Jeff Kaplan: belief

Transcript context

…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, 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 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- 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- 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.…

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