#493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming

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 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 got the 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 while 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, given 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, laws, 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 sunrise 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 wishlist it on Steam, join the Alpha, Later and March, I think, and Early Access is on the way. And now a quick few second mention of eSponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedwin.com slash sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We've got Finn, Focustumers of the AI agents, Blitzy for Code Generation in large code bases, Better Help for Mental Health, Shopify for Selling Stuff Online, Code Rabbit for AI-powered code review, and Proplexity as always for Curiosity-German Knowledge Exploration to you guys and my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads, I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason go to lexfreedwin.com slash contact. All right, let's go. 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In particular, of course, is anything that is awesome in this life, has to have a CLI. I'm being funny, but it's also true for a genetic programming of this. Code Rabbit CLI is incredible, highly recommended. It's a backstop for hallucination and logical errors that AI coding agents still to this day. And I again think for a long time to come, we'll still generate some percent of the time. It supports all programming languages, install Code Rabbit CLI today at coderabbit.ai slashlex. That's coderabbit.ai slashlex. 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. 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 too. So he, you know, his little nephew, he was just given quarters to play Pac-Man. I remember being my brother's graduation in Philadelphia. They had an asteroid machine in the lobby. That was one of the first coin op machines. I played as well. And my brother and I would, we 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 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 go 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. 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, 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. 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 and super that I didn't know existed at the time. And it was like suddenly the world opened up more and games could be more. 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 they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time. And my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I she bought a 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 two and Zork three trilogy. Zork trilogy. I see it. And it was weird and like the sometime in the 90s, there was this 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's you forest and there was all the characters. And the first Ultima I played was Ultima two because Ultima one 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 have a quest. Yeah. So 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 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, there's some of the craziest, funniest, you know, I know 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 feed the apple with 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, 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'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 LPDs, and then the rest of us, you know. 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 reached. I don't read any of the new sites anymore, but I read Blues News, which was like someone actually teased me recently. I linked them a story. I'm like, oh, did you hear these new things 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, guidance, Steven, he slipped. 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'd 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 Varrant, 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 had to made that post, I never would have checked out EverQuest. We'll talk about EverQuest. So since you mentioned Carmack and Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack? Why was he such an important 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 Wolf and Seen when it was a 2D game. You'd run around, you'd dress up as a German, you'd go grenade, 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, it was the intimacy of first person, 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 it in those days in Carmack and Romero. I, as somebody who worked on an FPS, I, that wouldn't have existed without them. Credit where credits do. And by the way, we should say you're, as a gamer, your range is incredible. You are a legit first person shooter gamer, but you're 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 this same exact experience with 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 still needs 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 was 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 want it to be a writer. You told me your main influences were Kerouac, but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, Orwell. 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 strangle thorn. 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. That's one way to go about it. Yeah, Franz Kafka, 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 many, you know, as many to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But there's like millions of kids just like James Joyce writers, they're declaring exactly that that turned out not to be. But that is in some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases you have to have that ego. Yeah. 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's 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 rational rationalizing it after the fact, you know, it was easy to do. 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 is 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. Now, 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 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 writings are 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 draw across across the United States and then wrote a book about it or just to take care of wax as an example. Anyway, sorry. You might have been more successful. I had 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 I 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 nameless for recruiting company. And I would take whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start like five in the morning. And I created all of this space for me to write. And I just, I had a dog named Jack. He 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 Kerrowack and poetic and epic. I just looked like a dumbass. But you 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 I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines. And you had to send envelope with return self-addressed 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 onto this. Like it was like, oh, Glimmer Train said, you know, showing promise, you know, and you just hang onto 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. 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 to come hell or high water. And sometimes there's that reality, especially when you're now in your mid 20s, we 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. That's so painful. Because you invest in 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 just 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. To cut it off. Is there a 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 having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side, which you don't know at the time. 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. 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. 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 there really, I mean, that is a real hero's journey of searching as a young person. It's a real like, you know, all the adults with their wisdom, they've stopped searching often. 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 they 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, the pressure that society kind of puts on us is, you know, oh, you want to be an astronaut, you want to be a firefighter, do you want to be a writer, 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 uncles pressuring you into, you know, 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 at a moment by moment basis. Yeah, that's really 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 was 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. You know, I, it was 1999 when that game came out. And I had a friend's Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend. 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, 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. I, 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, it was kind of insane. Well, that's over 6,000 hours. Yeah. Of gameplay. Yeah. Wow. So here, go to proplexity. EverQuest is a long running 3D fantasy massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I'm a more RPG set in the world of Norath as you were saying. First released in March 1999. It is an online roleplaying game where thousands of players create characters, group up and explore persistent shared world is widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs helping to find raid content, kill the systems in 3D online worlds. That's the other component of it. There's, it's all humans. And they group up. Yeah. And they raid together in the game. Yep. And the context of EverQuest rating is usually around 30 people or more getting together to conquer something that you couldn't beat otherwise. And to do successful rating, you usually need 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 the time leveling up I was unguilded where I was in like a roleplaying guild with rogues only. And it was when I got to level 50 in 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 when you won and you 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 loan 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 supergirl. So organizing, 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 the 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, it was a great group. It was super fun. It was people from all walks of life. And to coordinate these people, you just had to repeat everything 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 eye bushy tail. 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 every quest. 