- There's three types of

fun, fun for the player, fun for the designer, and

fun for the computer. - Is it PvP? - It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is

the most PvP thing in all of PvP. - Well, I don't know what that means, but... - Rust players know what that

means. My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest,

so I think I won the game. And we're 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 ser-" And

that's, that was our perspective of what was happening. 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. I had believed I would never work

any place but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was,

And I felt I was a part of it,

and I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought

the day would come, and that was it. - How painful was it to say goodbye? - It broke me. - Now, meanwhile, as far

as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared

off the face of the earth, but you were

actually working on a game. The following is a conversation

with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer

of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest,

most influential games ever made. He is genuinely one of the most

amazing human beings I've ever met. In the many conversations I was

fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video

games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious,

and still and forever a legit gamer, through

and through. Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the

incredible teams of creative minds he has

gotten a chance to work with over

the years, and they are truly incredible. Blizzard has created

some of the greatest games ever made, games that to me

personally have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and happiness, from Warcraft,

to StarCraft, to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch and more. So

for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire

Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game

industry, giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get

a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the

most beloved gamers and game designers ever. Full of memes, lulz, wisdom, emotional rollercoaster

moments, and of course, Blizzard video game lore. Jeff left Blizzard in 2021, and has been secretly

working on a new video game called The Legend of California that I

got a chance to play with Jeff. It is

incredibly beautiful.

Set in the 1800s Gold Rush era of California, it's an

open world online multiplayer game, part adventure and action, part survival. Sometimes creating

a feeling of loneliness and desperation, and sometimes

just awe watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape.

It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and

it's a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of

you. You can wishlist it on Steam. Join the alpha later in March, I

think, and early access is on the way. This is the Lex Fridman 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 to, so he, you know, his little nephew, he would

just give him quarters to play Pac-Man. I remember being at my

brother's graduation in Philadelphia, and they had

an Asteroids machine in the lobby. That was one of the first

coin-op machines I had played as well. And my brother

and I would... we would try to get the high score, and we'd

finally get it. But we had to go to bed early 'cause we were little kids.

And then in the morning somebody

else had like beat our high

score. And then, you know, I grew up in Southern California in the '80s.

I was born in '72. So, you know, I was a kid with that skateboard BMX culture where we'd ride two towns over.

We knew all the pizza parlors and liquor stores

and arcades, and we just lived in that coin-op

phase. That was, that was where the love started.

And then you started to see things like Pong. You'd go over

to a friend's house, they'd have Pong, and it was just mind blowing,

like, we're playing this thing on the TV and it was so much fun. Atari

was a big thing at that time as well. But the big one for me was actually Intellivision, because

my dad was an executive recruiter, and one of

his clients was Mattel. And he said, "Hey, I... They gave

me this thing," and he would get

discounts or free games. And my brothers

and I just loved Intellivision. 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. And I think the big moment where it really blew open and kind of hit the next level was

when the NES came out. And that, like, NES with Super Mario- was kind of

gaming at the next level at that point. And I have, like,

warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to

this day. I remember we played Super Mario for weeks,

my brothers and I, and then I had a friend come over, and he

showed me all the secret stuff- ... in Super that I didn't

know existed at the time. And it's... 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 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... - Okay. - But 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 II- ... and Zork III. - A trilogy. Zork trilogy. I see it. Okay. - A- 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 wanna talk

about world- building. You know, there was Yew Forest and

there was all the characters. And the first Ultima I played was Ultima

II, 'cause Ultima I was before my time. And that series,

it was this RPG group based PC game, and the worlds were just so rich. Like, you could get on a rocket

ship. You're playing in this fantasy world, fighting demons,

and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship. And then

there was just all of this sort of crazy stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world.

Like, there were bouncers in the towns,

and merchants, but if you really

wanted to, you could try to rob these people, or kill

Lord British, you know? That was something that was super

hard. And when you're just a jackass kid, you spend your time

endlessly trying to do these things over and over, and Ultima was really

a profound kind of experience for me. - And, of course, that led to Ultima

Online, which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest. - Yes. - Sort of starting to build these

worlds that are massively multiplayer online video

games. Can you take me to that journey? Like, as you

started to get online, MMO world. What were influential?

What were fun for you? - Well, the big one for

me was EverQuest. But, Like you mentioned, Ultima

Online sort of was the predecessor. It came before EverQuest. And it was, like, one of those

unfortunate times in my life where I

was actually at grad school. - You were busy. - I was busy, and I missed

Ultima Online. Like, I would have had that experience.

And when you hear the Ultima Online stories, they're

some of the craziest, funniest... You know, I 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, then feed the apple to

their horse and kill their horse. Then they'd 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. - Yeah. - 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 a ... You could

basically LAN. 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 castes of players. The low ping bastards, the LPBs- ... 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. Um,

and just, just connecting

with people. Like I said, the websites. To

this day, the only gaming website I read— I don't read any of the

news sites anymore, but I read Blue's News. Which was like, like ... Someone

actually teased me recently. I linked him a story. I'm like, "Oh, did you

hear this new thing's coming out?" And I sent the link, and they're like, "Dude,

this is from Blue's News. Like, what time machine did you just

step out of?" And guy named Stephen Heaslip... 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 .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 Verant," which became

Sony Online, "to work on this game called EverQuest." And I

was like, "How does anybody leave id, the greatest institution

in all of gaming ever, to work on any other game?"

I'm like, "This guy must be crazy. Or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it. I

need to know what's going on." And if he hadn't have made that post,

I never would have checked out EverQuest. - We'll talk about EverQuest, but

since you mentioned Carmack and, uh, Quake, what can we say about

the genius of John Carmack? Why was he such an important and

influential human in the history of gaming? - Those early geniuses at id ...

Like, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now if they

hadn't had the breakthroughs that they

had at the time. Um, gaming engines were evolving, but the level of breakthrough

that they achieved with Wolf 3D, that was the first... I remember

playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game. You'd run around. You'd dress up as

a German. You'd throw a grenade. Um, to see it in 3D ... And

it, it's funny. You look back at the screenshots or

videos of it now, and it seems almost childish. Like, "Oh, why, why were you so excited about

that?" And you were transported. There ... It

was the intimacy of first person. You know, putting the

hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany,

but you're the hero fighting the Nazis. And then the evolution. Like,

when Doom came out, I'm a huge Army of Darkness fan. Like,

one of my favorite movies of all

time. And I was like, "This is Army of Darkness, the video game." You

know? Like, "Give me the boom stick. Here we go." And the graphical advances ... But it, it wasn't just how

the game looked, it was how it played. The smoothness kept getting

better. The responsiveness the sharpness of the gameplay.

You have to credit id in those days and

Carmack and Romero. Um, I ... As somebody who worked on

an FPS, I ... That wouldn't have existed without them.

Credit where credit's due. - 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 also obviously love the more MMO world,

rich, exploratory kinda game. So it's fascinating. But yeah, there is ...

On the technology stack that brought something like Quake or

Wolfenstein 3D to life,

there's a threshold which

you pass of realism where you can immerse yourself into that

world. I had the same exact experience with, uh, Wolfenstein 2D taking

a step to 3D, and it was like tears in my eyes. Like,

"This is incredible." Like, my memories of Wolfenstein

3D is it was like ultra realistic. It's silly to say now. . It was the feeling like you were

there.Yeah, what an incredible age. And some of that, the

storytelling, a lot of that is the- technology that brings

that kind of 3D world to life. It's incredible. But

before- we get too far on that tangent you mentioned

grad school. We should mention that you have a master's

degree in creative writing from NYU, and you wanted to be a writer.

You told me your main influences were Kerouac, but also Hemingway,

Salinger, Bukowski,

Orwell. 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. Um, 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 Hills of Stranglethorn, and

I think it's amazing. And now I'm gonna try to write something

that somebody is gonna read." Uh, that's a giant leap of faith. You

know, that's a moment of putting yourself out there completely, and there's

gotta be some part of that that's ego. There's some part

of it that's masochistic. Um, 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 gonna do it anyway. And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just

write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered

by somebody else. You know, that's one way to go about it. - Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot

of the stories he wrote, never published, and he asked

for all of them to be destroyed. And then it's only because of

his friend that ignored his request that we

even have many of his stories.

It's like to be that kinda... I mean, clearly, there's some

masochism there, some tortured soul. But then there's also the ego like you

mentioned. I was entertained by this story of James Joyce, When he was a young man, 18, 19, Declared that he's going

to be the greatest writer of the 20th century. And he turned out

in many, in the eyes of many to be one of the greatest writers of

the 20th century. But there's, like, millions of kids just like

James Joyce, writers, they're declaring exactly that, that turn

out not to be. But that is in some cases, in many cases, maybe most

cases, you have to have that ego- ... to say, "I'm gonna..." Yeah, right.

"I read 1984," "and I'm going to write the next 1984." - Yeah. And I do think ego

is a big part of it. it's one of the many lessons

I've learned. Hearing your Kafka story is funny, because fast-forwarding

to how my writing career ended—

... I literally threw away

everything, I mean, in a dumpster. I used to keep copious

notes, like journals, my writing journals, everything I

ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just

handwritten notes. And then I also kept personal journals of just, you know,

to keep the writing habit up of just, you know, what happened in

my day, how I was feeling, all of that. And then either digitally or

typed, I had all of my manuscripts, and I threw it all in the dumpster. - What was that decision? Do you remember that

decision? What was that- what was that like to just take that part of your life

and just put it in a dumpster? - Yeah. It was I think it was necessary.

It was necessary. This is like rationalizing it after the fact,

you know, which is easy to do. You know? But at the time, I think I

was so broken and so defeated with

failure that I needed the moment. It

was like throwing in the towel for a boxer, you know? It's that moment of

like, "I'm not gonna win this fight, and you need to move on

from it." And if there was any element of that sitting around, I'd be tempted to try again or bring

it out of the drawer 10 years later. - We should mention that

you did give it a- a real try. You've mentioned receiving

over 170 rejection letters in one year when submitting your stories.

So there's a lot of rejection. So it was a long chain of rejection. And

then what was that like, the rejection? - It was hard. Um, I had

moved from New York. Um, I did the most terrible dumb thing

that I knew I was doing at the time. I had a really great group of

writer friends from grad school in New York, and I think

writing is a very lonely, solitary thing. But weirdly,

writers kind of support each

other and just, "Who do you give the

story to?" You know, you don't wanna give it to your mom or dad, you know. You

kinda wanna give it to somebody who's gonna really punch you in the nose

and tell you what's wrong with it. And I had left that writing

circle to move back to California. - Did you take a bunch of drugs, take

your typewriter and drove across, uh- - No. - ... across the United States and

then wrote a book about it? Or just to take Kerouac as an example.

Anyway, sorry. You went just- - I might have been more

successful had- ... I done that. - Uh, so sorry. So you went back. - So I moved back to California,

and I did it for a girl. And I think within two months of moving back, we were broken up. So... And

I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment when it was empty in New York

and I was about to close the door for the last time. I had that like, you know,

little me on the shoulder saying, "Dude, what are you doing?" "This... You're making one of those

epic life mistakes that is gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna write for eight hours a day." And I did. Um, I was fortunate. Like I said, my dad

had his company and he hired me as a research associate.

So I was calling up generating name lists for a recruiting

company, and I would take... Whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would

take those so I could start at like 5:00 in the morning. And I created

all this space for me to write, and I just... I

had a dog named Jack- ... who was... He was a Jack Russell

Terrier. And so everybody's like, "You're a writer, you named your Jack Russell Terrier

Jack." I'm like, "Because I named him

after Jack Kerouac." "It's

poetic and epic," and- - Yeah, of course - ... I just looked like a dumbass,

but- ... it was just me and this dog. And I was writing, you know, all that

time intensely. And this was mid to late '90s, so even though

internet existed, email was very primitive and you had to send

a manuscript off, like printed paper- ... to all... Like, I was trying to get

short stories published in literary magazines, and you had to send envelope

with return self-address stamp. So it was expensive, too. Like if you

didn't have money, you were just... There was a cost to it-

... to every single one of them. - You had to pay for the rejection letter

that you would eventually receive. - Yeah. And the, like, big thing

that you were hoping for was that the editor would write you a

note with the rejection letter. Like, um- - 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 who..." "I'm the dude who broke Jeff that one day." But I just had a moment where I

said, "This is gonna 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 gonna give up. I'm gonna

do this come hell or high water." And sometimes there's that reality, especially when

you're now in your mid-20s, where you have that moment of like,

"Am I really gonna be this? Like, am I ever gonna 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 gonna be. - That's so painful. It's 'cause

you've invested so much of yourself, of who you are, of the

dreams you've had, of this just whole conception of yourself, and

you're watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming

isolated, suffering more and 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. Is to

cut it off. Is there advice you can extract from that?

There's a lot of young folks who are in that same situation. - Yeah. This is one of

those hindsight things where, you know, having gone through

it and ended up okay on the other side, which you don't know at

the time, you know? When you're a young person in your

late teens or early 20s, there's so much pressure

on you. And I really think adults don't help. You

know? Every time you run into the younger nephew

or whoever and you start to say things like, "Oh, what's your

major? What are you gonna do with that?" "What do you wanna be?" It's such bullshit

to do to a human being. You know? - You're so lost in the world. I

mean, most of us are lost our entire lives, but especially in

your 20s, you know, like, you're

lost. So the 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 are really, I mean,

that is a real hero's journey of searching as a young

person. That's a real, like, you know, all the

adults, with their wisdom, they've stopped searching often. They've 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, how much uncertainty that

young people have to deal with. - It's, there's confusion,

there's pressure. Like, the pressure we exert on younger people for

having it figured out is, it's insane.

So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like

this sounds really trite, but focus on what you wanna do, not what

you wanna be. The, the pressure that society kind of puts on us is, you know, "Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut? Do you

wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker?" And

I think we get lost in the trappings of, like a vision of what that role is- ...

and how to perform as a fake actor in that role. Versus when you're off the clock

and no one's asking you any questions- ... you know, you're not at Thanksgiving

dinner and your uncle's pressuring you into, you know, what your future's

gonna 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 gonna find out what you're gonna become, not what you

wanna be. It's, "What do you wanna do?" - What do you wanna do? The thing

that brings you joy on a moment by moment basis. Yeah.

That's brilliantly put. And speaking of which, that's

where you took the pivot. You switched to video games. How did

that happen? Gradually? Suddenly? - Gradually and suddenly. So when I had that fateful moment where I just

sort of gave up with writing, I had these days where I'd

structure eight-hour chunks of just, this was writing time,

you know? I'd 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, Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend.

One of the few friends I had who played computer games, 'cause

there was a stigma to that. You know? It wasn't, you didn't walk

around telling people you played games. They thought you wasted

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 gotta play it." And the moment I logged in, I was just transported.

It was the world of Norrath. And it wasn't just the world itself and

how it looked, I thought the game was gorgeous, it was the mechanics,

you know, that I was this halfling rogue that, you know, had to go out and adventure in the world, and when I killed

stuff, I got experience, and I needed better loot to kill more stuff

to get more experience. And

the sort of draw of progression in

the game it was amazing. I, and I just lived my life of, "I

can't wait 'til 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 /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- ... of gameplay. Wow. So here going to

Perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy,

massively multiplayer online

role-playing game, MMORPG,

set in the world of Norrath, as you were saying.

First released in March 1999, it is an online role-playing game

where thousands of players create characters, group up, and explore

a persistent shared world. It's widely regarded as one

of the foundational MMORPGs, helping define raid content,

guild systems and 3D online worlds. That's the other component

of it. There's... It's all humans and they group up- ... and they

raid together in the game. - Yep. In the context of EverQuest, raiding

is usually around 30 people or more getting together to conquer

something that you couldn't beat otherwise. And to do successful raiding, you usually needed

to join what in EverQuest everyone referred to

as an Uber Guild. So I had this great pride in my EverQuest

journey that I... Most of the time leveling up I was

unguilded or I was in like a

role-playing guild with rogues only. And

it was when I got to Level 50 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, Nagafen, who was the fire dragon,

or Vox, who was the frost dragon, and needing perfect

coordination to pull it off, it was insane how fun. Like, you

would literally scream out. You're alone in your room at home- ... but you felt like you were there

with these people and you would audibly cheer out when you won, and

you'd feel depressed when you lost, and

it was a game of high highs

and low lows, and it did everything right. It was amazing. - So that was a big leap for you to

go from the proud lone warrior to a member of a guild, Uber Guild. And then there's that epic

story of you rising to the top to become the leader

of this Uber Guild. - The leader... Yeah. So organizing

people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats- ... 'cause, you know, everyone has their

own will. Some people are loot motivated, some people want the guild to do

well, some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with. And there was also a lot of depression in the

EverQuest community. It was something I suffered with, but a lot of

people, you know, anytime you're feeling sad or down,

you're looking for escape.

And one of the great things video

games brings us is escapism. And escapism isn't always bad or negative- ... but when you sort of

abuse it to escape your real life problems, it's bad and negative. - So there's a mix of pain and

darkness that pain can manifest as- ... all part of this community. - Yeah. And what's weird is you enter the

cycle where being with other people gives you comradery and relief and makes you feel like you're

not doing so bad in life, but you can quickly enter a cycle of...

But then you're withdrawing from life and it makes you feel that way more

to where you can only get the fix from the game at that point. So it's... Psychologically, there's

a lot going on there. - And so you had to work with all of

that. You have to get a bunch of

people together to do a raid, who are all human beings going through complicated

psychological journeys of their own. Some are talking shit, some are just quietly lonely, just

looking for some loot. - In the late '90s, everyone

was talking shit. You know what I mean? Like, the gaming

culture was just a different thing back then. But it was a great group. It was super fun. It

was people from all walks of life. And to coordinate these

people, like you just had to repeat everything like 200 times.

