Jeff Kaplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…It was my first game I worked on, and I joined it as this entry level dude. I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for 35K a year. You know, that’s what I was making. And very shortly after WoW shipped, you know, Allen left as 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. Tom is a designer who… He was a great partner of mine and a great leader and he actually came from Ultima Online. And so I always looked up to Tom because he had a lot more experience than I did. And this is like early 2005, the world was on fire, the servers were barely running… WoW was just, had taken off like gangbusters, and they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW. And at the time they promoted me, my title… I didn’t even have a lead title, my title was Senior Game Designer. And Tom and I were running the design of WoW at that time. So I thought it was totally normal, and I thought what we were experiencing with WoW was just normal for making a video game because it was the first video game that I had worked on. I thought it was the funnest 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. rocesses 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? Guardians of Blizzard. They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death touched anything. We used to have them when we were in the beta, like off in the distance of places players weren’t supposed to get in case they cheated their way there. And this GM is just spawning them all over Stranglethorn Vale because he’s worried because the players are exploiting. Yeah. 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.” Um, 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 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… 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, 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?…

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