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 may be all of them are anonymous. So you just have to use their name 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. You kind of assumed everybody was male. And then it was a surprise if they were actually female. Like my wife, for example, that's how I met her. You met her in every quest. I met her in every quest. That is a true love story. Yeah. Yeah. The funny part for me with every quest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played every quest and people are like, you're through 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 every quest. So I think I won the game. Yeah. Yeah. You're like the the well actually. Well, you're a life that will be on a Wikipedia page somewhere that says, well, here's an example of somebody. Yeah. Why video games are awesome. Yeah. I mean, some of the extra missions that 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 in my life, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But like looking back, just all nighters, you pull playing a particular video game, allowing yourself to really fully be immersed, seeing the sun come up. On, by the way, many of those games from you, or Blizzard games, this is an incredible thing that video games have been able to do. I think, you know, used to be in still somewhat the case that books do that kind of same thing. They 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 is usually in it's 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. It wasn't except there was a stigma to it. And one of the weird 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, in 20 years ago, what if, you know, not today. Now 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 is it to say goodbye for you? To Everquest. It was really hard. And there were times where you try to quit. Well, 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 didn't 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 luck. 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. Now, telling them in now famous, their solo rants, the famous one where you tell many of them to do a bunch of things, including to pull their heads out of their asses. You're 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 like 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, it 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 of Blizzard? So when the first skill leader left legacy of Steel the founder, he was a guy named, his online name was Dread. That was his name. He left. And our guild was kind of in this list, list, 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. And over time, Ariel got busier and busier. And you know, would send me messages like, hey, I'm not going to be online 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 heroes 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 ever quest 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 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. Um, where I hear you're in Pasadena because you mention it, you know, I 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, 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. It was much more of the half life quake quake three 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. There was a 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 want like freaking out, freaking out. No, I was freaking out in the different sense. I'm like, am I going to get mugged when I like, who is this a scam? Because you didn't meet people off the internet. So I drove down there. I ended up there was there was Rob Pardo who at that time was a lead designer on Warcraft 3. And he was aerial, you know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all. It wasn't this blonde wood elf. 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, the guy named Dailamann. 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, you know, I made friends with these people online. Now we know each other in real life. And they happened 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's one of those like inside invites of like whose barfa. I don't know, but Barfa is in the guild now. And there was at the time, it was a new dungeon called the whole. And we had never done it before. 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 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 say, here use this, you know, 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 ad ham. 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 Mourheim, 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 Everga's, he wasn't playing much at the time. He said, I want you to 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. 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 at moment like that, 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 hard course 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 or 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, PPP 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 a 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 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, 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. 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 and the jack in the box. Can you speak to because you mentioned some of the low points in the in 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 how? 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. 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 how 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, it's really drunk and and all those people seem 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 check box. So if 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 anti depressants 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 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 that and starting at Blizzard. So fine, I mean, there is a deep loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch, you're alone. I can really deep fund them at the way like in the way you weren't in New York with the writer with the writers group, right? And so that 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 great. What 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 spent all four years of undergrad in turning 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 cast system. And I was on the bottom of the cast system as an intern and I was seeing how the other people who were low cast in the film industry were treated. 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 and a thing you love. Yeah. I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic one of us, quote, one of us posed you made on April 18th, 2002. Because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us. The I apologize to bring up Justinian emperor, but you remain the 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'll be designing Quest for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's MMO RPG 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 end game content for World of Warcraft. The reason I'm sharing this information besides the fact that I have a messochistic love of reading rants and flames about myself is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore MMO RPG 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 while 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 sings, 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 MMO RPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interests of the player. 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 laps and 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 that need to learn the words that are called the words, cack, sagger, and moh, faq, or 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. But there's brilliance behind that. There's a passion behind that. Like when you're a gamer and you really put it in the hours and 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 is how many trade-offs there are, how your designs when they actually are brought to the world and they're experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, they are different from the division you had for it. So all those elements you don't know. But you have to have that ego in the beginning, right? Yeah. Do you even have the guts to try to have the guts 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's 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. I played 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 or the developers like? What was the vibes like in those early days? It was the dream. When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office was on the University, 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 was like a building right next to it that had like Cisco and you know, it was like all kind of techy 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 non-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 Sam 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 One and Team Two at Blizzard South. Team One was revered. These are the RTS guys. They made Starcraft, Warcraft Two, and they were at that time they're working on Warcraft Three. Team Two was kind of the red headed step child. 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 Two was working on at first. That got scrapped and Alan steered the team towards World of Warcraft. And there's amazing designer named Eric Dodds. He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of Harstone. 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 V. John Cash from Id. And you know, John Cash has a skin. You could be John Cash in Quake Three. 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. Val famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer. But in companies where design is a discipline, which 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 this part of a 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, somebody who's going to make quests or write storylines where there might even be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on a 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. As 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 the great lighting artists. And that's 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 artis 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 like 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. And programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized and they're thinking and everything 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 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 of boys may be 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. And it's exactly like you said. And there's a weird thing that happens. It's 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. Um, 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 might say a statement like that? It's harmful to a discipline to think that you understand the world. No silly other folks don't. And you have nothing to learn from them, really. And um, they're deluded in some, 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. It, 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 why, 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 of 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 then not like it puts me in a 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 have 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, I one 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 parto 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 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, parto 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 who I whose idea wouldn't have been championed whose idea by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know, early 2000s would have just said no. 