Like, "Okay, we're gonna port from North Ro. Everybody get to North Ro." 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 Ro. And I sort of like... At first I joined the guild, I was

just like the bright-eyed, 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

EverQuest. Like, people would just kinda disappear all of a sudden. There

wasn't a, "Hey, in about a month, I'm gonna stop playing because

I'm starting this new job." People... people had to quit in

some dramatic way, where they just disappear, and basically,

our guild leader stopped playing. - Did you miss them when they disappeared?

Like, we should say that most of the people, maybe all of them,

were anonymous. So you just- ...have a username, and you don't

really say who you are in real life. - Absolutely. In those days,

there was a great stigma to mentioning your, any

real-life info. You just kind of kept it all really close to

your chest, and you never knew

who was male or female. You kind

of assumed everybody was male. - Safe assumption. - 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 EverQuest? - I met her in EverQuest. - That is a true love story, right there. - Yeah. Yeah. - Wow. - The funny part for me with

EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest,

and people are like, "You threw years of your life away." Like, "You can't win

a game like that." And I'm like, "I don't know, like, sitting here today, my

whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game." - Yeah, yeah. You're like the,

the, "Well, actually..." guy. - Well, yeah, exactly. - Your life will be on the Wikipedia page

somewhere that says, "Well, here's an example of somebody-" "...

why video games are awesome." Yeah, I mean, some of it... I should

mention this as an aside. For me and many

people I know, yes, it's hundreds

of hours, but some of the happiest hours and days of my life. Like, looking back, it all worked

out. During it, you are pretty low, and you think, "I... What am

I doing with my life?" All that kind of stuff. But, like, looking back,

just the all-nighters you pull playing a particular video game,

allowing yourself to really fully be immersed seeing the sun come up, and by

the way, many of those games, for me, were Blizzard games. It's just an incredible

thing that video games have been able to do. I think you know, it used

to be, and still is 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. Like, I felt like I was doing this

secret, dark thing. It's usually in the... It's, it usually is

in the dark. There's just a

secretive nature to it, like I'm doing

something really dark and shady. - It wasn't mainstream. - It wasn't. - It wasn't... There was a stigma

to it. And one of the weirdest parts of that is, you know, I

mentioned, like, you could type in the /played in EverQuest. Well, if you

did the /played on how much TV people watch, what would that

look like? It would blow- ...6,000 hours out of

the water, easily. Well, it... 20 years ago it would

have. You know? Not today. - Now it's the phone, yeah. Yeah. But then

it is hard to say goodbye to that world. Those are also really painful times.

How hard was it to say goodbye for you? - To EverQuest? It was really hard. And

there were times where you try to quit. - Oh, you took a break sometimes? - Yeah. You think you're quitting for good.

You'd have those moments of, like, "I'm doing this too much. I need

to move on in life. I'm gonna put it down and walk away, and

hopefully not come back." And there were

times where you did come

back. When I finally did leave EverQuest, it was

actually extremely easy, because I was psychologically done

with the game at the time. It was not shortly, but not too

long after a new expansion had come out. At the time,

it was Shadows of Luclin. Which didn't speak to me like

the expansions before. Like, the one before that was called Scars

of Velious, 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 at Blizzard. As we said, you were

this legendary gamer, and now legendary

troll, on EverQuest. Username, Tigole. You

gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, Telling them in now famous...

There's several rants. There's a famous one where

you tell many of them to do a bunch of things, including to pull

their heads out of their asses. You were loved and respected

because you gave a lot of specific ways that the game could be improved. And that's

an important thing to say. You weren't just talking shit. You actually really

loved and cared for the game, and you gave them, in the language of

the time advice on how to improve, Their game. And it's funny, because, 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, and you 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 at Blizzard?

- So when the first guild leader left,

Legacy of Steel, the founder... He, he was a guy named... His online

name was Dread. That was his name. He left, and our guild was kind

of in this listless spin for a while. And eventually, somebody

stepped up and took his position as guild leader, and

that person's name was Ariel- ... who was this blonde

wood elf warrior, Female, who always refused to wear a helmet

because they 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 gonna be online, you

know, tomorrow," or, "I'm not gonna be online tonight. Can you run the

raid? Can you run the raid?"

And running the raids was very natural for

me. And it was my first experience with leadership in my life, of like how do

you motivate people? Like, what does motivation look like? What does

discipline look like? How do you inspire people? When

do you force people versus encourage them, you know?

So it was a learning experience for me on the fly, and

I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually. - I should mention, I'm just now reading about, doing a bunch of

research on Justinian of the Roman Empire, and he rose

from being a peasant to being emperor, so I see a lot of parallels

in your life journey, from peasant to emperor, but

go ahead, I'm sorry. - At least EverQuest guild

leader, that's- that's as much- - Uber guild leader- - ... as I could say. - Uber guild leader. - 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- you're

gonna 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 1 had come out, and with both Duke Nukem

and Half-Life 1, one of the incredible things that those companies

did back in the day was when they shipped the game, they

shipped the editor on the CD. And if you were curious enough, you

could like fire up that editor and fool around with it.

So I made a Duke Nukem level, and you'd send

it off to like those UK programming magazines, and you know,

you'd 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 I— 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 sent them to Ariel, and he says, "You know, my name's Rob. I'm

a designer at Blizzard Entertainment." "Um, we're— I— I hear you're in

Pasadena 'cause you mentioned it." You know, I would write about,

you know, the Rose Parade and

all these things on our website. You

know, I kind of ... It was blogging before blogging existed, so he knew I lived

in Pasadena, and he's like, "Irvine's only an hour away. Why

don't you come down, see Blizzard, and you can also meet..." and he names like four people in the

guild. And I'm like, "They all work at Blizzard too?" He's

like, "Yeah, we're all Blizzard." And it was so weird because during that era, I didn't have

a lot of money. It was not like ... Kind of nowadays it feels

like everybody plays every game, but you had to be selective. So

like I never bought StarCraft or Diablo or Warcraft.

I was much more of the Half-Life, Quake, Quake

III guy around that time, and I'd 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? Is it... Is there...

Is it... Was it building this like great legend of this game

company that seemingly doesn't miss?

- It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the

legendary game... Like, it was beloved— ... by gamers, but there were

still ignorant people like me who hadn't played, you know, War II or Diablo II or StarCraft, which

was shocking to people. - So you weren't like

freaking out, freaking out? - No, I— I was freaking out in a

different sense. I'm like, "Am I gonna get mugged when I-" Like,

"Who are ... Is this a scam?" Because you didn't meet

people off the internet. So I drove down there. Um, I ended

up... There was— there was Rob Pardo— ... who at that time was the

lead designer on Warcraft III, and he was Ariel.

You know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all.

It wasn't this blonde wood elf. You know, I don't know

what you expect at that point. It was Rob Pardo. To this

day, a great friend of

mine named Scott Mercer

was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalomin. 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

I, up until that point, I would never tell- Mm-hmm ...

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... Uh, I just saw

it as like, "Oh, now, I'm..." You know, I made friends with these people

online. Now, we know each other in real life, and they happen to work for

this game company. And at 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. Mm-hmm. And Barfa, Barfa wasn't

somebody who played with us all the time, but kind of

like Ariel got into the guild kind of on the side. You know, it was

one of those like inside invites of like, "Who's Barfa?" "I don't know,

but Barfa is in the guild now." And there was at the time, it was a new

dungeon called The Hole, and we had never

done it before. And we jumped down in

this hole, and we're doing this whole dungeon, and everything goes wrong,

as it's prone to do in EverQuest. And the whole guild escapes

except for Barfa, whose troll character's so big, he

can't jump out of the exit. Mm-hmm. 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. It'll teleport

you out." And I'm a rogue, I can just stealth and get out of the dungeon

on my own. So I saved Barfa, not really knowing who Barfa was, and I

did it with a very expensive potion. Mm-hmm. Having lunch, Rob introduced

me, "This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa." Mm-hmm. I'm like, "Oh,

Barfa!" And we, you know, he has a... "You saved me in The Hole that

time." Well, it turns out Allen

was the founder of

Blizzard, and he was the head... He was sort of the head of

everything at that time. It was Allen, Mike MorhAIME, and Frank Pearce.

And what I didn't realize what 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 talkin' about video games and I felt

comfortable around. And one day, Rob logs into EverQuest. He wasn't playing

much at the time, and he said, "I want you tomorrow to check the

Blizzard job site." Mm-hmm. 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- Mm-hmm ... 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." Hmm. And I'm like, "You guys set this up for me." Like, they

were just looking... And it was that hindsight moment of like,

actually, these guys were just interviewing me- Yeah ... for six

months. And they were actually friends, and they were really cool about it too. And

I just had the fuck it moment like that, that job opened up. I applied with all my heart, you

know? Like, it, they had a bunch of quest writing on it. And then I

went through like a pretty hardcore six-month recruiting

process because they never hired designers from out of

the company. Traditionally, designers were promoted from

within Blizzard. Either they would like transfer out of other

disciplines, or they would come from quality assurance, tech support. So

hiring somebody off the street was kind of

a big deal for them, and

they really put me through a grilling. Um, I met with... It was the first

time I met Chris Metzen- Mm-hmm ... who is maybe the most inspirational,

creative person on the planet. And you

instantly... They paired me... They did this interview pairing.

There were these two guys. It was Kevin Jordan- Mm-hmm ... who was one of

the original designers on WoW. Really, he doesn't get enough credit for

his contributions. He was one of the earliest class designers, PvP designers. But he's a really quiet guy.

Mm-hmm. And they paired him with Chris, and Chris just owns the room, you know? Mm-hmm. 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. And Chris, Kevin, and I go

to lunch at, 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'd come from this whole, like,

corporate culture from my dad's recruiting business, where I'd never imagined

somebody would curse in an interview, or stop to buy smokes. And again, it

was like, "I'm around my people." Like, I never smoked, but just, you know,

being around people who didn't care about- ... what the corporate norms were was so inspiring. And then my

last interview was with, uh, Alan and Rob, and a

great programmer named Bob Fitch. Like, I think he's one of the

first five developers at Blizzard. Uh, and they took me to an ARCO station that

had a Jack in the Box. You know, how, like-

... sometimes they'll combo? It was like

ARCO Jack in the Box. And that was my final interview at Blizzard,

was at the ARCO Jack in the Box. And I remember thinking to myself, "These guys just brought me to a Jack

in the Box that's in an ARCO station. I need to work here." Like, this

is... "These are my people." "This is where I belong." Like,

it was the greatest thing ever. And so, yeah, that's my

crazy journey to Blizzard. - Uh, started at the bottom and end up at

the top in a Jack in the Box. Can you speak to... 'Cause 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 way out, finding your people? - There were a lot of really

low points. Uh, I'll give you

the weirdest one. I started drinking

a lot, and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with

until my early 30s. And one of the things I'm most proud of

today is sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now. And I remember I was- I was just ha- I would

like buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and- ... like, drink the whole thing

by myself, and then watch the Oscars. I remember I was ... Of

all things, I'm watching the Oscars, which is just such a

fake, bullshit environment. But I was like... You know,

I was really drunk and all those people seemed so

together and successful and polished, and I just...

It made me... It was that contrast that made me feel like

such a failure. And it all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now. Um, 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, know, extremely helpful. And

one thing I learned is that you have to find the right

therapist for you. It's not just checking a checkbox of, "I

went to therapy." It's about finding somebody who sort of helps you get out of whatever rut you're

in, in a way that's healthy for you. And, um, I tried antidepressants,

but I hated... I just hated taking pills and feeling

like something was in me, and making me feel different. I never

responded to it. And then the hardest

thing, you know, which

I've never mentioned to anyone, and is hard for me to talk about,

but eventually I went through ECT, which is electroconvulsive

therapy, 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 wellbeing- ... and what was gonna 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. - To find... I mean, there is a- there

is a deep loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch, you're alone, like in a really

deep fundamental way.

Like, in the way you weren't in New York

with the writing- with the writer's group, right? And so that must've been an

incredible experience just to see the guild. - Yes. It was everything I nee- I... As such

an introvert, you- you think that there are extroverts and introverts,

and introverts don't need anybody, but weirdly, I think

introverts almost need people more. And we don't always know how to engage- ... in the right, healthy ways, and

how to find people and how to connect with people. And it was- it was great. Um, one... The thing that had attracted

me to creative writing was the solitude of it, and the

fact that you didn't have to collaborate, and you could just write

what you wanted to write and it was all you. You would succeed

on your own or you would fail on your own, and that was very

attractive to me. And the thought of creative collaboration was actually

off-putting. I'd spent all four years

of undergrad interning at Universal

Pictures, 'cause I thought I wanted to be in film, and it was such

an unhealthy creative collaboration in the film

industry. It's a very, you know, I look up unhealthily

to the film industry and admire it and, you know, grew up with all these legends who had come from

there. But it's like a caste system. And I was on the bottom of the caste

system as an intern, and I was seeing how the other people who were low caste in the film industry were

treated, and it was just horrible, you know. But games was different. Games

was very flat. It didn't matter if you were the CEO or the boss, like,

the way Mike and Allen carried themselves with, you know, me, who was an

associate game designer, you felt like an

equal. And I think it... Not just the

comradery, but the part that shouldn't be overlooked is the work itself and the work

ethic. That's what really pulled me out. - Hard work on a thing you love. - Yeah. - I have to, if you may allow

me, read the prophetic one of us, quote, "one of us" post

you made on April 18th, 2002. Because in some

deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us. The...

I apologize to bring up Justinian the emperor, but

remained a kind of peasant gamer, a 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."

He wrote, "This week, I accepted a position as associate

game designer with Blizzard Entertainment. Specifically, I will

be designing quests for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's MMORPG

based on the popular Warcraft series. In addition to my

duties as quest designer, I will also be expected to contribute

to helping design the end game content for World of Warcraft.

The reason I'm sharing this information, besides the fact

that I have a masochistic love of reading rants and flames about myself,

is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore

MMORPG players. The readers of the site have also come to

know my personal opinions on what constitutes a fun gaming

experience versus what feels like a complete waste of time or poorly

designed encounter." Wow, 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 sinks,

devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward

the lucky over the skilled and

quest rewards which are out of sync

with the amount of time and effort required to complete them. I

hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to

comfort MMORPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence,

looking out for the interest of the player." And you go on to describe some

of the high hopes you have for World of Warcraft, which is really fun to

read because you don't realize- - Now- - ... it's gonna be, like, one of

the greatest games of all time played by millions of human beings, just

where those millions of human beings are playing for hundreds of hours, thousands

of hours. It's crazy. It's funny that this... one of us is writing

at the dawn of a new age. The final paragraph is, "So with all that is going on with me,

you'll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site

here. I will try my hardest to give you slack or something

to read while you should be working. But in the meantime,

there's a whole world of

NPCs. They need to learn

the words kaksagur and mo'fucker, 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 Allen. And Allen was very understanding

and he... 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 and-" But there's brilliance behind that.

There's a passion behind that. Like, we're... when you're a gamer

and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest, you

understand what makes for a compelling

experience. You don't, at that time,

understand how much hard work is required to create that experience and

how much uncertainty there is, how difficult it is, how many

trade-offs there are. How your designs, when they actually are brought to

the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people,

they are different from the division you had for it. So all

those elements you don't know, but you have to have that ego in

the beginning, right? Do you even have the guts to try? Do you

have the guts to put in all that work? So what were the... what was it

like? What were the vibes of early Blizzard like? They've...

at this point, Warcraft I and II, Warcraft III is in production. StarCraft. These are legendary

games. I don't... I spent probably over 1,000 hours in

these games combined. I played Warcraft I, II, III.

I played StarCraft I and II. I played WoW, of course.

Diablo I, II, III, IV. Play Diablo II with "Stay a while

and listen," with Deckard Cain.

- Stay a while and listen. - I mean, some of these characters, some of

these experiences just, they'll stay with me forever. Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks.

What was it like? What was the team like? What were the developers

like? What were 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 of

California Irvine campus at the time. They have this research

and development park where, if you're like a tech company,

you can get office space there, and Blizzard took up...

When I joined, it was three-fourths of the building was Blizzard,

and there were... 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, everybody

is wearing black T-shirts and

shorts and throwing frisbees

and playing Hacky Sack and on scooters and skateboards,

and you're like, "Okay, that's where, that's where Blizzard

is." So it was that environment. I remember walking in

the door and thinking like, "It feels like I'm walking into a dorm room-" "... 'cause it was just posters

on the wall." And there were actually, like people would have

futons because they'd be sleeping because we would work so much back then.

But the vibe was... It was very small. Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002, was fewer than 200 people, and

that included... There was a whole group up in San Mateo

called Blizzard North. So Blizzard South, the Irvine

group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft, and there were two development teams at

Blizzard. It was called Team One and Team Two at Blizzard South. Um,

Team One was revered.

These are the RTS guys. They made, you know,

StarCraft, Warcraft II, and they were, at that time, they're

working on Warcraft III. Team Two was kind of the

red-headed stepchild. Like apparently, before I joined,

they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times

and failed, and then they finally decided they were

gonna 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 Allen stor- 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 Hearthstone. Him and Ben,

Ben Brode basically were the core designers behind that.

But Eric and Kevin Jordan

were these two key designers

working on World of Warcraft for Team Two, and then you had this tech

group that was headed up by John Cash. And John Cash, the first

day that I showed up to work on Team Two, they said,

"You have to go get your login from John Cash." I'm like,

"John... The John Cash from id?" And, you, you know, John Cash

has a skin. You could be John Cash in Quake III. So, and then he

saw me, and he, 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, we had that moment where we kind of

fanboyed out on each other. And it was just... The

vibe was so cool there. Like, there were very few producers.

