife, who is wonderful, told me I needed to take at least a year off and just, you know, I've been going really hard.
I'd gone 19 years, barely taking vacation.
And I let Blizzard consume me.
And, you know, I was crushed by leaving because I loved the place.
And I didn't know what to do with myself.
I was pulling weeds in the backyard.
Literally, gardening.
Yeah.
Well, she won't let me garden in the garden because that's hers, but I'm allowed to pull the weeds.
So I got very good at that.
I was very proficient.
And then of all things, I cracked out on Call of Duty, Black Ops, Cold War, and I unlocked Dark Matter Ultra, which I'd never, that's like a crazy achievement to do in that game.
So I did that.
And then I just, I couldn't help it.
Like, it's how I'm programmed.
It was like at this point, it's late spring, early summer, and I'm just sitting in the backyard.
And I just started writing with Notepad about here's a game I want to make.
And it was so terrifying because for 19 years, I had worked with the greatest developers I thought in the industry.
And, you know, there'd be moments where it's like, okay, I want to do like a game world map.
Like, hey, Aaron, you're amazing at making game world maps.
Like, you do that.
And, you know, I like, I need some story hooks.
Hey, Chris, what do you think would be cool here?
Like, you know, it's so collaborative.
And I was surrounded by the best of the best.
And there I was by myself.
And I was out there again.
And I loved it.
It brought all the joy of game making.
I thought games were no longer fun to make because it was only about business and somebody's asking me for unreasonable amounts of money and unreasonable amounts of time.
And I had forgotten the pure joy of the craft of making games.
And I was designing, I was going online, I was watching YouTube videos to learn Unreal and Adobe Illustrator and all these things to like help me make games, whatever, Blender.
I had no right to be doing any of that.
And it just felt so amazing to do it.
And I sort of realized I came to two realizations.
One, I never want to work for someone else again.
I never want to create something and then have somebody take my baby away from me.
You know, that's really hard when that happens.
And it's sort of happened a few times now, you know, where you have to just let something go that you created.
And I wanted it all to be focused on the craft of making games, the art, programming, design, audio.
You know, like just not about the bullshit of the games industry.
I'm not interested in the games industry.
I'm not interested in the business of games.
Not interested in the entertainment industry.
It's just game jamming, making stuff that we're going to play together.
And around that time, my I call him my development soulmate.
There's a programmer named Tim Ford.
He reached out and he's like, hey, man, he was like associate tech director on Overwatch at the time.
He's like, yeah, I don't think I can do this anymore.
It's just not like it was, you know, I just handed him my notice.
And I'm like, whoa, you know, well, if you want to do something together, like, fuck it.
Let's take a stab and, you know, just see what happens.
And Tim came over to my house.
And, well, before that, he says, my last day is on Friday.
And my exit interview is at like one o'clock.
I'm going to be over to your house at like two o'clock that afternoon.
And I'm like, well, don't you think you should take some time off, Tim, you know, before whatever's next for you?
Take a month off.
You know, Meg, his wife will appreciate it.
You know, just go pull weeds in the garden for a while.
And he's like, I'm a programmer.
All I'm going to do is program for a month.
If I take a month off, I might as well start programming our game, which is it was so awesome when he said that.
He came over and I pitched him this idea for a game and I pitched him, let's start a company.
And that was it.
Like that was the birth of us making a studio.
Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the earth, but you were actually working on a game.
Yeah, I needed to be away from the world.
I needed to not have, I wanted to not get attention from anyone.
I needed to not read my name on Reddit or, you know, any internet site.
I wanted to not come up, let some other Jeff Kaplan bubble the top of the Google, you know, search list.
You know, our man, Dino Foster, is going to be all over this conversation, right?
Oh, God.
Well, there's, yeah, this one's going to set him back some time.
But I needed to know what to do.
I needed for none of that to happen.
I just needed to be able to like mourn the loss of Blizzard and create on my own.
So it was great.