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 high-em 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 question dungeons and progress your gear and power and open fantasy world called Azeroth. At a basic level, you move usability from your action bar follow quest and gradually learn a combat rotation that fits your class and there's all kinds of characters and roles in classes you pick a race, appearance, starting zone, small racial bonuses and a class how you fight, where your role is in groups. Can you continue feeling some of the gaps? What is world of warcraft? World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything is a world. It's a world you can live in with real other people and everybody's kind of living out their fantasy. Chris Metzen, 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 believe 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. But it's this world you're living in. 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 the Alliance. And in the early days, there was a really strong division. Strong division. Yeah. You big aside and then you hang around with only people you're kind. Yeah. And you get a tattooed in real life on you. Like the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo. It'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 Ticondria. You'd be like, dude, Alliance. 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 part of when I came from EverQuest where we felt like this was a horrible decision. Alan was making. And we argued Alan, Rob, Bob Thitch 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 retirees 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 dead. 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 the early days of wow was it was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. We had Mark Kern running the team Shane DeBerry was legendary Blizzard developer, Bill Petrus was the art director. And then we had Metson who was sort of like Metson was the cool big brother. We all, you know, aspired to be older than Metson, 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 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 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 they later, you know, retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine. So we were like this Hodge Podge, like the bad news bears, because 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 Blizzard. 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 success with, especially with the early wow team team two and 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 Yehuz basically who was like, yeah, we can compete with Sony Online. Yeah. At the time they were making EverQuest 2 like if we go back in the time machine, EverQuest 2 had been announced. And EverQuest fans, we were just ruling foreverQuest 2. It wasn't oh cool World of Warcraft. It was EQ 2 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 Raff Koster 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 you know we're like, oh my god they're making EverQuest 2 and Star Wars galaxies. And if the Star Wars intellectual property were 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 it's the most pressurey of 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 be because you wanted to because your heart wasn't it because you're like this is everything like you loved it. Yeah the the games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It's just called crunch. 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 on additional 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 go 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 in different hours, you know, the family guys go much earlier than the single guys. And then watching everybody show up again in the next morning. And they're all like dress different. They look all refreshed. And I'm just like in the same position, you know, like eyes are beat red to the soundtrack of the cinematic. Yeah. But we crunched World of Warcraft. The date slipped. So you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing in 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 they 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. Yeah. And the carpets are stained and like dudes are falling asleep on the couches. 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'd never blamed on anyone but myself. I just wanted to. I remember, you know, coming in on Memorial Day like with sound 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 colds. Yeah, 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, I'm actually throughout their career that have been in 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 when they, especially when they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when you go through it, sometimes it's extremely difficult. You don't know. And then the crunch that 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 in 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 a 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. It's awesome. Let me ask you about quests. But first, quick math and break. It's okay. Yeah. Quick 30 second. Thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfrened.com slash sponsors. We got Finn for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for code generation in large code bases, better help for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, code rabbit for AI powered code review and proplexity for curiosity, driven knowledge exploration, choose wise and 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 an everquest consisted of maybe that simplifying it a bit, but standing your ones plot 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 guy through the world. And it so happens that it's 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 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 Nagle, 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 and 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 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 white board in Alan's office, we estimated how many quests we thought ever quests had to date. And ever quests that 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 ever quests 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 ever quest 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're going to interact with the NPCs and all 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 Westfall, 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 sort of described 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 of the way ever quest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level base game. You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit. And so the way people played ever quest 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 ever quest. And I remember Alan kind of telling us like, hey, the quests, when Pat and Jeff Wright 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 play test. 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 ever quest. 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 OSHIT moment right after that Elwyn forest play test 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 lease resistance. So basically what that means like an ever quest, the path of lease 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 lease 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 quest 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 story lines. 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 ever quest was very popular and very successful. And it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players. And wow, blew the doors open. There 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 as 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 of a 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 hated. The ones who hated are like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like you drop 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 needed. 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 like obviously one of those all these great ideas are always like this, right? In retrospect, you're like, well, obviously, if you make the path to leaser's existence quest driven gameplay, then it's going to be the reason that most people play. But it is true that I'm with you on 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 quests, killton rats, turning quest, ding level up, that loop. Like how do you fine tune us? So it's maximal 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 asked 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 there's an executional aspect to all of it. When I'm playing, I'm not only thinking about what makes us 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 saying? I mean, if I were to analyze the kind of game I am, why do I enjoy call level? And why above that, why do I enjoy loot? Why is loot so fun? Like what is 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. 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 spreadsheet 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. 