So a game team, there are five core disciplines that

make a video game. You've got

engineers or programmers who

are writing the code. You've got the art team that's making

all the visuals for the game, and that spans everything

from like 3D modeling, characters, environments, to also

animation, tech art, you know, making it all work. You've got game design, which some companies

don't have design. The artists and the engineers

do it. Valve famously has very few designers because

everybody there is a designer. But in companies where design is a discipline, which it very

much is so at Blizzard, game designers are sort of the

creating the game experience people, you know, setting up all

the systems and content in a way that gets the player to

navigate through the game. - So that's part of 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 systems side. So like

any game that you've played where loot drops- Diablo IV, World

of Warcraft, you know, Escape from Tarkov,

whatever. If there's loot dropping, a designer has planned out very

carefully what drops where and at what percentages. That would be

like a systems designer. A content designer is

somebody who's gonna make quests or write storylines,

or there might even be a narrative designer, which is even more

focused on a story. But designers, you know, run the gamut, and then you've

got these jack-of-all-trade designers that can do it all. Um, 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, it... the experience.

You're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise. But

that's who comprises the game team. - Is the lighting, you

know, all the different

kinds of graphics, would

that be under the art team? - Yeah. Lighting, you're gonna have

lighting under the art team, but they're gonna be best friends

with the 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 gonna 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 to- that will let

you do that." So you partner a great graphics programmer

with a great lighting artist, 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 gonna have the artists who... They're creative,

dare I say emotional- ... you know, they are

artistes on that end. And on the other end, you have the

most logical, brilliant programmers whose 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. Um, and programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized in their

thinking and everything is so logical. And then in the middle

are people like the sound

designers, the- 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 are well known for working on

quite small teams to create these incredibly huge games. What is

the- the power of a small team in this kind of context where

a lot... there's that creative tension? Is it- is it because

a small team avoids maybe the compartmentalization, like

the modular where 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 gonna 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 gonna sit in the room when

we decide what the art style looks like. As soon as the team starts to

grow, we become compartmentalized. It's exactly like you said. And there's a weird thing that happens

that'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 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 the... This is their life's work, too. This game is gonna be

as much theirs as it is mine. So who am I to say

a statement like that? - Yeah. It's harmful to a

discipline to think that you understand the world.

Most silly other folks don't, and you have nothing to

learn from them, really, and, 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 gonna show up on our

doorstep, so when they show up here, we

should treat them like the best prop artist in the industry

instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism. So, when that

person speaks up and says, "I think..." Like, with Overwatch, for example, "I think

we should do this." You know, "We should do X instead of Y." Instead of saying, "Well, I'm a believer in

Y, why are you against my idea X?" You should take a

moment, have a deep breath, and say, "Man, the best prop

artist in the industry is suggesting something.

Why don't I listen to it?" - I actually do it for

myself, like this kinda thought framework or thought

experiment. Whenever I'm talking to a new person, especially if

I feel, myself, a little bit tinge of that feeling. Usually, it happens with,

like, a really young person, like an undergraduate student or someone like

this. I pretend that they are the smartest

person in the world in my head, and then

not... Like, it puts me in the mode of, like, assuming I have a lot to learn from them, and it

helps. You actually, like, really listen. I literally think they're the

smartest, wisest human on Earth. It helps me. - I had that, like, I think...

You know, I'm no expert. I'm a game designer, so, like, as

much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into

having fun, hopefully. Like, I don't know, I don't have an

important job. But psychologically speaking- - That's fun. - ... I... One thing I think a lot about is

ego, and I think about insecurity. And insecurity, we all have. Like,

all of us as human beings have insecurity. It just manifests

itself in different ways. And as we kind of go through our

life journey, the insecurity also changes. So, like, some people, for

example, use their insecurity to

rip other people apart. Some people

destroy themselves through their own insecurity. Some people

destroy everybody with their insecurity. But I had that moment as a young

lead, when I first was made a lead on, like, World of Warcraft, where I felt

it was very important to be right and to, you know, be shepherding the

correct idea. And I actually got pulled aside. Like, Pardo and I had a meeting

with a couple people who weren't game designers, and it's always tricky as a game designer

because constantly everybody is throwing ideas out in- 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 gonna do instead." And after the meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me

aside, and he said, "You're a very smart designer, but you shouldn't do what you

just did to those people. You should always listen to what people have to say and try

to make their ideas work." And I just... Over and over, I was like, "Okay,

anytime an idea comes my way, let's try to make it work." And it went from this

kind of thing that I didn't believe into to actually, like, a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer,

as a game director. And some of the best ideas have come from developing

other peoples' 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 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

doesn't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan, That you're one of the most humble and always give credit to the team

for everything and anything. And so everything we talk about

today, I know you're probably resisting constantly giving

credit to the team on everything. So you're the famous, "Hi, I'm Jeff from

the Overwatch team," right? So just as

a small aside, thank you

for your humility through through your career, and thank you

for always celebrating the team. But let's talk about WoW.

Let's talk about World of Warcraft. Tell me what the early

days of developing WoW was like. Maybe we should

talk about what World of Warcraft, WoW is, going

to Perplexity here. World of Warcraft is a massively

multiplayer online RPG where you create a character, level it up doing quests

and dungeons, and progress your gear and power in an open

fantasy world called Azeroth. At a basic level, you

move, use abilities from your action bar, follow quests,

and gradually learn a combat rotation that fits your class.

And there's all kinds of characters and roles and classes. You

pick a race, appearance, starting zone, small racial bonuses. In a class,

how you fight, what your role is in groups. Can you continue, fill in some

of the gaps, what is World of Warcraft?

- World of Warcraft, first of

all, more than anything, is a world. Like, it's a

world that you can live in with real other people, and

everybody's kinda living out their fantasy. Chris Metzen, who was the creative

director on World of Warcraft, and really, like, Allen 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' imagination at some point. And Chris famously said,

"The lead character of World of Warcraft is the world."

And I always believed that. So you're trying to create

this place that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable

and gorgeous, and, you know, it should feel massive, and it really is. It, 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 Allen Adham, was the champion of

the Horde and Alliance. - And that in the early days, there

was a really strong division. - Strong division. - Like... You pick a side and then you hang

around with only people of your kind. - Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life

on you. Like, the amount of people who walk up to me and show

me their Horde tattoo. - That's awesome. - Like, 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 Tichondrius," you'd be like- - Right - ... "Dude-" - Lose my number. - "... Alliance?" - Yeah. - Like, "Okay, I don't think

we can be friends anymore." But the Horde-Alliance decision

was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed race. They had all the races kind of

like WoW did, but they could

all group with each other. And Pardo

and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible

decision Allen was making. And we argued, Allen, Rob, Bob, Fitch, and I would have lunch every

single day, and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW. Rob

wasn't even on WoW at that time. He was finishing Warcraft III. And we would fight over the Horde-Alliance

split, if it was a good idea or not. And Allen had... He came from

more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which

was another massive 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, Allen retired.

He went on to run a hedge

fund, of all things. Like, got super into poker, got super

into finance, left, and retires, like, I think it was nine months to a

year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts. And Rob takes over as lead designer

in Allen's stead, and to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was

go... Speaking to what we were speaking about earlier,

he said, "Allen's a smart guy. The fact that he was

fighting so hard for-" "... Horde Alliance, we gotta do it." And, uh, Rob and I sort of

changed our point of view and got on board with Horde

Alliance and went all in. And so, you know, the early days of WoW was...

It was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. You know, we had Mark Kern running

the team. Shane Dabiri was, you

know, legendary Blizzard developer. Bill Petris was the art director,

and then we had Metzen, who was sort of like... Metzen was the cool big

brother we all, you know, aspired to be. Uh, I'm older than Metzen, but I looked

up to him like a big brother. And then there were a lot of us

who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a

lot of people from other teams and other game types. Like, for example, the guys building the dungeons,

they hired out of the Quake community. And because they didn't have

any hardcore MMO designer on the staff at that time,

it was, you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers, they started

building Quake dungeons- ... as, like, Quake levels as

the dungeons. At one point, WoW was even made in QERadiant,

which was the Quake engine. And then they later, you know,

retooled to where they were using

a proprietary engine. So we were like

this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears- ... is how I would describe

the WoW team, of this mix of veterans and then people

like me. Like, I'm just some fucking idiot, you know-

... who played a lot of EverQuest. And I end up at Blizzard. - Designing quests. - Yeah. Like, okay, we're gonna

design World of Warcraft now. And I've said this later with

hindsight, I think a huge part of WoW's success with, especially

with the early WoW team, Team Two in its earliest formation, was that we didn't know what we were doing.

You kind of... Like, it's that... Titan was the

example for me. Titan was the attempt at making an MMO after

World of Warcraft at Blizzard. And we failed horribly, and we

had the best of the best on that

team. And it's because

everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a

groundbreaking phenomenon MMO. World of Warcraft was a

bunch of people, like a very successful, sure of itself company

who had made StarCraft, Diablo Warcraft, with a bunch of yayhoos basically-

... who was like, "Yeah, we can compete with Sony Online." At the time, they

were making EverQuest II. Like, if we go back in the time machine,

EverQuest II had been announced. And EverQuest

fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest II. It

wasn't, "Oh, cool, World of Warcraft." It was EQ2 was gonna 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 Raph Koster, who had come

from that Ultima Online,

and he's just a really smart game designer. If you 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 II and Star Wars Galaxies, and they have

the Star Wars intellectual property." "We're fucked." Like, "How are we gonna compete?" And

everybody had seen the success of EQ, EverQuest, and everybody

was gonna make an MMO, and it was just a question

of who was gonna win. - So you're feeling this immense

pressure. You have this small team of just this hodgepodge of this unlikely

team that kind of looks fast forwarding to Overwatch, the heroes in Overwatch, but working extremely hard. Now, you told me

about crazy, crazy work hours, and not

because you were forced to,

but because you wanted to, because your heart was in it,

because you're like, "This is everything." Like, you loved it. - Yeah. The- the games industry has a

terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It's just called

crunch. Like do you crunch or not? These days, crunch is not

allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon. If we were to work overtime,

somebody'd write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are

for working overtime. Um, 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 III. This was in my... I think, um, War III 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 III. I should just say that. Like,

in the credits, I'm additional- additional help or additional

testing or something like that. Um, 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 III out the door. - For shipping Warcraft III. - For shipping Warcraft III,

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 gonna help test whatever we tell you to test."

So we're trying to gold master, and there's a crash that happens rarely.

If you run one of the cinematics, like you have to be watching the

cinematic after one of the levels, and then there was

a crash that happened. And

so a programmer put in

some logging to catch it, and then they needed

somebody to just over and over again, "I need the crash

to happen so I can fix the bug." And I sat there for 30 hours and

just watched the cinematic for 30 hours- ... straight. And it was the funniest

thing, like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave at

the... which was a trickle out. Like, everybody kind

of trickles out, like, at- ... different hours, you know? The

family guys go much earlier than the single guys. And then watching everybody show up again in... the next morning,

and they're all, like, dressed different, and they look all refreshed.

And I'm just like in the same position. You know, like eyes are beet red. - To the soundtrack of

the cinematic and yeah. - Yeah. But we crunched World of Warcraft,

we crunched... The date slipped, so you do this thing. I remember

Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, "We're gonna

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, 6:00 or 7:00 at night. And they'd... Everybody

was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was like

the worst diet ever. I actually like Newport Rib, no shade- ... on them.

But you can only eat so much of it. And the carpets are stained and, like,

dudes are falling asleep on the couches. And it was an unhealthy

work environment. It

gets pinned on... 'Cause at a lot

of places it is executive driven. And it is mandated from the

top, but the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone

but myself. I just wanted to. I remember, you know,

coming in on Memorial Day, like, with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to

get some work done that day, and working through Christmas, and

those were things I wanted to do. I never felt like somebody, you

know, held my feet to the coals. - Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because

yeah, okay, you could say that's unhealthy, but I know a large number of

people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career, that

have been at companies that do crunch for a thing they believe in, for a thing they

love, and it's some of the most fulfilling years of their life, months and

years of their life. And they also it's not just fulfilling, they grow from it, they learn

from it, and it... You know,

and when they... Especially when

they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible

it was. Of course, when you're going through it, sometimes

it's extremely difficult, you don't know. And then the crunch, like you

mentioned, it's supposed to be a month or two, and then it turns out to be

a half a year, and then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan

type game where you never actually ship it, and it's heartbreaking and the pain,

it'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"-

- Yeah. - ... kind of, which I think is not necessary.

I don't think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks 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 normal-ish day to me. - Yeah. Yeah. - 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, it's 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,

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my friends. And now,

back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan. Okay, we're back. So I think

it's fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like

in EverQuest, consisted of, maybe that's simplifying it a bit, but

standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours. You helped develop with

WoW, I would say a revolutionary idea of quest-driven

leveling, where there's a story-driven, quest-driven

guide through the world, and it so happens that as part of doing that,

you're also leveling the character. So the leveling is both

fun and is the engine that drives the story that then

also immerses you into the world and pulls you in more

and more and more and more. So take me through this process of developing

that idea of quest-driven design. - Sure. Yeah, there were actually a lot of

people involved in it, and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways.

Allen Adham was the lead designer on

WoW. When we first sort of

decided we were gonna have a quest-based game, we used to joke that,

like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it. 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 Allen 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 in, Pat would deal with the

application, or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would

have to deal with it. And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I

was going through Pat, and then on my first day,

they put Pat and I in an office

together, and he's like, "Yeah, they hired me also

as the quest designer." And so Pat... And he was the most

wonderful guy. We had so much fun. So Pat and I kind

of designed the quest system. It was Allen's

idea to have it in the first place. And then there was that

great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the

interface of it all. And the idea was at first, we actually on a

whiteboard in Allen's office, we estimated how many

quests we thought EverQuest had to date. And EverQuest had

had, you know, I think four or three expansions at that point in time, and we're like, "Wow, we have to make

all of these quests like EverQuest has." It's gonna be a lot of quests,

and it's kind of up to me and Pat to do it all. And we believed all we had to

do was match that EverQuest number. And

Pat and I started working on, like, the

design of the system and how it would interact, and Eric Dodds was really

involved in how the interface... You know, like how you were going to interact

with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into like two zones. He was gonna take

Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans, and I

was gonna take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn 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 Elwynn and Westfall, and we did, like,

a team play test. And our

assumption was because the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level

up. It was a level based game. You go out. You kill a creature.

You get experience points. You level up a little bit. And so

the way people played EverQuest is they'd find these areas where

there were lots of creatures, and you'd usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could

find, so, like, fast respawn kind of easy things to kill, and

that's how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember

Alan kind of telling us, like, "Hey, the

quests... When Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim

us to where the creatures are." You'll do a quest, and

then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards,

and that's how he imagined it would work. So we kind of set up the world that

way. You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests

in Elwynn. I'd do a dozen,

20 quests in Westfall, and

we'd 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, et cetera.

And they'd play World of Warcraft. I think we played for, like,

an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn Forest. And the overwhelming

feedback from our team... And these are people who really

didn't play EverQuest, they're like, "My God, Pat, that was horrible.

I ran out of quests, like, right away." And we're like, "Wait a second.

You expect to just have quests just keep going?" And they're like,

"Yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the

whole way. And we kinda had an oh shit moment right after that

Elwynn Forest play test, where we realized, like, we had vastly underestimated

the number of quests we were gonna need. And we changed, we

developed this philosophy

that's kind of a shared philosophy

across Blizzard games in general at this point. And I've heard it

outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design along

the path of least resistance. So basically what that means, like, in EverQuest, the path of least

resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level is to

find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again

in place, which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would

do that for eight hours 'cause I think that's fun. But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, why don't

we make the path of least resistance, so in this

case, the way to get the best experience the fastest not to be killing creatures in one

place, but will overload the experience into the quests themselves,

and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to

see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome

storylines. It sort of did a

lot for the game, and I think

it was like a fundamental change in the genre. Like,

if you look at the things that... EverQuest was

very popular and very successful, and it was hitting

like hundreds of thousands of players. And WoW blew the

doors open and was tens of millions of players. And

I think the fundamental difference there was that WoW allowed

you to play as a single player. And what makes an MMO, massively

multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there. And they're so important or else

the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that

we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.

And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of the

game design, the game design way of

describing it is directed gameplay.

And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like,

for example, if you were to play a single player game

like Last of Us, you know, you'll have those moments where they'll

be like, you'll come up to a log and then press Triangle to duck or else,

or whatever the duck button is— ... left stick to duck to go under.

And that's like the ultimate in directed gameplay. Like, they're

telling you exactly what to do. On the other end of the spectrum

is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where

you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers

who love Minecraft or hate it. The ones who hate it are like,

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do." Like, "You 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 gonna cycle out. Not all players need it. And what WoW did, that it doesn't seem like

an innovation, it doesn't seem

like revolutionary, but it sort of

created this directed gameplay that felt optional, but really wasn't. - I mean, I think it's

absolutely revolutionary. It basically changed gaming.

It changed the way we see games. And it was

so successful in part because it became a mechanism by which you

could spend hundreds of hours, thousands of hours in the game. I

mean, it's kind of a, like, obviously... It's one of those... All

these great ideas are always like this, right? In retrospect, you're like,

"Well, obviously if you make the path of least resistance quest-driven

gameplay, then it's gonna 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. I guess you have to design for everybody.

That's the tricky thing. Like, how do you fine-tune this? If you think

of it as a loop of like accept

quest, kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding, level up, that loop. Like, how do you

fine-tune that so it's maximum fun or fun for the maximum number of people?

Is it... How- how difficult is that? - It's extremely difficult.

And not everybody's good at doing that. We all, to some

degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick. So we're

all different types of gamers, but if you ask me to

describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving

more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was or the

type of gamer I want you to think I am versus the

type of gamer I actually am. By playing lots of games, you cannot

be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit

out of as much as you can and understanding on a deep level.