And at that time, like as soon as it was announced that I was leaving Blizzard, I had like 60 people reach out to me.
It was, this was April of 2021 and investment money was nuts, both like the VC money and the strategic money was crazy, like the, especially the Chinese companies, because apparently they weren't getting publishing numbers in China or something.
The whole economy was crazy.
And so, just everybody was trying to throw money at me, which was a very good position to sort of be at to start a company.
So, what Tim and I did was say, We're not doing this for money, but here's the game we want to make.
And it's going to take this many developers, and we think it's going to take this length of time, and that means the budget is this.
And we need for any of these people who want to invest in us, we got to hit that number.
But after that, we're not going to go for more money.
It's not an auction to raise as high as we can go.
We're going to optimize for control.
I don't know if this is something that you can talk about, but I got a chance to see the game for a few hours.
And I have to say, it's incredible, Jeff.
Defining the Budget and Scope00:10:38
Like, it's incredible.
But I almost immediately fell in love with the world and everything I saw.
See, I'm tempted to say some of the things I saw, but it's just an incredible game.
So, how much can you talk about it?
Do you know what it's going to be called?
Can you talk about that?
Do you know about the company?
Are you allowed to say any of that?
Sure.
The most unconventional way to talk about this stuff for the first time.
So, our company name is Kensugiyama, which most people will struggle to pronounce.
And the company name has a deep meaning to me, which I'm happy to explain later if you're interested.
And the game name that we're working on, it's called The Legend of California.
And it's an open world game.
People are going to call it a survival crafting game.
People like to compartmentalize these.
I think it's an action game.
It's a game that takes place on a mythical island of California in the 1800s.
In the gold rush.
If you're trying to nail the most important time in California history, it's got to be that gold rush.
So it's this beautiful, almost ultra-realistic version of California, but it's in an alternate history, alternate version of California where it's an island, almost like an Atlantis type of ethereal island, but still very realistic to what the California terrain is.
Correct.
And that time period.
So it's this weird like amalgamation of this ultra-realistic and the surreal.
The theme of the game is very weird.
We're not trying to make a historical game.
There's no historical accuracy to this.
In fact, the island, when first discovered, is uninhabited.
That's already not true.
As we know, there were lots of people in California.
It's an island, which we know is not true.
We want it to feel authentic to that time period because we think that time period is cool.
Prospectors, you know, cowboys, like it's a really fun thing for us to explore.
All of those themes, people in minds, we want to build minds and we just want to create a world that you can live in.
I love creating worlds.
Everything that I've worked on before, from World of Warcraft to Overwatch, it's always been how do you create this place for players to escape to.
So it's an online multiplayer game.
I should say the experience of it is just gorgeous.
And then the music is wonderful.
I'm glad you like it.
One of my favorite things is just going down to the mine and digging.
I mean, that's done extremely well.
And as you described, the whole world is voxels.
So it's generated.
Can you explain how that works?
Yeah, as as a world, we handcrafted the world.
So like the shape of California is always the familiar shape of California, except it's an island.
So, you know, there's no Nevada on the eastern side.
We handcrafted all of that.
It looks gorgeous.
And places like Yosemite are where you would expect Yosemite to be.
And so all of those familiar landmarks are there.
But then we have like dozens of points of interest.
And those move around the map and depending on the map seed.
And the map is also tiered in terms of difficulty.
We don't really have levels in this game.
We have tiers.
And there's only four tiers right now.
Maybe that will change.
But the way that the map tiers itself each time changes with every world seed.
So not only any server that you join will have a different seed in terms of how the tiers play out.
So Mojave might be the easiest newbie area on your server, but on my server, it's endgame tier four area.
But all of our notable points of interest also move around.
So we have a really amazing point of interest that we call Dread Rock that's inspired by Alcatraz.
And like, sure, sometimes it's in San Francisco, but sometimes it can be sitting in the middle of the Mojave Desert also.
It integrates it into the environment to where it makes sense to be in that environment.