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 that things like leveling, things like that 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. Like, 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 player's drift. Like, I'm the type of player he's not really loot motivated. I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer. And often that takes me on a 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 characters using. And I have to go into creativity mode. Oh, he has that one A E 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're 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? And we'll talk about Overwatch is a specific kind of fun. Maybe 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's a large trend these days to third person. I really think pub G and fortnight sort of opened that third person shooter door. And you're seeing games like arc raters 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 of can you click on the thing fast enough. And when it's PVP base, 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 it 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 and 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 could be like raids where it's multiple 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. Yeah, there's a town on 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 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 in the 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 for 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 IV, 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. But anyway, we should say that the co op could be remote connection, but there's also what would you call that? College co op. We 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. With a friend, with a loved one, you can play a game together. Diablo IV, I should say, is an example of a game that does that really well. They do college co op. Like two people can play Diablo sitting together. And there's a real intimate experience in that. It's funny because it actually predates the couch even some of those old arcade games. Yeah. Like would have two joysticks on them. And then you could play with somebody else. So 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 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 buddies 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 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 a 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, you know, writers and scripts and all of this stuff. 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 experiments like from a designer creative perspective, because you don't know what the players will create. So that's fun to see. You lay out the chess board, 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? Tell me about some goofy time, like a Luke 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 Leidlaw, the writing behind Portal and Portal 2. I think it was Eric Wolpa who is hilarious. Just amazing. And Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. And that's, 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, Guy and Town rides by and he's like, how are you partner? And I go to like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, hey, what's up back? And I just whip out my sawdoth 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's story of blowing off the poor guy. And then Rockstar does a really good job with, you know, even in Grand Theft Auto with the radio, it can be kind of a side aspect of the game that great writing there can create, how 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 and Wasong. That's the way it is. I just, I love Daniel and Wasong. 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, and gorgeous, like more of a score. There's Woody Jackson, he'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 and Wasong. And there's like the quotes are coming back from like Dutch and Arthur Morgan. 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, you just imagine a number of people who shed a tear during that moment. Then that's just the reflection of how much you're invested into this world and to these characters. That's a beautiful thing. I have to ask you about this, this image that you saw me, it's super cool. So yeah, I'd love it if you can nerd out about it a little bit. The zone flow for the original War of the Warcraft. There's a bunch of zones. It'd be awesome if you kind of talk through how like this world is built. Take me to that time when you're designing this before you want to else got a chance to play it. All while 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 Lwynn Forest. And then Westfall, there's, you know, this group called the DeFiAS Brotherhood. And they have a place called Deadmines. 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 head. 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 Iron Forge, 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 Iron Forge 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're looked 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 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 have to collect a bunch of pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorne. Maybe can you 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 Hemingh Nestingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway. There's another quest giver there that's Caroax 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 dipshit. That's the Green Hills of Stranglethorne like summed up. So like I wrote the story over like 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 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 there's a really great famous Sid Meier quote where it 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 care. 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 of 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 this story and then I divided it up into all of these different pages. And the quest giver, Hemant Nessingwary, wants you to put together like the stories like 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 until 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 pay 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 of 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. And it just became away. It not only became away 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's sort of challenged people to make better versions of it. I mean, again, you continue to speak with so much humility. But while 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 claim. And then you rose to become a game director of while 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 while 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, love by millions of people and delivered 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 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 any, here's my home number. Like, calm, 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 and 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 is it in tail? Like, you're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out on a particular slice of that experience that could 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're 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. 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. And sure enough, they'd be right. But you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA or just even on like a 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 said 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? You know, are you having fun? 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 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 subtle stuff. Yeah, 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 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 the the developer in 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? Is it 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 world-winding and no one else will play anything else. You're like we should probably fix that you know. Oh those were the days I sadly was the barbarian world and 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 and an era when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world. Just you know looking back what was them can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming, a change gaming forever where it's millions of people playing this video game. 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 he actually came from Ultima online. And so I always looked up to Tom. I see I 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 was just 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 joy ride because we were working on WoW. We were still working in sane hours. And then I'd get home, eat dinner, and then me and my wife would log in and play WoW for four hours. And then I'd go in the next day. And it was just my whole life was world of Warcraft. And I loved it. I loved everything from the creative meetings with Chris Metzen. And just what an inspiration and muse he was. Down to the simplest dumbest design stuff that 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 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 GM's 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. What did we call him? Guardians of Blizzard. They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touch to anything. We used to have them when we were in the beta. Like often 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 hush 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 lot of landline. But that's just how and I loved it. I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutiae. 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 wow 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, which had 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 wow was to run anti-cheat on your machine. And we had a moment where we 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 Mourheim. He's like, you got to bring the launcher back guys. We're like, why? 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 battle net has morphed into these days. But all those decisions. And when it came time to 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 exodus 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 Mourheim's office. And I watched them all go in and quit. And they were the group that formed a 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. I mean 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 sacrifice thing that nowhere, nowhere nearer matches the imagination of the inception of the idea. So you become disenfranchised with the concept. So 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 and less saying no and no and cutting and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's difficult, psychological, difficult. But nevertheless the result when you zoom out is one of the greatest games of all time. The millions of people played for thousands of hours. It's just you ever ever experienced 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. 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 exodus of people who quit Blizzard. They went and formed a couple notable studios. One was Car Mine. 