And the weirdest part about it is

you're not just looking for the

greatest hits. You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do

from an amazing game. And also—like, a lousy game can have a great system that

was tuned wrong, or lacked the correct interface, or they didn't put

the right visceral polish on it. There's an executional aspect to all of it. When I'm playing,

I'm not only, like, thinking about what makes this fun, I'm

thinking about what makes this not fun. But I'm also watching everyone

around me. My wife plays games, my kids play games. And understanding,

like, well, what do they do and how are they different to

me? Why are they finding enjoyment in this? Why are they not? What's

frustrating? What did they miss? - And being raw honest with exactly

what you're saying. I mean, I, if I were to analyze the

kind of gamer I am, why do I

enjoy cow level? And why, above that,

why do I enjoy loot? Why- why is loot so fun? Like, what-

what does- what is it about opening a chest and getting a

bunch of stuff? I mean, I, 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 am, at best,

a quack psychologist. You know? We can motivate you to

do some weird things. The two driving motivators

are extrinsic and intrinsic. And all of us,

at different times in our lives, in our gaming

careers, whatever, we can shift from being intrinsically

motivated to being extrinsically motivated.

Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation,

but even saying that is too simplistic. Like, for example, on

the loot boxes of Overwatch, there's

a masterfully designed system that was

designed by a game designer, not by a businessperson 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 gonna... It's gonna

feel good. It's gonna feel good. And then there's the spreadsheety

part of it. Of, what does it have? Is it an upgrade? And I think great game designers know how to

tap into both of those things. You know, tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic. 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 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 the amount of gold you have,

those are all investment based. There's mastery. There's

just pure raw skill. Creativity is one. And hand-in-hand with creativity is customization. And some of

those can be aesthetic. 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 gonna come up with a whirlwind barbarian and I'm the first

to do it. These are all elements of fun that designers can tap into,

and in fact are frequently tapping into. But they're never defined anywhere, and I find that

players drift. Like, I'm the type of player who's not really

loot motivated. I'm more motivated by seeing the content the world

has to offer. And often that takes me on 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 character's using, and I have to go into creativity mode.

"Oh, he has that one AE where he..." Area of effect. "...where

he puts a curse on me." And, you know, "If I had this

counterability 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 as a

specific kind of fun. Maybe... But you're also a huge fan of the

ultra-realistic shooters. Call of Duty. What is the definition of fun there?

- There's a lot of skill

and mastery. Off the cuff, flippant comment would

be clicking heads, you know? I'm just trying to click heads. - Okay. - There's an intimacy also to the first person camera. And now,

not all shooters are first person. There is a large trend these days

to third person. I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened

that third person shooter door. And you're seeing games like ARC

Raiders are 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-based, you know that's coming at you. - Could you lay out for people who

don't necessarily know what PvP and PvE is? And single player

- Absolutely - ... multiplayer, massively

online multiplayer? - So PvP is player versus

player, so that means a combative, you know... If Lex

and I are up against each other, we're attacking each other. We

call that PvP. You can get killed by another player. Uh, player versus

environment is anytime you're shooting computer controlled

opponents. So if it's a game about dragons, the dragon is

the E, the environment in PvE. - And we should say that PvP and

PvE, the P might be multiple players. It could be five

versus five, six versus six for PvP. And for PvE, it could be,

like, raids where it's multiple people, large groups of people

going against the AI. - Yep. So single player,

that's a game that you play totally by yourself. Like, you

don't play with anybody else. You can't play with anybody

else. It's not networked to play with other people. For example,

I'm playing a game called Story of

Seasons right now on the

Switch, which I just play by myself. I have my farm.

You know, there's a town. I'm meeting people in the town, and

no one can come and join me and interact with that. So

it's a very controlled experience. Single player games are very difficult, or they can be

very difficult and expensive in terms of production to

create. Like, if you think of a game, like Uncharted or Last of Us that's made by Naughty Dog,

like, those are kind of the preeminent best single

player games you could talk about. They're very handcrafted.

Every experience is made just for you. One up from that is what

I call co-op. And these terms become interchangeable, so I'm

using some semantics here. But co-op is any cooperative

experience that we can play together, but

we're sharing an exact

same experience very

intentionally. And it's me sharing that experience

only with other people that I know. So a great example of a cooperative game, maybe one of the best

of all times, was Left 4 Dead, which is a game

where you and three other people go in and you fight,

like, hordes of zombies, and you try to progress

through to the end safe room. it's a very cooperative

experience. A game like Diablo 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 worlds become really,

really big at that point. - By the way, we should say

that the co-op could be remote connection, but

there's also what would you call it, couch co-op where you

have two people. Some games are really designed 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, It's a really fulfilling

experience. Like, with a friend, with a loved one, you can,

like, play a game together. And Diablo IV, I should say, is an example of a

game that does that really well. They do couch co-op. Like, two people

can play Diablo sitting together and there's a real intimate

experience in that. - Yeah, couch co- it's funny, 'cause it

actually, like, predates the couch even. Some of those old arcade games-

... like, would have two joysticks

on them and then you could play- ... with somebody else. Or there's

you know, famous game Gauntlet- ... had four joysticks and four

people playing together. And then anybody who grew up

in that early console era, like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a

legendary one. We would sit and we'd 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 we... I remember one of the big games

that came out was Mortal Kombat. And we would play

Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis, and it was the house

rules were, you know, whoever lost, so whether you were in your

college dorm or just some buddy's apartment and there's five

people there, you're constantly cycling everybody in and

out. But there's just a magic to multiplayer, of engaging

and sharing in the experience-

... with other people. Um, that's why I've always... I've never made a single

player game. Uh, I have great admiration for them. I don't know if I

could do it. The challenge... The reason I love multiplayer

so much, the way I describe being a game

director or game designer on a multiplayer game, it's like

imagine if you were gonna be a movie director, and you were gonna

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 gonna ask you, the director,

to just... You're gonna leave the room. You can set it all up ahead of time, and then you're not allowed to be there

or talk to anybody involved in it. And now you need the actors to

have an experience, and it's just kind of the wildest,

funnest experiment. Like-

- From a designer/creator perspective, 'cause

you don't know what the players will create, so that's fun to see. You

lay out the chessboard, you lay out the world, and then you get to watch

what they create together. That's true. - I struggle because sometimes people

call me the anti-story guy in games, and that really hurts me

because, like, I actually love story in games, and I counter that

I'm 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 loot goblin drew

you into the most danger." "And... 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, Marc Laidlaw, the writing behind Portal- ... and Portal 2. I think it was Erik

Wolpaw, who is hilarious, just amazing, and Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption

2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and that's a game where

you can see the expertise and mastery

of the game design and the

narrative design, and the fact that you can have those player stories of just the goofy shit. Like,

I remember... 'Cause the controls are a little

awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who's playing on console.

Like, I always get confused about, like, taking out my

gun and putting it away, and what's, you know, the

L1 and L2. Like, as a PC gamer, I'm just like, "Let me

bind this stuff to where I want it." And so like you know,

a guy in town rides by and he's like, "Howdy, partner." And I

go to, like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, "Hey, what's

up?" back, and I just whip out my sawed-off shotgun and, like, blow his

fucking head off. And then the whole town is like... Suddenly

I'm, like, under... I'm wanted and I'm being chased,

and then there's a train that, like, takes out the posse, and- - Yes. - It's like those stories, and the fact

that Red Dead can have, you know, this, like, touching, heartbreaking

story of Arthur Morgan and his

journey, but you can also have, you

know, the player story of blowing off the poor guy that's just trying to- - And that's the combination. 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

to the game, that great writing there can create- help create the world- ... with, 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 Lanois song- ..."That's the Way It Is".

I just... I love Daniel Lanois, 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- - Yeah. - Everything up to then had been

gorgeous, like, more of a score. There's Woody Jackson,

who's, like, a really amazing game

composer. He had done the

score for that, and so nothing had been, like, lyrical

with words. And then they play the Daniel Lanois song, and there's,

like, the quotes are coming back- ... from, like, Dutch

and Arthur Morgan, and I'm just like, "Goddam,

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 the number of people who shed

a tear during that moment, and that's just a reflection of how much you're

invested into this world, into these characters, and it's

a beautiful thing. Uh, I have to ask you about this image

that you sent me. It's super cool, so I'd love it if we could nerd out about

it a little bit, the zone flow for the original World of Warcraft.

There's a bunch of zones. It'd be awesome if you kinda talk

through how, like, this world is built. Take me to that time when you

were designing this, before anyone

else got a chance to play it. - All WoW stuff. It would start from that

inspiration of Chris and the world. And, you know, it was 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 Khaz Modan up there, and that's where this,

you know, tribe of dwarves were from. And then they, you

know, humans are going to be down, With Elwynn 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 heads. So, like, take

Burning Steppes, for example. Supposed to be one of the

scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know, all

this kind of stuff. That doesn't feel like where you want to

start. It feels like where you want to end, so you kind of work the world

flow in a way that puts that at the end. But there was also

kind of some magic to the original starting areas, where we gave the

dwarves and the humans a free flight path between... The dwarf hometown

was called Ironforge, the human hometown was called Stormwind. And we allowed you to fly for

free. So, like, these little newbies who were, you know, level five or something, if you played a dwarf

and I played a human, I'm like, "Oh, Lex, don't worry, I'll come. You

know, I'll come to Ironforge and we'll

hook up and I'll just fly out to

you," which is the magic of World of Warcraft. You have to fly

over Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge, and you look

down and you're like, "Holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous." And

it plants that seed of things to come. - Uh, so you've designed some

incredible quests. Is there any that stand out that you're proud of

ashamed of? I mean, you are famously have designed the Green

Hills of Stranglethorn quest. One of the most infamous

quests in the history of WoW, of gaming, where you had to

collect a bunch of pages, or... Green Hills of Stranglethorn,

maybe, can you, comment on that one or any quest

that just springs to mind? - Green Hills of Stranglethorn

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. Um,

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. Um, it's me paying homage to Hemingway, and the guy who gives

you the quest, his name is Hemet Nesingwary, which is just me

rearranging the letters of Hemingway. There's another quest giver

there that's Kerouac's name also mixed up. Um, and then

it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's

clever but is actually a dipshit. That's- That's the Green Hills of

Stranglethorn, 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're gonna 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 he says there's three

types of fun. Fun for the player, fun for the

designer, and fun for the computer. And we catch

ourselves, we're like, you know, we gotta be really care... It has to

be fun for the player, not fun for us. So this Green Hills of

Stranglethorn quest was like an ant farm design of,

I'm gonna write this, honestly, probably pretty shitty

story, I haven't read it since 2003 so God only knows

if it's any good. But I

wrote the story and then I divided

it up into all of these different pages. And the quest

giver, Hemet Nesingwary, wants you to put together, like, the

story's like, he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered

across Stranglethorn 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

Stranglethorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn

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 gonna 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

Stranglethorn Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all of these

pag- 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 Stranglethorn 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 gonna be social and meet each other, and players are

gonna be appreciative for each other, but really all everybody did was

just no... Eventually, no one did the quest. They just were super annoyed,

or they went to the Auction House.

auction house. So the quest is famous

in that it was so aggravating and annoying and it just became a way... It not only became a

way for me to learn from my mistakes, but because I was

very open with the fact that I didn't think it was good

and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at

Blizzard to be critical of our own work. Like it's always easier

if you're the first one to go out and say, "Hey, guys, I think I made

one of the shittiest quests in the game and here's why." Um, and then

it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it. - I mean, again, you continue to speak

with so much humility. But WoW turned out to be one of the

biggest games of all time both in terms of popularity,

how many players play it, revenue, and critical acclaim. And then

you rose to become a game director of WoW helping release Wrath of the

Lich King, which by many is

considered to be the greatest expansion.

I mean, there's a million questions I can ask here, but maybe this is

also a good place to ask about the famous Blizzard polish.

So Blizzard as a company has historically, and you

were certainly a big part of that, delivered these games. They were

just, uh, got so many pieces right and well-functioning and

well-coordinated, and just feel finished in a way that a lot of

other games don't get right. So what does it take to take this

gigantic game, this game played by millions of people,

loved by millions of people, And deliver it in a way where

it's like it all just works? - To have a level of polish is like a studio

wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody, like no one can be satisfied

with a bug. Every game is gonna 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 gonna 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 are 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 as possible, depending on the logistics

of... You know, in the early days,

we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us. We

were very fortunate on the Overwatch team to have a large

amount of QA sitting with us, and then developing that

relationship. You know, in the early days there, there were

these fears of like, "Well, QA can't talk to the developers,"

and trying to shatter that- ... of, because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out, you

would just say to them like, "Hey, dude. Just message me.

Here's my home number. Like, call me if there's a bug. If you think we're

gonna get raked over the coals on this, you gotta speak up. I don't care what

the chain of command is. Like, we gotta fix this thing." So QA was amazing. - I mean, so can you speak to

QA, quality assurance? At the peak of the craft, what does

it entail? Like you're basically experiencing the game and

trying to figure out, particular slices of that

experience that 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 gonna test what. There's a lot of regression

testing that goes on. within QA there will 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 gonna come up on some video card or some motherboard that

you weren't expecting. But it was all very systematic.

It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game.

And then as a developer interacting with QA, you would

find that there were certain specialists whether like, for example, on

Overwatch, there were a

couple of players that... Like, we all were shooter players when

we were making Overwatch, but I'm not like esports level shooter player.

I'm like, you know, Gen Xer, "Remember Doom, how good I was"- - Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. - ... type of shooter player. But we

had, you know, a couple of these QA specialists who, like, they could just snipe from 100

meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there

was a frame of input delay, you know? And then

you sit that person with an engineer and say, "Hey, I think

there's some input lag here." - That's amazing. - And sure enough, they'd be right. But

you have to have that relationship where the devs trust QA. Or just even

on, like World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA in

that they built out a full raid

team to do the raids. And then you're not only, like, looking for bugs, like, "Hey,

the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just, like, sunk through the world

and the game crashed," which would happen. But, like, if you really value QA, you're asking them, "What

do you... Dude, what do you think? You're..." You know? Like,

"10 million people are gonna see this. Your opinion, multiply it, you know? It matters. What do you think? You know?

Are you having fun? Oh, yeah, this is cool. This isn't cool." Um, so QA was important. The other thing that was important

is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to architect

your game to be hotfixable. And what a hotfix is, games, there's a

couple ways to fix 'em. The way most of us know, 'cause 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 it

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 wanna 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 hotfix

the game on a dime. And what a hotfix is, is a server patch that

no one's client has to go down for. - Mm-hmm. That's 'cause 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 emergency

issues like something's crashing. Like, the worst

case scenario is anytime the server's crashing. Or in

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 hotfix 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 gonna play Overwatch

is because that hero's active. You don't want to wait for patches and you

want to hotfix- ... as fast as you can. - And then also to improve the game quickly

to just even settle stuff to do that. - 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 or consumer product, you can feel when there are people who

loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a

shelf. And games have that as well, where you can feel the,

like, heart and soul of the 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 whirlwinding 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 whirlwind guy. - One-handed. - It was... Yeah, it

brought so much joy. So a lot of people modern day think of

you as Jeff from the Overwatch team. - My name is Jeff from the Overwatch

team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. - But y'all must have forgot, you

were the game director of WoW in an era when WoW was

one of the biggest games in the world. Just, you

know, looking back,

what wisdom can you draw

from that time when you got to experience

this era of gaming that changed gaming forever, where it's millions

of people playing this video 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, um... Very shortly after WoW shipped, you know, Allen 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 II. And he put myself and Tom Chilton

in charge. Uh, 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 because he had a lot more experience

than I did. And this is like early 2005, the world was on fire, the

servers were barely running- ... WoW 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. Mm-hmm. Um, I

thought it was the funnest joyride

because we were working on WoW,

we were still working insane hours- and then I'd get home, eat dinner, and then me and my

wife would log in and play WoW, you know, for four hours, and then I'd go in the next day and I'd work...

And it was just this... My whole life was World of Warcraft. And I loved it. Like I loved everything

from, you know, the creative meetings with Chris Metzen and

just what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the

simplest, dumbest design stuff that like we as game

designers, like, you wanna 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

minutiae 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 GMs, like game masters,

these are customer support guys, calling my home phone

at 3:00 in the morning. Like, I remember this

one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorn Vale and they figured out a way to

exploit it, and this GM calls me panicked, it's 3:00

in the morning. He's like, "I'm just spawning..." Uh,

what, what did we call 'em? Uh, Guardians of Blizzard. They were these

giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touched anything.

We used to have them when we were in the beta, like 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

Stranglethorn Vale because

he's worried because the players

are exploiting. It's like 3:00 in the morning and I'm talking in hushed

tones because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed. I'm doing this 'cause

it was actually like before the cell phone days when I actually had

a landline. But that's just how... And I loved it.

I loved the thrill of those big moments, the

minutiae. 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 a 12-chapter book

essentially. And that first how to run the game, how to patch it, what type

of content, how to deal with emergencies, what should

our customer support be like. I mean, we would debate

should we have a launcher or not. You know, in the early days, the

only reason the launcher existed in 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

MorhAIME. He's like, "You gotta bring the launcher back, guys." We're like, "Why?"

He's like, "There's no better way for us to talk to our players." And I

remember trying to hide the launcher. And to this day, Mike was right.

Like, that launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had.

