Jeff Kaplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, absolutely. They… So this is a call to action, again. People out there, support, support, especially young creators, support them. They need it. Like you think negativity has no cost, but it does. You’re robbing the world of some of the great creations. And also, allow creators to suck and to improve. Because that’s what the process of creation is like, is to take risks. To take risks meaning being vulnerable, being cringe. To doing the thing that like, the embarrassing failure where you’re standing there in a silly clown outfit, on stage, dancing, and nobody’s laughing. And it’s a… 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. 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 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 the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum, and we were working on Burning Crusade. Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of Titan development. We didn’t even really have a team then. And I remember being embroiled in Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings, and Rob pulled a group 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 a big company, and I’m like, “You gotta shut us down. We’re just gonna burn money.”…

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