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 Car Mine started it was I think all of our animators and some of our best programmers and like 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 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 2 the wow team was called team 2 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 credits do you remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become Blizzcon it was part of 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 expansion to Warcraft 3 but like we knew we're 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 gonna love like we're doing Blizzcon there is kind of Crickets with 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 sir and that was our perspective of what was happening and then like I said give Mike Morheim credit where credits do he kept us he kept us committed to that launcher and they put the Blizzcon 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 is talk about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft and isn't quite right it's a fascinating thing to me about human nature and it's absolutely true and I wish it was the 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 a conference as technical conferences they are they're all mostly full of love and in 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 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 I love X whatever do you just get made fun of yeah you get and then so with the 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 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 a aspect to 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 so on but you're used to pretty quick you understand it and 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 it I actually I had this reputation for being as year than I really was there were a couple notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back on um but they don't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill um 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'm spending a lot of time in 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 in 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 can just feel they're checking is it okay yeah so they're they're kind of like the default motor is whatever this everything is stupid this 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 gonna if I think this is awesome I'm gonna be the nerd I'm gonna take the risk and be made fun of for saying I love this in that case it's I love this robot so that that's a actual psychological effect that also young people doing it 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 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're 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 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 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 you would vengo have existed if you know read it 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 when 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 no cost but it does you're having 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 to and take risks being being vulnerable being cringed so doing the thing that like the embarrassing failure where you're standing there on you know in a silly clown outfit on stage dancing and nobody and nobody's laughing and it's as comedians go to this all the time when they talk about this all the time when they bomb right they they the act just doesn't work and you have to go through that and you have to you have to support the creators to that journey in order to have great things we need to support those those folks so after shipping while wrath of the lich king again many consider it to be one of the great expansions for while you step down as well as game director and switched to developing titan this epic huge game that promised to be the sort of the mmo to end all mmos and 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 cancelled 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 gonna last forever wow would be maybe successful for five years and eventually kind of age out and the studio would be real in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game uh sort of waiting in the wings so starting around i want to say 2006 maybe 2005 um the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum and we were working on burning crusade rob parto took the helm to start sort of titan development we didn't even really have a team then and i remember 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 la flore 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 an overwatch because that's where they came from and the by day stuff we're 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 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 that unlike world of warcraft which the the modern day term for is that it's sharded so meaning people play on different realms or servers and a wow server I don't 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 it 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 mount 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 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 to 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 in 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 the Titan team and um 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 um probably 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 gonna burn money go what was your intuition about why so like for my understanding there was a few issues so one was such a gigantic world which by the way isn't beautiful dream that's 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 like the quest flow is like what are you supposed to really do in this game what's the thing that connects all the pieces together so it was a multifaceted failure for for many reasons um 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 the 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 a three million dollars 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 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 days 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 of 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 over time 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 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 the first day at work and he's like are we making a world of starcraft is that and 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 as the devil's work or whatever you have these like brilliant team huge and we don't have a road map 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 prop shitty make shitty work on china town or the Hollywood set and you're just making up busy work the engine didn't work when we would run play tests on Titan we would have to tell the team stop checking in because it slows us down with this really great technical artist 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 and 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 like the best in the industry and they can't work 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 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 and 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 focused 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 constantly saying no that 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 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 hard break 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 for keeping some part of the Titan team the core of the team together and Mike more high and gave you six weeks to come up with a pitch for a new game and you've talked about this process and you've mentioned that there's the repossible 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 to those six weeks yeah the six weeks it's it was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it because your 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 immoralized 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 time for any game that's crazy but for a Blizzard game it's kind of insane yeah and then the second okay the the second is even more ambitious and crazy was 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 throughout 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 hardstone so immediately large number of the team was gone then we had a bunch of like what we called temp loans people that some day we're 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 like 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 adventure or you know make your mark on the world so we had this idea it was this old Chris Metson drawing of a space prospector and I love that idea that like somewhere out and 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 that's awesome more on the ground level I didn't even think about that because my intuition with Starcraft MMO will be the soldier as part of the army right the prospector that's such a beautiful vision yeah looking for the resources and on the way finding the 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 that's so then there was this Metson picture of the prospector and then two of the most amazing artists Arnold sang and Peter Lee Arnold's the great character artist Peter leaves the great environment artist they did this concept art for frontiers that was Metson space prospector he smoking a cigar and he's got his foot on a hydrolyse 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 preorder now like sign me up for that game um that picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch we redid it um but but yeah that's that was where McCree actually came from so that was the Starcraft Frontiers idea we kind of we we went all in on the design we had a world design we had class design like how how the classes would work um what progression might look like and you also have to think when you're trying to design a 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 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 also legit large scale MMO in a 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 yeah it would take I mean it would be incredible but it would be a five-year realistic leave and 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 gonna want a cutscene but we should probably make it a cutscene because that's easy but well we got out of space flight that you're adding like three years just by saying we got to have space flight you're 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 you essentially when you're brainstorming like that and by the way such an incredible thing 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 could do this a complete world I get constantly trying to simplify or you're 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 fucking amazing what's big what's what a player's need there's there's a blizzard design value called what is the fantasy what is the fantasy you you want to be in space you want to be in the starcraft universe and then your job is 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 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 sit case scenario is when your tech director art director and game director are doing the scoping 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 if you have a giant team and one guy's job is just to make props crates and chairs guys gonna make the you know that's a triple a awesome developer who's gonna 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 attention there the your costly dancing was you you're allowing yourself to think big but then scoping it down and doing that what on a