And like you said, so much of what makes the world is sound and lighting.
Yes.
And that's definitely a thing that I've noticed.
I mean, probably the most beautiful sunset and sunrise I've seen in the game.
We have a great lighting artist who, this amazing guy named Mike Mara.
And some of the inspiration for the game, like there's a lot of inspirations for this game, but there's a painter named Albert Beardstadt who I discovered while researching California.
And he painted these just epic landscape pieces of, you know, Yosemite and a lot of other, the gorgeous parts of it.
We're looking at one photo of his.
Yeah, it's just amazing.
And these paintings were huge, too.
I'd love to see one in person.
So you see a painting like that and you're saying, we want to create that world.
Yeah.
I mean, when I see that painting, this is what video games brings to the table.
So every art form that evolves after another gets to incorporate previous art forms.
Movies got to take sound and, you know, fine art.
We get to take everything, including movies.
So, you know, it's Katamari Damasi, the art form.
But like, I see a Beardstadt painting and I want to walk around that world.
I want to see what's around the corner.
And our lighting artist, Mike, he, you know, he sees these pictures and he's like, okay, yeah, hold my beer.
Like, I'll make it look like that.
And he, and he, we are all blown away by the, like, how much impact just the lighting.
And I'm not an artist, so I don't think about things like the color theory, the lights, the clouds, what all of that's bringing to this.
I just know I want to live in that world.
And these are the types of worlds that we want to make.
So what do you want the tone of the game to be, the feeling of the game?
This is really different.
It's been hard for people when people were talking to us about, you know, they know me and Tim and they're, oh, the Blizzard guys, the Overwatch guys, you're making like a bright aspirational future team-based hero shooter, right?
And I'm like, why would I want to do that?
I felt like, first of all, respects to Blizzard in I don't want to try to crib Blizzard and make a pseudo-Blizzard game.
You know, this is, I want to make a Kansugiyama game.
You know, me and Tim and this crack team, you know, we're only 34 people.
We want to define what a Kensugiyama game is.
And this world seemed so inspiring to us.
You know, the setting is really interesting.
You know, I think California can be a game world.
I think we can make it beautiful and interesting.
We don't have to follow history or geography.
We can kind of do a spin where, you know, it feels authentic.
We can have guns that feel like they're kind of from that time period, but we're not spaceships and aliens and steampunk.
That's what we would have done at Blizzard.
We're going to be a little different here.
So the tone of this game, you know, Metzen would describe Blizzard as the hero factory.
You know, we make, and what he means by that is not only are we making heroes, but we make the players into heroes.
This game is going to have an edgier tone.
You're going to enter this world.
It's going to feel lonelier.
It's going to feel mysterious, larger than you.
You're going to feel small until you earn the right to feel big.
It's going to feel really dangerous.
You're going to want to see what's over that next hill.
But if the sun is setting, like get to shelter.
Can't wait to get back to my ranch and put my cozy fireplace on and wait till morning.
You know, we want more of that vibe.
It's more solitary, almost scary, but beautiful.
Yeah.
That makes that tension.
I hate to ask this question, but given our previous discussion about a timeline slide, but what do you think a timeline looks like?
When do you think it's possible for somebody in the world to be able to play this game?
So this is the beauty of me and Tim kind of getting to run the show and why we're excited about it.
We can kind of do whatever we want within reason.
Yeah.
So we're just going to kind of quietly put it up on Steam and see what happens.
You know, no like big corporate marketing group would ever think to do that in a million years without like some, you know, $10 million announce or whatever.
We'll just kind of put it on Steam and be cool if people wish listed it.
There's my plug.
And then I think we are shooting to have some sort of public-ish alpha in March.
And then our plan is something I'm really excited about because I've never gotten to do this before.
We want to put the game in early access.
Some people hate early access and won't touch it.
And I understand it.
And then some people are like, I want to be in on the ground floor and see the thing from day one and watch it evolve.