That's essentially what Battle.net has morphed into

these days. But all those decisions and when it

came time to make Burning Crusade, you know, at that

point, Tom and I were leads. We were full, they had actually promoted

us. There was, there were two big exoduses of groups that quit

Blizzard, they were disenfranchised if you can believe it. Like

we just shipped World of Warcraft and this whole group just

walked out the door. I was actually sitting, my, my desk faced MorhAIME's

office, and I watched them all go in

and quit, and they were the group that formed Carbine....

which made the game WildStar. Ended up taking them 10 years to make, and they were just

really unhappy with World of Warcraft, and they were unhappy with, um... 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. Like, what is it? Just because

they put their heart and soul into the game and they maybe get exhausted

in a certain kind of way? - Yeah, and I don't want to... It's not fair

of me to speak on their behalf. I think they were promised some compensation

that they didn't immediately see. I don't know if the game... Like,

here's the weird part when you make a game. When you come up with

the idea and you start pitching it to people, that's the

best the game is ever gonna be, and then you work on it. Like,

you know, games I worked on

take five years, you know? Overwatch was

two and a half, three years. Every day you get close to ship, the

imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from

the reality, and you're always shipping this, like,

greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere near matches the imagination- ... of the inception of the idea, so you

become disenfranchised with the concept. - 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. - Yes. - You're doing less and less and less, saying

no and no, and cutting, and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's difficult, psychologically

difficult, but nevertheless, the result when you zoom out, it's one of the greatest games

of all time that millions of people played for thousands of hours.

It's just... What... Did

it... Did you ever have an

experience, a realization how huge WoW was in terms of not, like, statistics on the server and so on,

but the cultural impact it had? - The first time was the first

BlizzCon, which was in 2005. So when WoW shipped and this

is so weird to tell people, but on the team not everyone, but a lot

of us were very demoralized after WoW shipped. There were, there were

all sorts of issues with the servers because the game did way more successful than we expected it to

do and the server load was just nuts. Like, we were

just... We were doing our best to hire database programmers, you

know, 'cause we just didn't know how to deal with the sheer scope of

the game. But when you're an individual

like... And at that time, like I

mentioned, there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard.

They went and formed a couple notable studios. One was Carbine

the other was Red 5. And we lost, like, kind of our core people.

Like, when Red 5 started, that was our team leader, that was

Mark Kern and our art director, Bill Petras, they quit. When Carbine 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 who stuck around, and then eventually

he left also, but you're doing like, okay, we gotta now do a patch without

an animator. A lot of our art team was

gone at that point, and you're

trying to keep the ship afloat and the morale was just in

the shitter. Like, everybody felt very down on Team Two, the WoW team was called Team Two, and that we

had somehow failed. And during that time, there was this idea to do BlizzCon,

and the way that started was EverQuest had done these, like, meetups

because they knew it was, like, a big guild social game, and people would

get together at like some hotel ballroom and you'd sit with your

guild at like a banquet room table. And to give credit where credit's due,

I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become

BlizzCon, it was Pardo who said, "Blizzard's bigger

than that. We're not just one game, and I know everybody's

focused on World of Warcraft right now, we should do BlizzCon." And at the time, we had a game

called StarCraft Ghost was in

development, and that was getting

ready to show, and there was Frozen Throne, which was the

expansion to Warcraft III, but, like, we knew we were gonna make

StarCraft II. 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," and everybody's

kinda like, "Crickets. What's BlizzCon? Who cares?" And we're idiots, we're reading the forums, and

the forums are just flaming us all the time, like, "There's lag

on this server and can't log into that server." And that's,

that was our perspective of what was happening. And then,

like I said, give Mike MorhAIME credit where credit's

due. 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

wanna 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

'cause it gets attention. You know, that's the lesson I should've

learned from my early days. And it's such an unfortunate thing, because

then you met these people in person and they loved World of Warcraft.

And all they wanted to do was talk

about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next and be around other

people who loved World of Warcraft, and- - It's incredible. It's a fascinating theme,

to me, about human nature, and it's absolutely true, and I wish there was a

thing that could be solved. But then again, maybe not. Maybe that's

just the way it is. But in person, all of the people that are passionate about a particular topic,

and whatever that topic is, it could be games it could be at conferences, technical

conferences, they're all mostly full of love. And just the way they talk

about stuff, they nerd out. Even the disagreements

are drenched in this, Respect and appreciation and

love for the game, for the 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," or, "I love bananas. I love fr..." Like, "I love

X," whatever. You just get made fun of. You get... And so the lesson

you learn from that is, "Well, I'm just not going

to speak up when I love something. I'm going to

instead speak up when I, maybe how much I hate another

thing that's similar to it." Or maybe join in when we're

making fun of a particular quirky thing, about, "Don't you hate

it when bananas are too ripe or too..." Versus like not

saying the, calling out the elephant in the room is, "We're all gathered

here today 'cause we love the thing." It's interesting. It's that aspect of the

internet that I think is jarring to a lot of people depending on the game, but if

you go to Discord or Reddit or so on, in the communities that love a

particular video game, there's a... If you're not used to it, and I don't often go, so when I

go it's like, "Wow, there's a lot

of, like, pretty intense kinda

mockery and derision and so on." But you get used to it pretty quick and you

understand it. I 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. You know, I ran a... Uh,

I actually, I had this reputation for being

edgier than I really was. Um, there were a couple

notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back

on but they don't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill. And that's unfortunate. I think a lot

as a game designer about the design of social media. And unfortunately, social media in general is

designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works,

and that's how you get the most

points is by being max hyperbolic. And usually, unfortunately,

it's more in the negative direction than the

positive direction. You know, if I say, "That's 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 kinda interesting thing. So I was at I, I spent, that's what we're

talking about, you're from Pasadena, so I've been spending a

lot of time in Caltech and working on robots, and we get to see

students come in from high school. Uh,

undergraduates come in and,

like a tour, hang out with the robots. And middle school also.

And the interesting thing you see, the younger that they are,

the more prevalent this effect, which is all of them are kind of

afraid to show that they think a thing is awesome. They're all... You could

just feel they're checking, "Is it okay?" So they're, they're kind of

like the default mode is whatever, this, everything is

stupid, this is stupid. You know, that, 'cause 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's a actual psychological effect that also young

people are dealing with, in-person also. So I think, I just

wanna 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. Um, I think people make up the internet, people build the

internet, and young people, more than anybody else, define 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 100 compliments, it's the one, you know,

you're... And you're supposed to read it and supposed to be

fine with it and have it not affect you. It'll stay with you for years,

you know? I have those. And I think of it, like the cheesy, the

cheesy way I think about it is like, is there some kind of social

Darwinism going on? And my big worry is

that there are creators... Like, now

being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you know, make online

videos, whatever- whatever creator means to you, make games. Now

part of the skillset is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism

like the world has never seen. And I make up these scenarios in my

head of like, would van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there

commenting on... Like, how many people were able to communicate with

Beethoven in his lifetime, or in a week? Like, how many influences could

comment on his music directly to him? Versus like if I want to

insult Brad Pitt right now,

I can just go on 10 different

devices and do it. And it's like that level of access is very dangerous,

and I worry that there is a whole group of people who's receding

from us that will never see the brilliance, and

they're being shut out by the negativity. There's a very

real example, was Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds,

who was the game director of Diablo III. And he took so much heat, it just affected him to the

point where he essentially retired from making games.

Went and, you know, wrote novels. I was very happy for him

because, you know, I'm glad he found his place, and I think

he's getting back into making games now. But we lost, we essentially... Like, think how

many people loved Diablo III and played the shit out of Diablo III.

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. They... So

this is a call to action, again. People out there,

support, especially young creators, support them.

They need it. Like you think negativity has no

cost, but it does. You're robbing the world of some of

the great creations. And also, allow creators to suck and to

improve. Because that's what the process of creation is

like, is to take risks. To and take risks meaning being

vulnerable, being cringe. To doing the thing that like,

the embarrassing failure where you're standing there on, you know, in a in a silly clown

outfit, on stage, dancing, and

nobody, and nobody's laughing.

And it's a, it's... Comedians go through this all the time, when... They

talk about this all the time, when they bomb, right? They, the act just

doesn't work, and you have to go through that. And you have to,

you have to support the creators through that journey. In order to have

great things, we need to support those folks. So, after shipping

WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, again, many consider

it to be one of the great expansions for WoW, you stepped

down as WoW's game director and switched to developing Titan. This epic huge game that promised to be

the, sort of the MMO to end all MMOs. Um, I mean, it's kind of a

legendary vision for a game, right? It's gigantic. With a lot of, like you said,

a brilliant team, a team that's now hardened and knows how to do a great game.

But it was canceled after seven years in

development. So, tell me, what was the

vision of the game and what happened? - Sure. So, as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft,

there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn't

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 sort of

waiting in the wings. So starting around, I wanna say 2006, maybe 2005,

um, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum, and we

were working on Burning Crusade. Uh, Rob Pardo took the

helm to start sort of Titan development. We didn't even really

have a team then. And I remember,

being like embroiled in

Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings, and Rob pulled

a group, you know, from kind of across the company, and

we started talking about what this next MMO could be and

when it would get going. And eventually, it started

in earnest, like real development, around 2007.

The first team members joined, and it was a real

ambitious project, including like building a new engine from

scratch. I think maybe the first team member was a guy named

John LaFleur, who was just a stellar game programmer, and the engine, which ultimately failed for

Titan ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which

is a great success story for him. And the idea behind the

game, it was gonna take place in future Earth, and the players

played as secret agents.

And by day, they all had day jobs, and by night, they went off and did cool

secret agent stuff. And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter,

but over-the-top abilities, Like you would see in Overwatch,

because that's where they came from. And the by day stuff, we were

gonna 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 gonna be all this like daytime business house stuff. You could build a house. You could live

in a neighborhood. Um,

and beyond that, there

was also a vision on the technical side, game design

and technical side, that unlike World of Warcraft,

which the modern day term for it is that it's sharded.

Mm-hmm. So meaning people play on different realms

or servers. In 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 gonna take place in future Earth, and we were literally building like,

we had what we called Bay City, which was San Francisco. We had, you know, Hollywood, and then we had

to build all of California between that, and we also wanted

to build like Cairo and London.

And there's this realization of

like, how do we connect all of these? The game had driving in it,

like full-blown, like GTA-style driving. It was such a

gargantuan, huge undertaking with a brand new engine, a

brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual property, you

know, setting, which we really wrestled over. Like,

the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure

out, like, are there aliens or not aliens, you know? Like,

all that sounds kinda dumb and fun, but when you're building

a game, like you, especially world-building, you have to have

rules. That's- 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, 'cause someone said so, and just the way it

needs to be. But that development started in 2007, kind of as

ideation, brainstorming,

early work. Really got going in late 2007, and then I had

to ship Wrath of the Lich King, And it was... We had the like, we

always did like a champagne toast. Uh, I still remember it because it was

Election Day. I think it was like Election Day and my birthday,

and the day Obama got elected, and then I left

the WoW team on that day. It was like memorable

in all those ways. And then I joined the Titan team, and that game, we went on, like the fast-forward

part of that is we shut it down in 2013. That was one of the most

painful development processes that I've ever been a part of, and probably, 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 gonna

happen, it's in trouble. I remember going to Mike MorhAIME in

2010, and, like, you're going to the CEO of... You know, at that time,

Blizzard was big company, and I'm like, "You gotta shut us down.

We're just gonna burn money." - What was your intuition about why? So

like from my understanding, there was a few issues. So one, with such a

gigantic world, which by the way, is a beautiful dream, this kind of universe

simulator, because I love... Every game you mentioned there is great. I

empathize with the dream. I would love to play that game. But

one of the issues, as I understand, was that it was

unclear what, like, the quest flow is. Like what are

you supposed to really do

in this game? What's the thing that

connects all of the pieces together? - So it was a multifaceted failure

for- for many reasons. Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself

included. Like, there's just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like, a lot of games you

can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the, you

know, the servers didn't work- ... or like an art failure, like no one

responded to the look of the game, or a 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've

come from 10 different games.

- Mm-hmm. And we should say it cost $83

million across those years. So a large team doing a lot of stuff, but not converging

towards a game that could actually ship. - Correct. As, like, a game

designer, I use semantics a lot and I like to define my semantics

so people know where I'm coming from. Talking about ideas versus

vision for a second, ideas are easy. Ideas, you know, I can have 10

in 10 seconds. You know, let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse, you know,

whatever. Like, you can... A secret agent by day is, you know, doing all

this cool shooting stuff, by night is running a flower shop.

You know, ideas are just infinite. At least on

creative teams, you know, you have no shortage of ideas. What I call

vision is the ability to not only

take a great idea, but shepherd it into

existence, and you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost.

If you need a team to make it, you need a team to

believe in the vision of the idea. And then there also has

to be a technological plan for the idea. There has to be a design

plan. There has to be an art style for the plan. There has to be a pragmatic

production reality to the plan. And Titan kind of was like that was the hubris of

Blizzard in that era at its height of, you know, we were over being

hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft. I don't know if people are

gonna 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 gonna 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 gotta work overtime or, like, we might not

ship if we don't get, you know, somebody else in here. And Titan kinda

had that hubris of like, well, we're gonna 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 gonna make

the art or what the constraints of it are, but we know we're gonna 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

'cause 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 at his first day at

work and he's like, "Oh, are we making World of StarCraft? Is that..." And they're

like, "No, dude. Let me show you it." And he's like, "What is this game?"

You know? We were in that world, and we hired way too many people.

The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible

and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can

get your hands on, using other engines, using art from

whatever. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're

doing, then you expand the team. You know the cliche of idle hands

is the devil's work, or whatever.

You have this, like, brilliant team,

huge, and we don't have a road map for what we're making or how

we're gonna make it. And now you're having to deal with all

these people. Like, they're coming into your office, you know, you're trying

to figure out what is the quest flow, what—how do I design the quest system

for Titan, how can we prototype it? And we're like, "Oh, this prop artist over here is running out of stuff

to do. What props should he make? Should he work on Chinatown or the Hollywood set?" And you're

just making up busy work. The engine didn't work. When we

would run play tests on Titan, we would have to tell the team, "Stop

checking in because it slows us down." We had this really great technical

artist, a guy named Dylan Jones, and he was on Titan with us,

and I remember in, like, the last days, we asked him,

because he was a very active

user Titan editor was called Titan Edit

or TED which is, to this day, TED is the proprietary tool for Overwatch, since

Overwatch came from the Titan engine- ... which was Tank. And we

said to Dylan, "I want you to log your uptime in the editor,

in TED." And in a 40-hour week, he was only able

to work for 20 hours. And you can imagine, you're building

a team of the best and 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. Like, the creative frustration and the

way that that manifested itself, and how demoralized the team

got, it was a disaster. - And so many elements of

that were done completely

differently for Overwatch, which turned out to be this incredibly

masterful execution on a short timescale with a small team with a clear vision. I read that sort of if

you- if you were to compare Overwatch and Titan, sort of

the defining characteristic for the Titan team, they said yes to

everything, and the Overwatch team said no to everything. Meaning focus, like deep,

deep focus on the execution of a very clear vision. And

maybe that's the process of designing games, like you said, is, you

know on a team that's full of incredible ideas because it's creative minds, it's

constantly saying no. It's a really painful process, but perhaps it is the responsibility of leadership

to just keep saying no. Which sucks. I guess it sucks to be a

leader on a team in that sense, because you're constantly saying no. - The being a creative leader, you're in two modes. You're pushing or you're

pulling, and whatever mode you're in

is the exact opposite of the team. When they're not thinking outside the

box enough or, like, elevating the vision enough, that's when you're

pushing them. Like, "Come on guys," you know, "don't worry about the

schedule. We got—" you know, "capture hearts and minds, inspire

people." And when they're going a little crazy and they... Endless source of great ideas and really

fun development, that's when you gotta 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've been a gigantic heartbreak for everybody.

And there was this moment when the plan was for the Titan

team to be disbanded and moved elsewhere, but you fought for for keeping some part of the

Titan team, the core of the team together, and Mike MorhAIME 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 were three possible ideas, directions

you were thinking about. A StarCraft MMO maybe an MMO in a new IP called

CrossWorlds, and then the third idea was Overwatch. Can you take me

through those six weeks? - Yeah, the six weeks, it's... It

was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it. Because you're a game developer at Blizzard,

and you get to come up with a new idea. So that sounds awesome, like, to

everybody at Blizzard, to all game developers, it sounds

great. But we were probably the most demoralized we'd ever been in

our careers. At least I was, you know? I didn't know if I was gonna be fired.

I didn't know if that was the end of my career at that point. And so it was

like a really serious, kind of dire

environment that this

was happening in. And we were given two criteria that we had to

hit for these pitches. The first one was that we had to ship within two years. And

that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game. - Yeah, crazy. That's crazy. - But for a Blizzard game,

it's kind of insane. And then the second... Okay, the second

is even more ambitious and crazy, 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

threw out the revenue thing 'cause 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 Heroes of the Storm, the

D3 expansion, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone. So immediately, a large number of the team was gone. Then we

had a bunch of, like, what we called temp loans- ... people that someday were gonna

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, I actually really loved

that pitch. It was called StarCraft Frontiers. And

the concept was, like, less of you're playing, like, space

marine. Like, it was less armies. StarCraft the RTS is always about the

three races and the giant armies. And kind of what made WoW wow and separate

from the Warcraft RTS series was that instead of being, like, a footman in the

army in World of Warcraft, you were like a

lone adventurer, you know,

make your mark on the world. So we had this idea, it was this

old Chris Metzen drawing of a space prospector. And I love that

idea that, like, somewhere out in, like, where all the

giant StarCraft battles were happening, you know, thousands

of Zerg and Protoss and Terran, there's, like, this, like, lone

prospector on some planet, like, going through, like, a mysterious dungeon- ... you know, looking for minerals but

finding monsters. Like, it was that kind of spirit of- - That's awesome - ... more on the ground level. - I didn't even think about that because my

intuition with a StarCraft MMO would be the soldier as part of the army, right? The

prospector. That's such a beautiful vision. Yeah. - Yeah, I— - Looking for the resources and on

the way finding the monsters. - You want to be on the ground— Like,

what's it like on the ground floor? And I don't want to be a

minion in a giant army. I want to— I want to be Indiana

Jones in space, you know?