scale of days in this case like 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 shot it off and go to idea number two yeah idea number two was crossworlds that was a medicine vision for a universe and like I'm glad mezzan's back at Blizzard and I hope they make this game someday um the way Chris described it was there's a planet on the edge of the universe that's like the Moss Eisley spaceport with all these you know freakish aliens and people from all walks of life and it's kind of city and criminal and there's traders 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 i pdraven one that was really inspired by Chris and there are a lot of you to play with different characters different I like that I like that idea a lot because it's the 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 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 mean 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 for frontiers we were having the class meetings you know how class progression work like the game designary stuff and on crossworlds we were having a class meeting of like a big decision in like RPG type games as 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 basis 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 there's no right or wrong it's all trade-offs so the trade-off um decision we were making is like oh i think we want to be class based with this crossworld saying 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 a nixia 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 set in this meeting he said i wish instead of making like six classes i wish we can make fifty classes and i wish instead of having like you know a hundred abilities on the classes the the fifty 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 with Jeff it 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 design we had a class called the the jumper and the jumper could like teleport forward and rewind time and come back and the jumper used dual wield pistols which was at the time designed after my dual g18s from modern warfare two was my favorite loadout i was just cribbing infinity ward that's where tracers 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 uh what does 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 gonna be on this team and i knew that Arnold Sang was gonna 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 um i went through a bunch of titan classes um with a guy named the gun jack who was became reaper um we had uh actually the ranger got split out and became 76 and became bastion of all things and you're describing the game of overwatch where exactly that vision from that meeting yes came to life for you as opposed to having a small number of classes within large number of skills you have a large number of heroes with each their distinct look distinct set of skills yeah and personnel the personality was a big part of it like capturing this isn't some generic the jumper it's this person lina oxden you know and she she has a life and we're gonna 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 in a direct way it's it's like seeps in indirectly throughout the game so the backstory is implied yeah 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 converged 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 um and it was called monetize shooter at the time yeah and it just said monetize shooter and then the first slide was League of Legends plus team fortress two logos yeah and then I had like six heroes like sloppily designed and as everybody was working on crossworlds um there were two you know co-leaders of that team four there was you know Chris met sim was there and ray grisco and I remember ray coming over uh ray is like a phenomenal game developer of all time he like wrote the dark forces engine was the production director on diablo three he and I killed titan and then um 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 them the seven slides and he just looks at me and he says go show met sim this this is what we should make instead and then I went and I showed met sim like hey this is this is just an idea and met sim 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 this 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 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 how we're supposed to be working on cross-worlds and you're like you got to pitch this idea to them and matt holly stossed me in the hall and says you Jeff you cannot go into that meeting I'm I refuse to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says monetized shooter they'll hate that and that's not the spirit of who we are is you know creative development and I'm 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 gonna 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 have written overwatch on that board and it got the most votes so I basically name the game overwatch to like high five my team and kind of middle finger yeah like yeah 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 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 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 besides dragging Arnold Seng's art you know desiccrating it into my deck we put together we had this amazing game designer on the overwatch team a guy named Jeremy Craig who's now actually game directing a game over at bonfire 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 and 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 one two and three 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 one 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 time frame 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 the slide of crawl walk run thinking it was aspirational and really we were just trying to save save ourselves like don't cancel that 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 the fucking Photoshop of you know Arnold's art on it and like and also it'll be on mobile brilliant yeah but I think this crawl walk run ideas 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 pve version of that go up and then if people really fall in love for the world then you build a big mm all around it quick pause for bathroom break quick 30 second thank you to our sponsors check them out in the description it really is the best way to support this podcast go to lexfreedman.com slash sponsors we got fin for customer service AI agents blitzie for co-generation in large code bases better help for mental health shopify for selling stuff online code rabbit for AI powered code review and perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration choose wise in my friends and now back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan and we should also say that there's a whole world that was built around overwatching one of the ideas was so warcraft is a very particular kind of world starcraft is a particular kind of world the apple is a particular kind of world and you wanted to bring overwatch to earth and make it positive you give this talk where there's 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 I like what the personalities but like bringing the world to life in which they will be what was the what was that process like the 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 you know if there's going to be all this fighting like that 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 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 what 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 mm-hmm or in the case of like oasis it's like okay maybe I rack 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 um so we just really tried to sell this idea of these uh 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 gonna spend a lot of time in the environment so the environment should be pleasing and not oppressive can you go to 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 uh from the best your knowledge of the internet favorites my my favorite I have a couple favorite heroes uh 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 game play 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 they're mapping out the possibilities and by the way we should say that uh it's a pvp game with six or six at first uh and where there's uh three distinct roles that people take on those uh on 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 uh damage yeah so that and then there's all the kinds of heroes that associate with the different roles and people pick and 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 uh there's no way you can talk about Overwatch without talking about team fortress two 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 1 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 which pains me because I'd never back in a 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 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 McCree 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 way to design a Mike Hyberg designed the high-noon ultimate um and then just all the Karen loved the team put in like when he does the ultimate we roll a tumbleweed across the screen like every time um 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 mobs or hero shooters and they start like this guy throws orbs and he throws three orbs and then he runs out of his orb uh bank and then he can call the orbs back or he can cash the orbs and I'm just my my head is spinning and I'm like just give me a fucking good gun you know and I'm done simplicity is everything yeah what about Ryan Hart the tank Ryan Hart was actually my main uh so I played the most of Ryan Hart 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 um 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 for dead two and there was 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 runaway train and watching Ryan Hart's charge to their deaths is kind of hilarious and it's what separates a great Ryan from a a shitty one uh 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 like what makes a good matchmaker the matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design and engineering tasks you're ever gonna tackle um and they're thankless it's it's very hard to because I think most people 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 what they want is they want to match where they're slightly better than the other guy yeah like they wanted to feel like it was close but then win and you can't architect that like there it's you know it's a zero sum situation so there's gotta be winners and there's gotta be losers um 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 a cow do that all the time I love looking at people's accounts and seeing what would happen it's like yeah you had the six game losing streak had an eight game winning streak before that yeah there was no post about how awesome is this and the human psychology doesn't allow for that the 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 