So we'll put it into early access and we'll just run that until who knows.
Is it scary to you to have a sort of game with some rough edges out there in the wild where people are interacting with it through the alpha, through the beta?
Embracing Imperfect Early Access00:03:05
Yes.
And this game has more rough edges.
Probably like the most rough edges we would have at Blizzard is like showing you at BlizzCon, which was heavily polished and controlled.
This is going to be more, you know, like in development than anything else I've ever worked on.
But I love it.
Part of the excitement too, you know, it's kind of like this is this is how the sausage gets made.
I mean, you're going to see it front row.
I'm going to try to get myself into the alpha somehow.
Anybody who is listening to this, I highly recommend this game.
You will not be disappointed.
The world itself is just beautiful.
So, whoever's behind it, you and Tim and the team is just doing an incredible job.
And thank you for putting out rough versions of it.
So, we get to not wait forever for the perfect thing.
And because you feel like you're a part of it, if you get the imperfect thing, I'm one of the people who like the imperfect.
We get to see the rough versions develop and get to be a part of it developing.
I saw the logo as a mountain.
Can you explain the meaning behind the name?
So, Kensugi is a Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery.
So, there's a lot of philosophy that goes into it as well.
And, you know, I want to do a good job of explaining it.
But basically, like you take a broken piece of pottery and then they would use golden joinery, like golden lacquer to put the piece back together.
And the thought was rather than hiding the scars, you make them more beautiful.
And the philosophical parts that sort of appeal to me with that is there's a lot of me and Tim in that of we're so appreciative for our time at Blizzard, but we didn't come away unscarred.
And there's also a philosophy in Kensugi that nothing's ever perfect and the pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake, and that there's beauty in imperfection.
And so I relate that to myself personally.
That's how I feel in an aspirational way.
I'm not saying I've achieved it, but in an aspirational way, I want to be that way.
And I think it's also an analogy for the making of games.
Like, it's a making of games is a constant pursuit of imperfection.
Game is never going to be perfect.
Just ask the players.
They're very vocal about it.
And seeing the beauty and the imperfections and the strength in something that's been broken that can be stronger.
You had a heck of a difficult couple years here.
And so in some sense, it represents that beauty in imperfection.
Lessons from Breath of the Wild00:04:08
So everybody listening to this, I hope you do have it out on Steam.
Go check out Legend of California.
Truly a beautiful world.
I'm so glad you were actually creating this low-key, quietly creating this beautiful, incredible world.
Ridiculous question, but can we talk about some of the greatest games of all time?
Yes.
What I mean, I know this is a bit of a nerding out kind of thing.
And outside of the games you've been part of creating, I think Blizzard has created some of the greatest games of all time.
Outside of those, what do you think are in the list?
So there's one that's the best.
It's Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild.
And then there's this list of greatest games, Zork, Ultima.
So Breath of the Wild is the best.
Greatest game ever made.
What makes it the greatest game ever made for you?
Every aspect is so thoughtful, so well designed.
The art matches the design and the tech, and even integrating with the Switch in the way it does.
How do you keep making Zelda better?
How can Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time exist and somebody make an even better Zelda game?
The way you can chop down a tree and float in a river and like the world is a toy and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work.
And there's a narrative aspect to it.
And there's really fun combat and action and itemization.
There's so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right and are become best in their genre just for getting that one thing right.
And Breath of the Wild does them all right and the best.
There's a certain kind of lightness to the way the world feels, the openness of the world feels.
That's unlike any other game, right?
It's uniquely that company, uniquely that.
Nobody else creates that.
You're right.
Under the pressure of having created a bunch of Zeldas, they're like really great games to be able to deliver once again.
Nintendo is like the mecca.
Like they're the best.
You know, that's all there is to it.
Do you understand how that company works?
No.
I don't at all.
Like, because I mean, they've been around for a long time and still to be able to deliver.
I kind of rationally or irrationally just worship.
It's just sort of, if it's from Nintendo, it's going to be great.