- Nice. - Um, so then there was this

Metzen picture of the prospector, and then two of the most amazing

artists, Arnold Tsang and Peter Lee. Arnold's the great character artist.

Peter Lee's the great environment artist. They did this

concept art for Frontiers that was Metzen's space

prospector. He's smoking a cigar- ... and he's got his

foot on a Hydralisk skull. - Nice. - And then there's, like, a Medivac in the

background, and they're on this, like, big alien planet. And, like, that

picture, you just wanted to like, "Here's my money. I'll pre-order

now. Like, sign me up for that game." Um, that picture ended up being McCree

from Overwatch. We redid it. - Nice. - Um, but, but yeah, that's

where McCree actually came from. So that was the StarCraft

Frontiers idea. We kind of, we went all in on the design. We had a

world design. We had class design, like how, how the classes would work what

progression might look like. And you

also have to think when you're trying to design an MMO, like, what could

expansions and live content be like? And we put together

a really good pitch. We all knew there's no way

you can make this game. Like, this, even though it was more

focused than Titan, it's five years on Blizzard's best day with

nothing going wrong, in perfect scenario, five years to make that

game 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, 'cause it lacked, it lacked

the path to reality, you know? There- - 'Cause that's a legit large-scale MMO

in a world that you haven't quite developed in the way that an MMO

needs that was really crafted for the arts or the real-time strategy

formulation of StarCraft. And it's in space. It's-

It's... It would, it would take... I mean, it would

be incredible, but it would be a five-year and realistically even more. - Like, an endless thing that you'd spin

on on that team. You're making the StarCraft game. How do you

get from planet to planet? Is it a cut scene? No one's going

to want a cut scene, but we should probably make it a cut scene because

that's easy, but well, we gotta have space flight. That... You're adding, like, three years just

by saying, "We gotta have space flight." - You are. Yeah. - And then how do you make a space game

without space flight? We've all played them. We know, we know those games, so. - So are you essentially, when you're

brainstorming like that, and by the way, 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

can do that's a complete world?" Like, are you 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 do players

need? There's a Blizzard design value called "What is the fantasy?" What is the fantasy? You

want to be in space. you want to be in the StarCraft universe,

and then your job as the game director, and if you have a great creative

director, art director, tech director, the director

should be scoping it back into reality. The mistake

I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes

a production problem. You give it to the project

managers or the executives or the producers to say,

"No, there's not enough time." Or, "You guys

should hire more," 'cause- - Right. - Like, what do executives,

what do those types have at their disposal that they can

hit you with meetings in 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 bucks.

- The scoping, your best-case scenario is when your tech director, art director,

and game director are doing the scoping. Um, because then you know, like,

this part we gotta 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,

you know, crates and chairs, that guy's going to make the... You

know, that's a triple A awesome developer who's going to put his

heart and soul into it. If you let him, he'll take, you know,

six weeks to make a crate. You have to have that moment where

you're like, "I kind of need 200 crates. So just spend,

like, a couple hours on that one." And that's a hard

thing to say to somebody. - You're doing this kind of

scope carving while also talking about what is the fantasy. So you're, there's a tension there that you're

constantly dancing with. So you're allowing

yourself to think big, but then sculping

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, shut it

off and go to idea number two? - Yeah. Idea number two was Crossworlds.

That was a Metzen vision for a universe, and, like, I'm glad Metzen's back at Blizzard, and I hope they

make this game someday. The way Chris described it was there's

a planet on the edge of the universe that's like the Mos Eisley space

port with all these, you know, freakish aliens and people

from all walks of life- - Nice - ... and it's kind of seedy 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 IP driven one that was really inspired by Chris. - And that allows 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 those worlds. - No, you, you don't have to design

them, but then they're yours. Like, if the players really are reacting

to, like, the Green People planet- ... or whatever, and someday you're like,

"Hey, what expansion should we make?" "I don't know. Green People planet." - Green People, 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 designery stuff. And on CrossWorlds, we were having a class

meeting of, like a big decision in, like, RPG type games is always, are you doing,

like, skill based or class based? And it's usually some combination

of those, but class 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 base is everybody's

kind of an avatar, and then the skills that you pick

define, so I might take that I know how to use swords. So

you're kind of making those decisions, and with all things game design,

there's no right or wrong. It's all trade-offs. So the trade-off decision we were making is like, "Oh, I

think we want to be class based with this CrossWorlds thing," and we were in a design meeting and

one of my favorite designers of all time is a guy named Jeff Goodman.

He was one of the original

WoW encounter designer, he

designed like Onyxia and all the big raid bosses. Like, if someone

has a favorite raid boss, Jeff probably designed it. And he just kind of

off the cuff said in this meeting, "He said, "I wish instead of making, like, six

classes, I wish we could make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having, like, you

know, 100 abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had, like,

one or two things that was really interesting about them." And

then the class meeting ended. Like, we designed our six classes

in that meeting, and then the meeting ended. And I was back at my desk,

and it just stuck with me what Jeff had said about the way he

wished he could design the classes. And then I also had... We had this

directory of all the amazing Titan art.

And I started pulling up

Arnold Tsang's characters. Arnold's vision and his art is second to

none. And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had

designed. We had a class called the Jumper, and the Jumper could,

like, teleport forward and rewind time and come

back. And the Jumper used dual-wield pistols, which

was, at the time, designed after my dual G18s from Modern Warfare

2. It was my favorite loadout. Uh, I was just cribbing Infinity Ward.

That's where Tracer's guns came from. And we had all these, like, different guns,

like, some that bloomed and some that, you know, had this, like, really

crazy recoil, and we had other types of guns. And I took

every version of, like, the Titan Jumper, and I just

distilled it into what I thought was the best

version of the Jumper, which was, you know, the

dual-wield pistols, the blink, the

recall, and time bomb. And

then I took Arnold Tsang 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 if she's British,

and her name's Tracer?" And, like, that was the origin of Overwatch. And some of the pragmatic part

of that was I knew that Geoff Goodman was gonna be on

this team, and I knew that Arnold Tsang 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 I went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named The Gunjack, who was...

became Reaper. We had... Actually, the

Ranger got split out and became 76,

and became Bastion of all things. - You're describing the game

of Overwatch where exactly that vision from that meeting- - Yes. - ... came to life for you. As opposed

to having a small number of classes with a large number of skills,

you have a large number of heroes with each their distinct

look, distinct set of skills. - Yeah, and persona- the personality

was a big part of it, like capturing... This isn't some generic, the

Jumper. It's this person, Lena Oxton. You know? And she has a

life, and we're gonna, you know, make you interested in her. - Yeah, there's, like, a deep backstory.

And that's also what's interesting about Overwatch, is that backstory

is not, like, revealed in, in a direct way. It's,

it sort of, like, seeps in indirectly throughout the game.

So, the backstory is implied almost.

- 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 Cross World. Like, people are, you know,

writing design docs and doing concept art for Cross World. And, you know,

we'd have some brainstorm meetings every day, and I put together...

It was a seven- page deck, Overwatch deck. And it was called

Monetized Shooter at the time. - Yeah. - And it just said, "Monetized

Shooter." And then the first slide was League of Legends

plus Team Fortress 2 logos. - Yeah. - And then I had, like, six

heroes, like, sloppily designed. And as everybody

was working on Cross Worlds there were two, you know, co-leaders of that team for... There was, you

know... Chris Metzen was there, and Ray Gresko. 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 III. He and I killed Titan. And then he's at my desk looking over

my shoulder, and he's like, "Well, what are you working on? Is this the Cross

Worlds pitch?" I'm like, "No, this is, like, another idea that I'm just working on

on the side." And I show him the seven slides, and he just looks at me,

and he says, "Go show Metzen this. This is what we should make instead." And

then I went and I showed Metzen, like, "Hey, this is, hey, this

is just an idea." And then Metzen 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... 'Cause we

would- Every morning, we'd get the team together 'cause we were in this dire,

you know, dire straits, and we're

midway through at that

point. And Ray and a producer named Matt Hawley said,

"Tomorrow morning at the meeting, you're gonna pitch this Monetized

Shooter idea." It was called Monetized Shooter because originally

when I pitched it, it was free to play and you had to buy the

heroes, which is fucking terrible, but at the time, I actually

thought that was a good idea. And I'm walking down the hall with

Matt Hawley to go, like, pitch this to this group, you know, out of- we're supposed

to be working on CrossWorld, and they're like, "You gotta pitch this idea to them." And

Matt Hawley stops me in the hall and says, "You, Jeff, you cannot

go into that meeting. I refuse to put up a deck in front

of the team where the first slide says, 'Monetized Shooter.'" "They'll hate that, and that's

not the spirit of who we are-" "... as, you know, creative devel-" And I'm like,

"Yeah, you're right." Like, well no one was

supposed to see his deck anyway. You guys are all looking over my

shoulder. 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 had

written Overwatch on that board and it got the most votes. So I

basically named the game Overwatch to,

like, high five my team- ... and

kind of middle finger. Like— Don't act like it's a democracy

when it's not. You know? So... - So it's a middle finger. So Overwatch, and then the, I mean,

the rest is history. So what, what, in that slide deck, is that,

in that slide deck, were, did you already have a kind of crawl, walk, run idea

of, of the way this would be developed? - So my deck was terrible.

People actually... there's a thing called the 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- ... Besides dragging Arnold Tsang's

art, you know, desecrating 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. Um, Jeremy, not only was he a great

game designer, but he had the

ability to sell things better than anybody

else, visually. So Jeremy took my shitty deck, and then we had lots more, like,

creative brainstorms 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. Um, 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 I, II, and III 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 I, essentially.

So this first game is just to establish that there's a universe you

might give a shit about. We also knew that the timeframe

we were given of two years, there was no way to create a

compelling PvE experience, so we just kinda randomly put dates in a

slide of crawl, walk, run, thinking it was aspirational, and really,

we were just trying to save ourselves. Like, don't

cancel the, don't cancel us. You know, this team can

make something great. The other part that we had to talk

to too was, like, a mobile strategy. Like, at that time, it

was like, everything has to be also on mobile, which I think

is the dumbest thing ever.

And so literally what we did

is, this was Jeremy's brilliant part, we had a picture with

all the boxes and then one of them is, like, a tablet

with just a fucking Photoshop of, you know, Arnold's

art on it. We're like, "And also-" - Mobile - "... it'll be on mobile." - Brilliant. But I think this crawl, walk, run idea

is really nice. So 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, co-op. And then if people really fall in love with the

world, then you build a big MMO around it. Quick pause for a

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to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan. And we should also say that there's a whole world that was

built around Overwatch. And one of the ideas was... So,

Warcraft is a very particular kind of world. StarCraft is a particular

kind of world. Diablo is a particular kind of world. And you wanted

to bring Overwatch to Earth and make it positive. You give

this talk where there was a lot of respect paid to the sort of dark,

gritty, post-apocalyptic games on Earth. Also gave 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. And not just,

like, different characters like Tracer and so on, like what the

personality is, but, like, bringing the world to life in which they will

be. 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." - Mm-hmm, yes. - You know, if there's gonna be all this fighting,

like the... it kinda 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 be like,

"Where do you wanna go?" You know, "Santorini looks

amazing." And you're looking at pictures, and like, "Let's make

that place." You know in a

video game people are gonna spend hours

and hours in a location. Resist the urge to do the common, I call

them the cargo container mazes, that you see in every

game. And I know why they exist, they're easy to make, but we kinda wanted Overwatch to

be this world tour of great places that you'd wanna go to. Or in

the case of like Oasis, it's like, okay, maybe Iraq, back when we

were making this game, wasn't the top of people's list, but

what is the bright, hopeful version of what that could look like? Um, so we just really tried to

sell this idea of these aspirational locations.

One, just to get people thinking about different places on

Planet Earth and how awesome they all are. But also, from

like a pure game design standpoint, you're gonna

spend a lot of time in the

environment, so the environment should

be pleasing and not oppressive. - Can you go through some of the heroes

that you ended up putting in the game? Maybe a good way to do it is,

which are your favorites? And what's from the best of your

knowledge of the internet, favorites? - My favorite... I have a couple

favorite heroes. Obviously, Tracer. - She's the OG. - The OG, the cornerstone. You know,

we put her on the front of the box. She was that moment

of, "We should just take the best of the best," and we

know this gameplay is good and solid. And it's so simple. Like,

the mechanics are very easy to explain to somebody. It's very

easy to pick up. The first time anybody hits recall

for the first time and they try to wrap their mind around

like, "Wait, does that mean if I..." You know, and they're

mapping out the possibilities. - And by the way, we should say

that it's a PvP game with six

versus six at first and

where there's three distinct roles that people take on those, On a team. And those roles, at first,

I guess were not required. Like, you can reallocate those roles

as you wanted. And then to maximize the fun, you add a

little bit of structure. You enforce two per role, and the role

being tank, support, and damage. So, that. And then there's all the kinds of

heroes that are associated with the different roles, and people pick and

there's lore. And some people are probably like hardcore

just one particular hero. And so there's a lot of personality and story and community that builds

around each of the heroes. And, but at the end of the day,

it is just a fun shooter. - Yeah. Our goal was to pay

homage to the shooters before us that we loved. There's no way you can talk about Overwatch without

talking about Team Fortress 2.

Uh, Team Fortress started as a Quake

mod 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 2, 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 hearken back to what people

call the arcade or arena shooter genre. Which pains me 'cause I never... Back

in the day, I didn't think of Quake as a arcade shooter. It was almost an insulting

way of saying it. But just the fast movement really epic, over-the-top

weapons. You have a low time to kill, or TTK, that players call it. Meaning

you're very survivable, you can take a few hits. Where, in a game like Call of

Duty or Counter-Strike, if you get

shot in the head, you're just dead right away. Um, so it was supposed to

be this explosive, larger than life, fun, arcade-y shooter- with

a lot of teamwork involved. - And so you said Tracer up

there? She's the OG. Who else? - McCree. McCree is another,

like, I'm somebody who's attracted to the simplicity

and design. And I did not design McCree's six shooter. The way that gun feels is phenomenal,

and to capture the spirit of that, we had a designer named

Mike Heiberg designed the High Noon ultimate. And then just all

the care and love the team put in, like when he does the ultimate,

we roll a tumbleweed across the screen like every time.

It's a very simple hero, but the simplicity is what I like

best in design. I'm not a fan of when somebody starts explaining, you know,

in any of these games, whether they're

MOBAs or hero shooters, and

they start, like, "This guy throws orbs, and he throws three

orbs, and then he runs out of his orb bank, and then he can call the orbs back, or he can catch the

orbs." And I'm just, my head is spinning, and I'm like, "Just give

me a fucking good gun." You know? And I'm done. - Simplicity is everything. Uh,

what about Reinhardt, the tank? - Reinhardt was actually my

main. So I played the most of Reinhardt. That was another

amazing Geoff Goodman design of this guy who just has a

shield. As soon as you give somebody a shield, they know what to

do. They go into protector mode. The shield was designed

to shoot through. The shield has since been copied by like

every hero shooter since, and even non-hero shooters. And

then he just has a giant Rocket Hammer. And he

does a charge ability. It's really interesting where

the charge ability came from. I was playing a ton of

Left 4 Dead 2, and there

you could play in versus mode where

you could be the enemy zombie guys. And there was an enemy boss

zombie called The Charger who had that charge ability. And I thought,

the reason that ability was so cool is because it's a commit. Once you press

the button, you're a runaway train. And watching Reinhardts charge to

their deaths is kind of hilarious, and it's what separates a

great Rein from 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, 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. And they're thankless. It's very hard, too, because I think most people, and they're

not being disingenuous, like if you ask a

gamer, "What do you want?" They're like, "I just

want a fair match. Like, just make it even." And the reality what they want is

they want a match where they're slightly better than the other guy. Like, they want it 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. 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." - Mm-hmm. Oh, Reddit. - Yeah, right? I love Reddit. But we would look up that person's account.

I would do that all the time. I love looking up people's accounts and seeing- ... what would happen. It's like, yeah, he had

the six game losing streak. He had an eight game winning streak before that. There

was no post about how awesome is

this. And the human psychology

doesn't allow for that. 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 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, we put all of our eggs in you

noticing if the team won or lost. And we downplayed your individual

contribution as much as possible. There wasn't a scoreboard.

We had a medal system, but the medal system was, in my

opinion, it was not good because the losing team got medals and

the winning team got medals. And on the losing team, they would use that. They

would weaponize it against their teammate. "Well, I'm the top kills, and all

you guys are making us lose." And it's like, "Okay, you're the top

kills by like one, and you guys still

lost." So I would, if I was to redo it

today, or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay

the team factor, and try to put more focus on individual contribution. Because

that's just how people play. They're selfish. And I don't mean

that in a bad way. It's just, it's that human

nature, they can't help. - And in terms of how they experience the

game, in terms of how they derive joy from it, or how they see the challenge of

the game is individual. Even when you're on a team, you're still feeling- ... it's individual, fundamental

individual experience. Uh, let me, as a small aside,

before I forget, since we mentioned first person shooters so

much, outside of Overwatch, what are some of the great shooters?...

of all time that you've played? - Quake is the greatest. - Quake is GOAT. - Yeah. Quake is GOAT. There's

a lot of contenders up there.

- What have you logged the most

hours in outside of the games? - Rust. - Okay. Can you... Okay. Uh, 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... You have, to me, spoken so highly of

it. So can you explain Rust? - Yeah. Rust is an open world game. It's a procedural map, so it

means that every time it's different. You're always on an island,

and it resets every month. So- - Is it PvP? - It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is

the most PvP thing in all of PvP. - Well, I don't know 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 with all due respect,

please don't write me letters.