and 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 metal 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 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 experienced the game in terms of how they derive joy from it or how they see the challenge of the game is individual even when you're on the team you're still feeling yeah individual fundamental individual experience uh let me is the smallest side 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 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 spoke if you have to be spoken so highly of it so can you explain rust yeah rust isn't 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 so is it PVP it's all PVP in fact rust is the most PVP thing in all of PVP what what that means but rust players know what that means everybody who plays rust and loves it sounds to me like they're in a cult so I will all do 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 okay um 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 it like permanently permanently like oh I see 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 and like real low lows real low lows wow right debilitating like am I ever going to play this game lows you know like you spend a week building the world's most perfect base and getting tons of loot and then it 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 gonna 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 that's yes gamer etiquette yes offline is when like hey I think that my neighbor logged off for the night you know they they just played six hours I've been watching them and now there's no activity in their base so I'm gonna 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's sounds like yeah I want if I want more stress in my life I'll play rust yeah I can't wait so okay so that's one that that sounds like a unique experience and a great joy so quick number one rustin up there call of duty call of duty just you know there's a lot of haters like call of duty four and modern warfare two were the pinnacle of call of duty with black ops being a very respectable you know third but you're never gonna get a better gun feel from a game then call 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 like those there's a map called crash from call of duty four 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 to 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 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 in heroes but they wanted to kind of do it on their own terms in like a PvE setting so even though Overwatch is 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 then God we you know ship 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 look 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 executive 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 real I think and you know I always like to pay respects to like when a big event is happening and like hey we should do like an event for the Olympics you can't call it the Olympics or I'll say 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 Hyberg 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 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 too we shouldn't be this focus 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 in 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 want to Overwatch 2 builds 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'll be teams associated with particular cities yes and it'll be international be real competition so the 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 over marketed 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's 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 is 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 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 and it was a 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 in the 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 was began 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 you know 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 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 dollars just in the live game last year what can we sell and what can you give us that pressure comes on to 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 surlet let's just make events and new heroes and new maps we're losing all these resources um and it got to the point you know my ex-sident Blizzard I believed in Overwatch 2 I think we could have made a great 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 refer 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 put out one of the people that were Overwatch is great but the pvp but I 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 just almost expanding it to also the yeah 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 a production director 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 paid 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 and he's a recurring revenue of and then he says to me if it doesn't do dollars we're gonna lay off a thousand people and that's gonna 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 1400 people working on it if you just hire 1400 people and make it free to play we'll make that money right and that was I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard I loved it it was a part of who I was and I thought I was a part of it and I literally thought I would retire from the place and 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 they describe taking big risks and falling a level 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 it doesn't mean it's not at the core this this incredible creative journey that's incredibly difficult to pull off and just because you've 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 home and the degree to wish you don't have weirdos at the home creative minds at the home and your business person at the home 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 were 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 artist 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 their 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 reveal 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 any how could I give that up how could I not be there anymore it was it was really really painful leaving he would 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 Warcraft Starcraft universe Diablo wow overwatch what made us such a legendary game company just looking back at the whole of it the start is Mike Allen and Frank it was run by three gamers they were all three of them programmers they 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 sounds 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 4500 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 Metson or Sam Didier they were like the visionaries of early Blizzard Allen adhem of just these worlds that were still making and we're still playing in today it was infectious and it was inspirational and you wore the Blizzard blue with an asprey decor 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 yeah that's the sense of reading everything that's the sense I got everybody that was a part of it that truly truly truly honored that time just to just to take a small slice what were some of the brain you mentioned Chris Metson you gave so much love to so many people on the team but I got to ask about Chris Metson go out with by the way I love to do a podcast with at some point what were the brainstorming sessions with them like it seems like those are pretty uh uh like 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 Rathal Lich King I went up to his office like hey we're we're finally doing it we're doing the Northrenda expansion you know what excites you about Northrends 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 Samy had drawn in like maps and 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 his zone what's a dungeon what could be cool what should come first which 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 foot plus it's more interesting the more choice you have you know Sid Meier 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 were just like okay in that first meeting Chris had put his own 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 just go for an hour and you have no idea how much of it like 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 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 as I was like the translator into gameplay of what Chris wanted how to get it to play like how Chris wanted so my favorite stories were working on burning crusade and we're in this meeting and Chris is like he's a 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 in Silver Moon City it's got the tallest fucking tower and 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 Carazone 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 and oh okay that's okay like are you willing to take the heat if he I'm 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 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 can 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 they figure out ways to do that so and and 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 the college co-op experience have been really like that aspect of it is really great just all of it is one one of the greatest games in recent history one of the things I wanted to mention this is a powerful speech is sort of instead of doing some kind of corporate goodbye as you're leaving Blizzard you allegedly shared with your team a video of David Bowie giving advice and people should go watch this clip 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 the bow in the right place to do something exciting speaking which you are just the bottom 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 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 got 19 years barely taken 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 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 right so I got very good at that I was very proficient and then of all things I cracked out on called duty black ops cold war and I unlocked dark matter ultra which I know 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 no pad 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 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 it you know 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 um 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 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 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 that are 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 he was like a 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 in 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 days on Friday and my accident interviews at like one o'clock I'm gonna 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 in the garden for a while