And even if my first impression is like, wow, they're doing what weird thing with the controller this time.
And then you get your hands on it and you're like, God.
My son and I, we both played Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, and he makes games also.
And we had this moment where he's like, I'm so sad after I played it.
And he's like, I know I'll never make anything like this.
And it's that weird, like you honor it so much and think it's so great.
Red Dead was like that for me.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is, that's a game I put on a shrine.
Not just how brilliant the game itself is, but as a game maker, as a craftsperson who makes games, how the hell do you make that?
Like only Rockstar with all the years of making those types of games, no one else can come in entry level and compete with that.
So that's truly single player, narrative-driven.
So you also respect that kind of like pure.
Yeah.
I don't give anyone a pass.
I feel like a lot of gamers and game developers, like if it has writing, they're like, the story is so good.
I'm like, actually, very few games have great story, but Red Dead has a great story.
It's got great character development.
It's got a good plot.
The Magic of Resetting Worlds00:03:49
And the dialogue is like, it's like Tarantino level, high-quality dialogue.
So Red Dead's up there.
I have my other games that make the list for me.
And these are both these games are, I would never tell you to play them.
EverQuest and Rust are two of the most defining games to me and my career and my life.
And Rust, I would never recommend somebody go and play it.
Rust will come calling to you if you are up to play it.
It is a cult.
It's 100% a cult.
When you're ready, it will come to you.
It will come down.
It will let you know.
In Rust, you are considered a complete noob that doesn't know what he's doing.
If you don't have a thousand hours, even a thousand hours, people will be like, oh, you only have a thousand hours in that game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But Rust and a lot of inspiration for me in the game I'm working on now.
My game is not like Rust in that it's not a PvP-centric game, but it will have PvP.
What aspect of Rust do you draw inspiration from?
I love the resetting world.
It's a great game mechanic and it's one that I want to evolve and work upon.
How often does the world reset?
Do you think in Legend of California?
I don't know yet.
Probably every month.
We want it to be fast enough that you're not too attached, but we want to make it rewarding.
Like the trick is coming up with not why am I upset that the world resets, but why am I excited that the world resets?
And we know players can get very angry about resetting worlds, but anybody who's played 5,000 hours of Rust, like some of us, the resetting world is the magic.
It's, I can't wait for the next reset because the adventure starts all over again.
And if you want to play the first time with me, like if we want to play World of Warcraft and I'm level 80 and you're level one, there's no meaningful experience we can have together.
But in Rust, we just wait for a reset and we're both naked on the beach, you know, from minute one.
What about the experience of Rust where you can have everything taken away from you?
Is that part?
We're not doing that.
Right, right.
Because that feels awfully stressful.
Yeah, I just lost the entire Rust audience when I said we're not doing that.
Because if you're a Rust player, you're not thinking you're going to lose everything you have.
You're thinking I'm going to take everything somebody else has.
See, my perception of the Rust audience is there's like three people.
They're in a castle somewhere.
It's a very exclusive group.
They are highly skilled, highly passionate, highly knowledgeable.
Yeah, it's an inspiration for me.
That and EverQuest were defined.
And the amount of hours I've logged in both those games are insane.
What do you think has more hours from Jeff Kaplan?
EverQuest or Rust?
Well, you said I was 6K on EQ.
So that puts me, I met 5K in Rust.
And also in that collection is Zork.
Zork was, I mean, Zork, it just brings me back to that old IBM PC with my mom and my brother trying to figure out, you know, like how to keep the lights on or else the groove's going to eat us, you know?
Yeah, so certain games just capture your heart and they stay with you forever.
AI in Creative Pursuits00:06:47
What do you think is the future of video games?
So there's a lot of conversations about AI helping expand maybe the storytelling aspects, the world creation aspects becoming a tool that people can use more so, maybe creating more believable NPCs, that kind of thing.
But also there's, as we've talked about, the video game industry is changing and evolving and trying to figure out whether it's the indie game makers that will have more power or these larger game makers will have more power.