- They're too busy playing Rust. They're too

busy checking on their base, making sure it's not raided, to write you letters. - Oh, good. - 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 call 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 - ... it would be like PvPing in

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. All right. - Like, debilitating, like, "Am I

ever gonna play this game?" lows. - Right. - 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 raiding and offline raiding.

Online raiding 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. - Ah. - Yeah. It's—

- Yes - ... gamer etiquette. - Yes. - Um, offline's 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." - Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Rust, because real life is

not hard enough, is what it sounds like. Just, I want... If I want— - That'd be a great tag. - If I want more stress in my life, I'll

play Rust. Yeah. I can't wait. So okay, so that's one. That, that

sounds like a unique experience and a great joy. So quick

number one, Rust is up there. - Call of Duty. - Call of Duty just has its own- - You, you know, there's a lot of

haters. Like, Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 were

the pinnacle of Call of Duty, with Black Ops being

a very respectable, you know, third. But you're

never gonna get a better gun feel from a game

than— Like, just study the visual effects, the

animation, the modeling, the

sounds. Every aspect of shooting a gun in

Call of Duty is so masterfully done. And then the maps, like, the flow

of the multiplayer is just great. Like, there's... There's

a map called Crash from Call of Duty 4 that Erin Keller

and I... Erin's now the game director on Overwatch. We just

sat and studied that map, or Terminal from Modern

Warfare 2. Just studied the maps of just, like, this

map design is off the hook. So Call of Duty

is definitely up there. - So even though you were not

thinking about it Overwatch ended up being a gigantic success. So did you start thinking about, in

this framework of crawl, walk, run, about the walk, the PvE piece? - Yes. So the PvE piece was what

Overwatch 2 was supposed to be. And I don't know if people

know this or not, but we

started working on Overwatch 2 in 2015. - ♪ Over- ♪ - 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. Um, I remember I spent a lot

of time... It was myself, Chris Metzen, and Michael

Chu sort of brainstorming a framework for what, like,

a campaign could look like. And we had this idea

of, like, a cooperative PvE shooter. And we

actually pitched it to the team before we launched because we were

trying to put a bunch of runway in front of us. That worked against us, and it's

one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career, was

Overwatch 2. There were two points of failure for me. The first was, I

had people on the game team

who didn't like PvP or

competitive shooters, and they really loved the Overwatch

universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, but they wanted

to kind of do it on their own terms in like a PvE setting. So even though Overwatch is this like runaway success

and everybody's talking about it, they felt like they couldn't really engage

with it. And so like people on the dev team are like, "Okay, thank God

we, you know, shipped that PvP thing-" "... When do we start work on

this other thing?" So that came from a genuine place of excitement.

And then the other point of pressure was from the executive

team, and this was both the Blizzard and more so the

Activision executive teams, and they started really putting

the heat on, "Well, you said Overwatch 2 was gonna be out in 2019."

And they're referring back to

these slides that were

just crazy dates. Like- ... it was... You never want

to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive.

Like, you might as well etch it in stone and come

down from the mountain on it. - So you just threw some dates

because the layout looked good. - Yeah. This is just all bullshit. This is just... In the same way we

put, like, the tablet, you know? We just put Overwatch, like put

Tracer on a tablet and say we have a mobile strategy. So the executives started getting really

angry at us that Overwatch 2 was slipping, slipping. And so when Overwatch 1 took off,

I remember very early, we were in like May of 2016, and that year the

Olympics were gonna be in Rio, I think. Um, and, you know, I always

like to pay respects to, like, when a big event is happening, I'm like,

"Hey, we should do, like, an

event for the Olympics." You can't call it

the Olympics or else they sue you, so you just... Even though you're

advertising for them to a bunch of kids who want to play video

games and not watch the Olympics. But we also had like these two

developers, Mike Heiberg and Dave Adams, like worked on this

quirky... Like, they made soccer in Overwatch. We

called it Lúcioball. Like, they made a map and they

made these mechanics. We're like, "Yeah, we... Let's do an event

called the Summer Games." And we do a live patch

that's the Summer Games. It's extremely successful. And then after that, we're like, "Yeah, let's

do... Halloween's coming up. Let's do a Halloween event. How cool will

that be?" And our fans just loved these events, but there were two

groups that were struggling with it. One was that group I told you on the dev team who was like,

"Oh my God, you guys are

over-scoping the patches.

Why are we doing this Halloween event? We should be doing... We should start work on Overwatch 2.

We shouldn't be this focused on the live game," which was fucking nuts. Like, that was just

crazy. There's this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most

games fall off the back of the wave. They don't catch the wave. No

one plays it or plays it for two weeks. If you're lucky enough to have

caught the wave- ... ride it till the end. And my instincts at that point were like,

"Let's just keep... How many more of these live events can we do?" - So yeah. So now there's

this wave 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 wanted Overwatch 2 built instead of the

live events. And then the executive pressure became monumental. And what

would have been correct was to do more

world events, like keep it going, but

the major derail was Overwatch League. And we really like... The

weirdest part about Overwatch League is I believe in it.

You know, I helped pitch it along with some other

people. We thought it was like the future of esports

and doing regional based teams, ensuring minimum

player salaries and player protections. Like, there was a lot

of very good about Overwatch League. - And there would be teams

associated with particular cities. - Yes. - And it would be international. It would

be real competition. So the dream, the ambition was really huge there. - Yeah. The teams part of the

dream was more of like regional based, player protection, try to make esports more of a first class citizen,

because there were all these stories about like shady teams, you know,

screwing their players over. Where it got away from us was there was a

lot of excitement about Overwatch League,

like too much so, and then

it got over marketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this road show where they

had a deck basically, and like you could put anything in a

deck and sell anything, and they were pretty much selling

the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going

to be more popular than the NFL. And we got a bunch of......

billionaire investors in these teams. And when 2018 started, like

for example the day I got back, they said, "We signed

this huge deal with Twitch for streaming of Overwatch League,"

like a media rights deal. And that means that here's all

these commitments we made for Overwatch League of like in-game

stuff that had to exist. Like a lot of it was integration

with Twitch and camera control and that kind of stuff. The

other part of it was a bunch of skins

and you know, uniforms for all the teams, which was not just getting

the art in the game, but there was huge technical challenges to,

like, how all that worked and was efficient and hit the right,

you know, memory footprint and all of that kind of stuff. And so all of your plans at that point kind

of go out the window. Like you're not gonna work on new world

events. You're not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you're just

kind of treading water. There was a lot of talk of like,

"Oh God, you know, the deal, like, the deal didn't go well and we've got to

do make goods to make the deal better for them." I'm like, "Just give them

some money back, you know?" Like, if you... The deal isn't what people wanted,

like, putting it on us, the Overwatch team, to, like, support this beast.

And it was a great idea that

the wrong instincts and sort of, I

don't know how to phrase this in a way that's not damning, but there was too much focus on, "Let's

make lots of money really fast." And a lot of people got dragged into

it. And while Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of

the players that it brought in, like and 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 of these organizations

got built and they were all great, but it was a house

of cards waiting to fall. - And when it became more

about the money versus, The quality of the experience of the

different teams playing together and actually building this

ecosystem of esports. - The financial reality kicked in,

where these teams now, we didn't just

have, 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 to express

their opinions. Originally, the business model was going to be that

they were going to do in-person events and there's going to

be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that. And I think really quickly

everybody learned like, yeah, we can't do in-game events when you have

a London team and a Shanghai team and, like, how does this work? So that

fell apart super quickly. The merch was good, but it wasn't going to

be making NFL level money- ... whatever insanity anybody

thought that was going to be. So everybody quickly

defaulted back to, "Hey, didn't Overwatch make like $500 million

just in the live game last year?

What can we sell and what can you give us?" That pressure

comes onto the team, and then the pressure to ship Overwatch

2 and all care and love that we had for, like, the live game and the live

server, "Let's just make events and new heroes and new maps," we're losing all

these resources. And it got to the point, you know, my exit at Blizzard, I believed in Overwatch

2. I think we could have made a great game. I have a lot of hindsight of,

like, how I would have designed that game differently with what I know now versus what ultimately we didn't ship.

And there's Overwatch 2 is out now, but it's not the Overwatch

2 that we planned and announced. - So when you're referring to Overwatch 2 in

this conversation, you're referring to the PvE version? - The PvE version. - Which, by the way, I

would have loved to play.

I'm one of the people that were...

Overwatch is great, but the PvP, but I would have loved

to play the PvE version. - I think everybody would have loved

to have played it. And there's a misconception online that all I cared

about was PvE and I didn't care about PvP. All of the Overwatch 2 PvP maps were something that I said to the team

over and over, "We have a PvP audience. If we get anything right,

it has to be the PvP." We would be lucky to welcome these PvE

players, but that's not guaranteed. So it was never a PvE only focus. - It's just almost expanding

it to also the E. - 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 Gresko as the production

director, it felt like we were running Overwatch. And we were very, very

successful and doing a good job. And I think the fans were

happy. And then as we transitioned, you know,

Overwatch League was the best intention. You know, my parents always

say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." That was the Overwatch

League, and it ended up being an albatross. And then

Overwatch 2 is 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 into the CFO's office, and he sits me down and he says, it, he

gives me a date, which at the time was 2020 and was going to

slip to 2021, but at the time, it was 2020. And he

said, "Overwatch has to make

in 2020, and then every year after

that, it needs a recurring revenue of ." And then he says to me,

"If it doesn't 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 1,400 people working on it. If you just hire 1,400 people and make it

free-to-play, we'll make that money, right?" And that was, I had believed I would never work

any place but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was, And I felt I was a part of it,

and I literally thought I would

retire from the place. I never

thought the day would come, and that was it. I was like, it's, we're done here. Luckily for Blizzard,

that CFO is no longer there. - I mean, Blizzard is one of the greatest

companies in the history of Earth. They've created so many incredible

video games. It's so difficult to create so many

hits, and they were done not by chasing money. They're

done by small incredible teams, the hodgepodge that you describe taking big risks and falling in love

with the thing they do and then just chasing it, working

extremely hard. And just because you figured out a way how

to make a lot of money doesn't mean it's not, at the core this

incredible creative journey that's incredibly difficult

to pull off. And just because you got a bunch of

really smart creative people who

have somehow figured out how to pull

it off multiple times in a row doesn't mean you can just treat it like

a machine. Every single time, it's this beautiful journey of a hodgepodge

of weirdos working together, and weirdos have to run that thing. If you have, ever have a chance to create

something special, you have to have weirdos at the helm. And it, it,

the degree to which you don't have weirdos at the helm,

creative minds at the helm, And you're a businessperson

at the helm, get out of their way, right? You can't, you cannot

have the meetings like you're describing. And I don't just

speak about this particular company. It's just the

entire industry. I just, there's so much joy to be had

if we keep creating great games, and I just hope we get

to see those great games. - I think there's a message to

creative people out there and people who make stuff. We're generally,

we're so focused on the love of the craft

that we get lost in it and we love

doing it, and we're not cutthroat and we don't have that kind of ambition.

We have a different kind of ambition. But there's this whole world, especially

as soon as you're lucky enough to have success, that are very cutthroat and

very ambitious. And for whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them,

and we need to stop giving our so... World of Warcraft, when

we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard. You

don't need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need

artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team. - You don't need to bring in... Just because you're

making a lot of money doesn't mean you need to now start adulting by bringing

in a CFO. You can figure it out. - And there are great finance guys. Like

I've worked with finance guys who get it and get out of the way and

respect, and they're gamers,

and they sort of understand, but like, I wish developers would

understand their own value more and stop handing the golden goose

to people who don't deserve it. - How painful was it to say goodbye? - Uh, it broke me. I think after you've

been at a place like Blizzard, which 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 mourning,

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 It was really, really painful leaving. - Can we just speak to, I don't know, I don't think we can

give enough love to Blizzard. It's a legendary company. For me personally, for everybody, for

millions of people, created some of the greatest games ever, Warcraft,

StarCraft Universe, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch. What made it 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 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 businessperson, they had a COO in the early days named Paul

Sams, and Paul protected us. You know, they just, they found

great people who got it. The company when I joined was, like, 95%

developers and, like, 5% operations. It's, when I left, it was, you know, 50/50, and

that's like a 4,500-person company. That love of the games and the respect and

good treatment for game developers really turned it into the place that it

was, just the commitment to excellence, the high-quality bar and then finding

these passionate people like Chris Metzen or Sam Didier, they were, like, the visionaries of early

Blizzard, Allen Adham, of

just these worlds that we're still

making and we're still playing in today. it was infectious and it was inspirational,

and you wore the Blizzard blue with an esprit de corps. Like, you

felt proud to be part of it and you felt like you

had made it to be there, and everything you did, you did wanting to respect and honor those

who had come before you. I know that 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. Reading everything, that's

the sense I got. Everybody there was a part of it that truly, truly, truly honored that time.

Just to take a small slice, what were some of the brain... So you mentioned Chris

Metzen. You gave so much love to so many people on the team, but I gotta ask about

Chris Metzen, who I would, by the way, love to do a podcast with at some point.

What were the brainstorming

sessions with him like? It seems

like those are pretty like, awesome. - They were the best. Like, you could walk into a room. Like, the way

I would work with Chris is early on when I was more

junior, it was just sort of getting creative direction from him.

"Hey, Chris, I'm about to work on this zone called Westfall. What are

your ideas? You know, how could I capture them in gameplay? Well, that won't

quite work. How about like this?" It was more like that. Later on, like, I still remember,

the first discussion I ever had with Chris about Wrath of the Lich

King, I went up to his office like, "Hey, we're finally doing it. We're

doing the Northrend expansion. You know, what excites

you about Northrend?" And that's all you had to

say. And he would draw a map and he'd start pulling up

old, like, Warcraft II and Warcraft I manuals and, you know,

showing you, like, pictures

he and Sammy had drawn and, like, maps and he, all of it, he would just go on

for an hour and then I would sort of digest. I'd just listen, taking constant notes. I'm photographing

his whiteboards all the time, and then I go back and start to put those into design flow of, like,

"Okay. What's a zone? What's a dungeon? What could be cool? What

should come first? What should come last?" You know, Lich King, for example,

we wanted to try a very specific design to counter a problem we had in

Burning Crusade, which is everybody entered through the Dark Portal

through Hellfire Peninsula, all the server programmers hate you

because everybody loads into the same zone at the same time. Lich

King, we split them up for better player flow. 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 them two starting zones, but that was the flow with Chris.

And so often we would just, like, okay, in that first meeting,

Chris had put a zone called

Grizzly Hills on the board. Well, I

don't know anything about Grizzly Hills. "Hey, Chris? Talk about

Grizzly Hills." If you didn't interrupt him, he'd just go for an hour. And you have no idea

how much of it, 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 is what you're doing. As a consumer of those worlds,

you kind of take it for granted that they're incredible, but,

like, you're crafting them. Like, you're looking at a blank sheet

of paper and then together coming up... - My job, as I saw it

working with Chris, was I had to on World of Warcraft

specifically working with Chris, is I was like the

translator into gameplay of what Chris wanted, how to get it

to play like how Chris wanted.

So my favorite story is we're

working on Burning Crusade and we're in this meeting and

Chris is like...He's the gentlest, sweetest guy, but because he

carries himself with such confidence and everybody's in awe of him, the junior developers get kind of intimidated

by him. So we're in this meeting and we're talking about Silvermoon

City because we're introducing the blood elves, and Chris is like, "And Silvermoon City's got the tallest fucking

tower in all of Azeroth. I mean, it is the tallest

thing. You know, it's mind-blowing, the awe of it.

Only the blood elves could build it." Fast-forward like two weeks

later. I'm walking through the hall and I see a bunch of level

designers and artists are all like crowded around the screen, and on the screen

they've dragged Blackrock Mountain and Karazhan and the Stormwind Cathedral.

I'm like, "What the fuck are you guys doing?" And they're

like, "Well, Chris said that the

Silvermoon 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 Steppes, you know- ... and the cathedral in Stormwind- ... is. What Chris means is just

make the tower really fucking tall." "You don't need to measure it." And

they're like, "Oh, okay. That's okay?" Like are you willing to take

the heat if he- 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- - It's a vibe. - Yeah. And I also just personally have

to give all the love in the world for the current Diablo IV team, because I've spent most recently out of

the Blizzard games, I've spent a huge amount of time in Diablo, and

they've created some... And it's not just the loot, all right? It's the

whole experience, the art, everything

together. And the seasons 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 IV in like modern times is one of the best worlds

that they've 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

there's this 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 all, of course you have to come up with new

content with the seasons and they figure out ways to do that, so and, 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 couch co-op experience have been really

like that aspect of it is really

great, just all of it. It's one, one of the greatest games in recent

history. One of the things I wanted to mention, 'cause

this is a powerful speech is sort of instead of doing

some kind of a corporate goodbye as you were leaving Blizzard, you allegedly shared with your

team a video of David Bowie giving advice. And people should go watch

this clip. 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

co-exist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly

dangerous for an artist to fulfill other peoples' expectations. I

think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

And the other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that

you're working in, you're not working in the

right area. Always go a

little further into the water than you feel you're

capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And

when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're

just about in the right place to do something exciting."

Speaking of which, you are just about in a place to do something

exciting. After leaving Blizzard, uh, you told me that you tried to take

some time off. How did that work out for you? - Not so well. My wife, who is wonderful, told me I needed

to take at least a year off and just, you know, I'd been going really

hard. I'd gone 19 years barely taking vacation and I let Blizzard

consume me. And, you know, I was crushed by leaving because

I loved the place, and

I didn't know what to do with myself.

I was pulling weeds in the backyard. - Literally. Gardening. - Yeah. Well, she won't let me garden

in the garden 'cause that's hers- ... but I'm allowed to pull the weeds.

