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

Jeff Kaplan is a legendary Blizzard game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, now preparing to launch a new game, The Legend of California, from his new studio Kintsugiyama – available to wishlist on Steam today, with alpha later in March.
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Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/jeff-kaplan-transcript

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EPISODE LINKS:
The Legend of California (Steam Page): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2550530/The_Legend_of_California
Jeff’s Game Studio: https://www.kintsugiyama.com/

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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(02:24) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(10:47) – Early games: Pac-Man, Zork, Doom, Quake
(25:12) – Writing career – 170 rejection letters
(40:45) – EverQuest obsession
(53:43) – Getting hired at Blizzard
(1:09:11) – Lowest point in Jeff’s life
(1:15:16) – One of Us
(1:19:33) – Early Blizzard culture
(1:39:15) – Building World of Warcraft
(1:56:59) – How WoW changed video games
(2:14:21) – Single-player vs Multi-player
(2:35:15) – How Blizzard made great video games
(3:01:04) – Online toxicity
(3:08:38) – Why Titan failed
(3:25:48) – Overwatch in six weeks
(3:52:46) – Best Overwatch heroes
(4:01:16) – The challenge of matchmaking
(4:04:40) – Rust
(4:15:01) – Why Jeff left Blizzard
(4:37:14) – Diablo IV
(4:38:42) – Getting back to making video games
(4:47:38) – The Legend of California
(5:01:23) – Greatest video game of all time
(5:09:30) – AI and future of video games

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