So what do you think the future of games looks like?
I think with AI in mind in particular, I think the current state of AI trying to integrate it into development is mostly a hot mess.
Yeah.
But I do think that, you know, games are a technology-driven art form.
And somebody much smarter than me once described it, and I'm paraphrasing: making a game is like making a movie if you had to invent the camera every time because you're kind of inventing the technology of your specific game.
And I think AI can play a role in that, and we'd be silly not to look at it as an option.
The problem with AI right now is it's overconfident in what it tries to deliver.
Like it fooled around, obviously, like everybody, like you mess around with, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini, and you fool around with some of the art generation.
And it's fun for non-artists to fool around on mid-journey, but it's mostly weird and shitty.
And even like when trying to have AI answer for me, like I don't normally make UI in a game.
And so I'm trying to figure out like UMG and the Unreal Engine.
And I'm asking ChatGPT to how to, how to fix like a simple problem.
Like, how do I make the chat rap, you know?
And it like overconfidently gives me the wrong answer.
And it's like right one in 10 times.
So its hit rate has to be a lot better.
I think there's a lot of moral concerns around AI when it comes to creative pursuits as well.
Like no one's creative work should ever be used by AI without their permission.
You know, voice actors and artists, it can't be lifting from them without their permission.
That's just immoral.
It's no different than just sort of stealing.
So that's wrong.
I think how I'm curious, like especially as somebody who runs a small studio with 34 people, it's like, what are the points of tedium that maybe AI could help out with that I don't want to do?
And I'm not going to hire someone to do.
So I had like a really dumb example.
I'm making a bunch of images.
I size them all incorrectly because I'm dumb and I'm not an artist.
And I did it all in Photoshop and I have like 2,000 images that are the wrong size.
I can have ChatGPT resize those and zip it in a file for me.
And it literally takes it like a minute to do that.
I wasn't going to hire an intern to do it.
I was just going to work an hour later or two hours later that night to do it.
Like it made my life easier.
It didn't take a job.
That seems okay.
As long as that ethical line stays in place, what I don't worry about is no matter how good AI gets, never going to draw a picture like Arnold's saying.
It's never going to tell a story like Chris Metson.
You know, the human spirit is irreplaceable.
Yeah, it's hard to put into words what is that magic that humans produce, but they do.
Truly great creative minds, truly great creative teams.
They create something special.
It's hard to really articulate exactly what's missing with AI, what people call AI slop because it creates really beautiful imagery and beautiful stories and very believable text, but it's not quite, it doesn't have that, I don't know what it is, the edge that's human.
Maybe it's the imperfections.
Yeah, I think so.
Like AI to me right now, currently, it's like an interesting fever dream.
You know, that's at the point I'm at with it.
And a useful tool for the mundane task, like you said.
But do you think the small studios have a hope in the future of gaming?
Small studios are the future of gaming.
The big studios basically acquire the small studios for new IP and ideas, and the small studios grow in the really compelling, new, innovative ideas are going to come out of small studios.
What advice would you give to video game creators, small teams, if they want to create a truly special game?
Well, they know how to do it.
I mean, if they're doing it, they know how to do it.
It's more to video game developers in general own the craft, own our art form, stop giving it to these fucking corporate jackholes.
You are the golden goose.
Yeah.
Keep your eggs.
Jeff, formerly from the Overwatch team, I have to say from the bottom of my heart, and I think I speak for millions of people.
Thank you for everything you've created in this world.
Now that I've gotten a chance to see the new game, I can't tell you how excited I am to try it.
Thank you for everything you've created.
Thank you for everything you represent.
Thank you for remaining and fighting for us as one of us.
So thank you.
And thank you for talking today.
Thank you, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Kaplan.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
Don't Bend: Final Words00:00:21
And now, let me leave you with some words from Franz Kafka: Don't bend.
Don't water it down.
Don't try to make it logical.
Don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next Next time.