So I got very good at that. I was very proficient. And then of all

things, I cracked out on Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War

and I unlocked Dark Matter Ultra, which I'd- that's like a

crazy achievement to do in that game. So I did that, and then I just, I couldn't help it, like it's

how I'm programmed. It was like at this point it's late

spring, early summer and I'm just sitting in the backyard and I just

started writing with Notepad about here's a game I want to make.

And it was so terrifying because for 19 years I had worked with the

greatest developers, I thought, in the industry. And, you know, there'd be

moments where it's like, "Okay, I

wanna do like a game world map." Like, "Hey, Erin, you're amazing at

making game world maps. Like, you do that." And you know,

I, like, "I need some story hooks. Hey, Chris, what do

you think would be cool here?" Like, you know, it's so collaborative and I

was surrounded by the best of the best, and there I was by myself. And I was

out there again, and I loved it. It brought all the joy of game

making. I thought games were no longer fun to make because

it was only about business, and somebody's asking me for

unreasonable amounts of money and unreasonable amounts of time. And I had forgotten the pure joy

of the craft of making games, and I was designing, I was going on,

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

came to two realizations. One, I never wanna work for someone

else again. I never wanna 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, the art, programming, design, audio, you know? Like, just not about the

bullshit of the games industry. I'm not interested in the games

industry. I'm not interested in the business of games. I'm not interested

in the entertainment industry. It's just game jamming, making stuff that we're

gonna play together. And around that

time, my I call him my development soulmate.

There's a programmer named Tim Ford. He reached out and he's

like, "Hey, man..." He was like an associate tech

director on Overwatch at the time. And 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 wanna do something together, like fuck

it. Let's take a stab and, you know, just see what happens." And

Tim came over to my house, and well, before that, he says, "My

last day's on Friday." "And my exit interview's at like 1:00. I'm gonna be over to your house

at like 2:00 that afternoon." And I'm like, "Well, don't you think

you should take some time off, Tim, you know, before whatever's next

for you? Take a month off, you

know? Meg, his wife, will

appreciate it, you know? Just go pull weeds in

the garden for a while." And he's like, "I'm a programmer. All

I'm gonna do is program for a month if I take a month off. I might as well

start programming our game." Which- - Brilliant - ... it was so awesome when he said that. - Brilliant. - He came over and I pitched

him this idea for a game, and I pitched him, "Let's start a company."

And that was it. Like, that was the birth of us making a studio. - Now, meanwhile, as far

as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared

off the face of the Earth, but you were

actually working on a game. - Yeah, I needed to be away from

the world. I needed to not have... I wanted to not get attention from anyone. I needed to not read my name

on Reddit or... you know, any internet

site. I wanted to not come up, let some

other Jeff Kaplan bubble to the top- ... of the Google, you know, search list. - You know our man Dinoflask is gonna

be all over this conversation, right? - Oh, God, well, there's, yeah, this-

this one's gonna set him back some time. But, yeah, I needed- - You know what to do. - Uh, I needed for none of that to

happen. I just needed to be able to, like, mourn the loss of Blizzard- ...

and create on my own so it was great. And at that time, like as soon as

it was announced that I was leaving Blizzard, I had like 60 people reach out

to me. It was, this was April of 2021 and investment money was

nuts, both like the VC money and the strategic money was

crazy, like the, especially the Chinese companies, because

apparently they weren't getting, publishing numbers in China or

something. The whole economy was crazy, and so just

everybody was trying to throw

money at me, which was a very good position

to sort of be at to start a company. So what Tim and I did was say,

"We're not doing this for money, but here's the game

we wanna 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

wanna invest in us, we gotta 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 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

fell in love with the world and everything I saw. See, I'm

tempted to say some of the things I saw but it's just an incredible

game. So how much can you talk

about it? Do you know what it's going to be

called? Can you talk about that? Do you know about the company? Are you

allowed to say any of that? - Sure. The most unconventional way to

talk about this stuff for the first time. So, our company name is Kintsugiyama,

which most people will struggle to pronounce. - Nice. - 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. 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. - Mm-hmm. In the 1800s. - In the gold rush. If you're trying to- - In the gold rush. - ... if you're trying to nail the most

important time in California history, it's gotta be that gold rush.

- So, it's this beautiful,

almost ultra-realistic version of California, but it's in an

alternate history, alternate version of California- ...where it's an island,

almost like an Atlantis type of ethereal island, but still very realistic

to what the California terrain is- ... and that time period.

So it's this weird like amalgamation of this

ultra-realistic and the surreal. - The theme of the game is very weird.

We're not trying to make a historical game. There's no historical

accuracy to this. In fact, the island when first discovered

is uninhabited. That's already not true. As we

know, there were lots of people in California. It's an

island, which we know is not true. We want it to feel authentic to that time period because we

think that time period is cool. Prospectors, you know, cowboys. Like, it's a really fun

thing for us to explore, all of those themes people

in mines. We wanna build

mines and we just wanna

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. - And one of my favorite things is just

going down to the mine and digging. I mean, that's done ex- extremely well. And as you described, the

whole world is voxels, so it's generated. Can you

explain how that works? - Yeah. 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. We handcrafted all

of that. It looks gorgeous and places like Yosemite

are where you would expect

Yosemite to be. And so

all of those familiar landmarks are there, but then we have

like dozens of points of interest, and those move around the map

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. - Mm-hmm. It integrates it into the

environment, to where it makes sense- ... to be in that environment. And

like you said, so much of what makes a 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's this amazing guy named Mike Marra, 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 Bierstadt, 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- - Yeah, we're looking at one photo of his. - Yeah, it's just amazing, and his

paintings were huge, too. Um, I'd

love to see one in person. - And so you see a painting like that and

you're saying, "We wanna create that world." - Yeah. 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, it's Katamari Damacy, the

art form. But like...I see a Bierstadt painting, and I wanna

walk around that world. I wanna see what's around the corner.

And our lighting artist, Mike, he, you know, he sees these

pictures, and he's like, "Okay. Yeah. Hold my beer." Like, "I'll

make it look like that." And he, and he... We are all blown away by the, like, how much impact just

the lighting. And I'm not an artist, so I don't think about things

like the color theory, the lights, the

clouds, what all of that's bringing

to this. I just know I want to live in that world, and these are the

types of worlds that we want to make. - So, what do you want the tone of the

game to be, the feeling of the game? - This is really different. It's,

it's been hard for people. When people were talking to us

about, you know, they know me and Tim, and they're, "Oh, the Blizzard

guys, the Overwatch guys. You, 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 Kintsugiyama game,

you know? Me and Tim and this crack team, you know, we're only 34 people. We want to define what a

Kintsugiyama game is, and

this world seemed so inspiring

to us, you know? The setting is really interesting.

You know, I think California can be a game world. I think we can make it beautiful and interesting.

We don't have to follow history or geography. We can kind of do a spin where, you know, it

feels authentic. We can have guns that feel like they're

kind of from that time period, but we're not spaceships

and aliens and steampunk. That's what we would have done at Blizzard.

We're gonna be a little different here. So, the tone of this

game, you know... Metzen would describe Blizzard as the

hero factory. You know, we make... And what he means by that is not

only are we making heroes, but we make the players into heroes. This game is gonna have an edgier

tone. You're gonna enter this world. It's gonna feel lonelier.

It's gonna feel mysterious, larger than you. You're gonna

feel small until you earn the right to feel big. It's

gonna feel really dangerous.

You're gonna 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. That mix, that tension. I hate

to ask this question, but given our previous discussion

about a timeline slide, but what do you think a timeline looks

like? When do you think it's possible for somebody in the world to

be able to play this game? - So, this is the beauty of

me and Tim kind of getting to run the show and why

we're excited about it. Um, we can kinda do whatever we

want- ... within reason. Um, so we're just gonna kinda quietly

put it up on Steam and see what happens.

- Nice. - You know, no, like, big

corporate marketing group would ever think to do

that in a million years- ... without, like, some, you know,

$10 million announce or whatever. We'll just kinda put it on Steam and be cool if people wishlisted

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, 'cause I've never gotten to do

this before, we wanna 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 wanna 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, you know? - Is it scary to you to have a

sort of game with some rough edges out there in the wild where people

are interacting with it through the alpha-

... through the beta? - Yes, and this game has more

rough edges, like, the most rough edges we would have at Blizzard

is, like, showing it at BlizzCon, which was heavily polished and

controlled. This is gonna be more, you know, like, in development than anything else I've

ever worked on. But that's- - I love it. - ... part of the excitement too,

you know? It's kinda like this is, this is how the sausage gets made.

I mean, you're gonna see it front row. - I'm gonna try to get myself

into the alpha somehow. Anybody who is listening to this, I highly recommend

this game. You will not be disappointed. The world itself is just beautiful. So,

whoever's behind it, you and Tim and the team, are 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 in... 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- and get to be a part of the it developing. I saw the

logo. It's a mountain. Can you explain the meaning behind the name? - So, Kintsugi 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 wanna do a good job of explaining it, but basically,

like, you take a broken piece of pottery, and then they

would use golden joinery- Um, 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 appealed to me with that is there's a lot of me and Tim in

that, of... We're so appreciative for our time at Blizzard, but we

didn't come away unscarred.

And there's also a

philosophy in Kintsugi that nothing's ever perfect, and the

pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake, and that there's beauty

in imperfection. And so I relate that to myself personally. That's how I

feel in an aspirational way. I'm not saying I've achieved it, but in an aspirational

way, I want to be that way. And I think it's also an analogy for the making of

games. Like, it's a... Making of games is a constant, pursuit of imperfection. Game is never

gonna be perfect. Just ask the players. They're very vocal

about it. And seeing the beauty and the imperfections and the strength in

something that's been broken that can be stronger. - You had a heck of a difficult couple years here. And so in some sense,

it represents that beauty

in imperfection. So everybody

listening to this I hope, I hope you do have it out on

Steam. Go check out Legend of California. Truly a beautiful

world. I'm so glad you are actually creating this, low-key, quietly creating

this beautiful, incredible world. Ridiculous question, but can we talk about

some of the greatest games of all time? What... I mean, I know this is a bit

of a nerding-out kind of thing, and I, outside of the games you've

been part of creating, I think Blizzard has created some of

the greatest games of all time. Outside of those, what do

you think are in the list? - So there's one that's

the best. It's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

And then there's this list of greatest games, Zork, Ultima, uh- - So Breath of the Wild is the best, yeah? - The greatest game ever made. - What makes it the greatest

game ever made for you?

- Every aspect is so

thoughtful, so well designed. The art matches the

design and the tech, and even integrating with the

Switch in the way it does. How do you keep making Zelda better?

How can Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time exist and somebody make

an even better Zelda game? The way you can chop down a tree

and float in a river, and, like, the world is a toy and everything works

as you wished and hoped it would work. And there's a narrative aspect

to it, and there's really fun combat and action and itemization.

There's so many things that that game gets right that

other games are lucky if they get one of those things right, and are... Become best in their genre just

for getting that one thing right. And Breath of the Wild does

them all right and the best. - There's a certain kinda lightness

to the way the world feels, the openness of the world feels. That's

unlike any other game, right? That's

uniquely that company, uniquely that- - Yeah. No one else- - Because nobody else creates that. You're

right. Under the pressure of having created a bunch of Zeldas that are, like, really great games, to be

able to deliver once again. - Nintendo is, like, the

Mecca. Like, they're the best, you know? That's all there is to it. - Do you understand how that company works? - No. - That they're not... - I don't at all. - Like, because, I mean, they've been around for

a long time and still to be able to deliver. - I kind of rationally or irrationally

just worship. It's just sort of, if it's from Nintendo,

it's gonna be great. And even if my first impression is

like, "Wow, they're doing what weird thing with the controller

this time," and then you get your hands on it and you're like, "God."

My son and I, we both played Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and he makes games also. And we had

this moment where he's like, "I'm so sad after I played it." And he's

like, "I know I'll never make

anything like this." And it's that

weird, like, you honor it so much and think it's so great. Red

Dead was like that for me. Red Dead Redemption 2 is... That's a game I put on a shrine. Not just how

brilliant the game itself is, but as a game maker, as

a craftsperson who makes games, how the hell do you make that?

Like, only Rockstar with all the years of making those types of game.

No one else can come in entry level- ... and compete with that. So that's- - Purely single player,

narrative driven. So you also respect that kind of, like, pure- - Yeah. I don't give anyone a

pass. I feel like a lot of gamers and game developers, like, if it

has writing, they're, they're like, "The story's so good." I'm like,

actually, very few games have great story. But Red Dead has

a great story. It's got great character development. It's got

a good plot. And the dialogue is

like... It's like Tarantino-level- ... high-quality dialogue. So...Red Dead's

up there. I have my other games that make the list for me, and

these are... Both these games are... I would never tell you to

play them. EverQuest and Rust are two of the most defining games to me and my career and my life.

And Rust, I would never recommend somebody go and play

it. Rust will come calling to you if you are up to play it. - It is a cult. It's 100% a cult. - That's- - It... When you are ready,

it will come down. - It will come down. It will let you know. - The sky will part. Okay. - In Rust, you are considered a complete noob that doesn't know what he's

doing- ... if you don't have a thousand hours. Even a thousand hours- ... people would be like, "Oh, you only

have a thousand hours-" "... in that game."

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? Just... - I love the resetting world. It's a- ... great game mechanic and it's one

that I want to evolve and work upon. - How often is the world reset do you

think, in Legend of California? - I don't know yet. Probably

every month. We want it to be fast enough that you're not too

attached, but we wanna make it rewarding. Like, the trick

is coming up with not why am I upset that the world resets,

but why am I excited that the world- ... resets? And we know players

can get very angry about resetting worlds, but anybody who's played

5,000 hours of Rust, like some of us the resetting world is the magic. It's I

can't wait for the next reset because the

adventure starts all over again.

And if you wanna play the first time with me, like, if we wanna

play World of Warcraft, and I'm level 80 and you're level

one, there's no meaningful experience we can have together,

but in Rust, we just wait for a reset and we're both naked on the

beach, you know, from minute one. - What about the experience of Rust

where you can have everything taken away from you?

So that part that you- - We're not doing that. - Great, great. Because that

feels awfully stressful. - See... 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." But- - 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 highly skilled,

highly passionate... highly knowledgeable, um... but yeah,

it's an inspiration for me. That and EverQuest were define...

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 Kaplan, EverQuest or Rust? - Well, you said I was 6K on EQ, so

that puts me at... I'm at 5K 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 Agrue's gonna eat us, you know? - Yeah. So certain games just capture

your heart and they stay with you forever. What do you think is

the future of video games? So there's a lot of conversations

about AI helping expand maybe the storytelling aspects, the world

creation aspects, becoming a tool that people can use more so.

Maybe creating more believable NPCs, that kind of thing. But

also there's, as, as we've talked about,

the video game industry is changing

and evolving and trying to figure out, well, there's 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 of games looks like? - I think with AI in mind

in particular, I think the current state of AI,

trying to integrate it into development is mostly a hot mess. But I do think that, you know,

games are a technology-driven art form. And somebody much smarter than me

once described it, and I'm paraphrasing, making a game is like making a movie

if you had to invent the camera every time, because you're kind of inventing

the technology of your specific game. And I think AI can play a role

in that, and it would be silly not to look at it as an option. The

problem with AI right now is it's

overconfident in what it tries

to deliver. Like, it fooled around, obviously like

everybody, like, you mess around with, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini and you fool around with some of the

art generation, and it's fun for non-artists to fool around on Midjourney.

But it's mostly weird and shitty. And even, like, when trying to have AI answer

for me... Like, I don't normally make UI in a game, and so I'm trying

to figure out, like, UMG and Unreal Engine and I'm asking

ChatGPT to how to, how to fix, like, a simple problem, like,

how do I make the chat wrap, you know? And it, like,

overconfidently gives me the wrong answer. And it's, like, right one in 10

times. So its hit rate has to be a lot better. Um, 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. 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 wanna do, and I'm not gonna hire someone to do? So I

have, like a really dumb example, I'm making a bunch of

images, I size them all incorrectly 'cause I'm dumb and I'm

not an artist, and I did it all in Photoshop, and I have like

2,000 images that are the wrong size. I can have ChatGPT resize those and zip it in a file for

me, and it literally takes

it like a minute to do that. I wasn't gonna hire an intern to do

it. I was just gonna 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- what I don't worry about is, no matter how good AI

gets, never gonna draw a picture like Arnold Tsang. It's

never gonna tell a story like Chris Metzen. You know, that human

spirit is irreplaceable. - Yeah, it's hard to put into words what

is that magic that humans produce, but they do. Truly great creative minds, truly great creative

teams, they create something special. It's hard to really

articulate exactly what's missing with with AI, you know,

what people call AI slop. 'Cause it creates really beautiful

imagery and beautiful stories, and very believable text. But it's not quite...

It doesn't have that, I don't

know what it is, the edge that's

human. Maybe it's the imperfections. - Yeah, I think so. Like AI to

me right now currently, it's 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 tasks, like you said. But do you think the small studios

have hope in the future of gaming? - Small studios are the future

of gaming. The big studios basically acquire the small

studios for new IP and ideas, and the small studios grow in. The really compelling, new, innovative ideas

are gonna come out of small studios. - What advice would you give to video game creators, small teams, if they

wanna create a truly special game? - Well, they know how to do it.

I mean, if they're doing it, they know how to do it. It's

more to video game developers in general, own the craft. Own our art

form. Stop giving it to these fucking

corporate jackals. You are the

golden goose. Keep your eggs. - Jeff, formerly from the

Overwatch team, I have to say from the bottom of my heart,

and I think I speak for millions of people, thank you for everything

you've created in this world. Now that I've gotten the chance to see the

new game, I can't tell you how excited I am to try it. Thank you for everything

you've created. Thank you for everything you represent. Thank you for

remaining and fighting for us as one of us. So thank you,

and thank you for talking today. - Thank you, Lex. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with

Jeff Kaplan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description,

where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions,

give feedback, and so on. 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.