#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:

lexfridman.com/jeff-kaplan-transcript

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EPISODE LINKS:

The Legend of California (Steam Page): store.steampowered.com/app/2550530/The_Legend_…

Jeff’s Game Studio: 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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