and he's like I'm a programmer all I'm gonna do is program for a month if I take a month off I might as well start programming our game which it was so awesome when he said that it 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 I needed to be away from the world I needed to not have I wanted to not get attention from anyone I 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 uh Dyna Fass was gonna be all over this conversation right oh god well there's yeah this this one's gonna set him back some time but you 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 um 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 um the strategic money was crazy like the especially the Chinese companies because apparently they weren't getting uh 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 gonna take this many developers and we think it's gonna 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 gonna go for more money it's not an auction to raise as high as we can go we're gonna optimize for control I don't know if this is something that you can talk about but uh I got a chance to see the game for a few hours and I have to say it's incredible Jeff like it's incredible but I almost immediately found love with the world and everything I saw see I'm tempted to say some of the things I saw um 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 or are you allowed to say you know that sure the most unconventional way to talk about this stuff for the first time so our company name is Kinsu Guiyama 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 gonna call it a survival crafting game um 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 if you're trying to nail the most important time in California history it's got to be that gold rush so this is beautiful almost the ultra realistic version of California but it's an alternate history alternate version of California and island almost like a Atlantis type of ethereal island but still very realistic to what the California terrain is correct and that time period so it's just weird like a malgamation 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 um we wanted 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 um 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 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 mind 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 on the eastern side um we hand crafted all of that it looks gorgeous and places like Yosemite are where you would expect Yosemite 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 in depending on the map seed and the map is also tiered in 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 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 it's so much of what makes the world is sound and lighting and that's definitely a thing that I've noticed I mean it's probably the most beautiful sunset and sunrise I've seen in a game we have a great lighting artist who is an 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 Beardstad 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 looking at one one photo of his yeah it's just amazing and these paintings were huge too I'd love to see one in person and so you see a painting like that and you're saying we want to create that world yeah I want I mean when I see that painting this is 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 that's Katamari Demasi the art form but like I see a Beardstad 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 beard like I'll make it look like that 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 the tone of the game to be the feeling of the game this is really different it's 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 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 and 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 Kansugiyama game is and this world seems so inspiring to us you know the setting is really interesting yeah 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 Metson 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 edge your 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 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 um 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 whatever think to do that in a million years without like some you know 10 million dollar announcer 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 and 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 so the alpha to the beta yes and this game has more rough edges probably like the most rough edges we would have at Blizzard is like showing 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'll not be disappointed the world itself is just beautiful so whoever is behind it you and Tim and the team as you're 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 and 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 we get to be a part of the it developing I saw the logo as a mountain can you explain the meaning behind the name so Kansugi 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 on scarred and there's also a philosophy in Kansugi that nothing's ever perfect and the pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake and that there's beauty and 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 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 and something that's been broken that can be stronger you had a heck of a difficult couple of years here and so in some sense it represents that beauty and imperfection so everybody listening to this I hope I hope you do have it out on 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 uh ridiculous question but can we talk about some of the greatest games of all time yes what I mean I know there's 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 he's orc ultimate breath of the wild is the best greatest game ever made what makes it the greatest game ever made for 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 making 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 it's unlike any other game right it's uniquely that company uniquely that no one else nobody else creates that you're right under the pressure of having created much as others 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 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 it's 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 you're like god I would my son and I both played uh legend is 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 too is uh that's a game I put on a shrine not just how brilliant the game itself is but as a game maker as a crafts person who makes games how the hell do you make that like only rock star with all the years of making those types of game no one else can come in entry level and compete with that um so that's a thing purely single player and narrative driven so you 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 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 um it's got a good plot 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 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 is a cult there's 100% of cult that's when you're ready will come down it will let you know in in rush you are considered a complete newb 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 it 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 this I love the resetting world it's a great game mechanic and it's one that I want to evolve and work upon um call off as the world reset and do you think in legend of California I don't know yet probably every month we wanted 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 five thousand hours of rust like some of us um 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 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 that part we're not doing that great great because I feel 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 gonna lose everything you have you're thinking I'm gonna 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 very exclusive group they are they are highly skilled highly passionate highly knowledgeable um but yeah it's an inspiration for me that and everquest were defiant and I've the amount of hours I've logged in both those games are insane what do you think has more hours from Jeff Gapin everquest or rust well you said I was six K on EQ so that puts me I'm at five K in rust and 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 grue is gonna eat us you know yes a certain game just kept your heart and this day with you forever well 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 can use more so maybe creating more believable NPCs that kind of thing but also there's as as we've talked about the video game industry is changing and evolving and trying to figure out well there's the the indie game makers that will have more power of or these larger game makers will have more power so what do you think the future games looks like I think with AI in mind in particular I think the current state of AI trying to integrate 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 games 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 what it tries to deliver like a fooled around obviously like everybody you mess around with you know chat GPT 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 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 chat GPT how to how to fix like a simple problem like how do I make the chat rap you know and it like over confidently gives me the wrong answer and it's like right one in 10 times so it's 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 like I have 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 2000 images that are the wrong size I can have chat GPT 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 saying it's never going to tell a story like Chris Matson you know that human spirit is irreplaceable yes 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 you know what people call AI slop because it creates a 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 yeah I think so like AI to me right now currently it's like an interesting fever dream you know yeah yeah that's at the point I'm at with it and a useful tool for the mundane task like you said yeah but do you think the small studios have a hope in the 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 growing the really compelling new innovative ideas are going to come out of small studios what advice would you give to a 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 if they're doing it they know how to do it it's it's more to video game developers in general own the craft own our art form stop giving it to these fucking corporate jack holes 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 got an chance to see the new game I'm 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 the spot guests 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 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 time