Jeff Kaplan

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There’s so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right, and are… become best in their genre just for getting that one thing right. And Breath of the Wild does them all right and the best.

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World of Warcraft, when we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard. You don’t need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.

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There’s this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don’t catch the wave. No one plays it or plays it for two weeks.

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So I would, if I was to redo it today, or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay the team factor, and try to put more focus on individual contribution.

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And the reality of what they want is they want a match where they’re slightly better than the other guy.

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The best feature we can add for the player is shipping.

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The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes a production problem.

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The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on, using other engines, using art from whatever. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you’re doing, then you expand the team.

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What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea, but shepherd it into existence, and you’re doing that through inspiration first and foremost.

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Now part of the skillset is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen.

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And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that’s how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.

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When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that’s the best the game is ever gonna be, and then you work on it.

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You know, obviously, we patch our games and that’s where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime.

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Which is, you know, you’re the game designer who’s playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they’re gonna do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer.

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And there’s no, like, textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.

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And the weirdest part about it is you’re not just looking for the greatest hits. You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game.

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We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick. So we’re all different types of gamers, but if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was or the type of gamer I want you to think I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.

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And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there. And they’re so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.

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And I’ve heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design along the path of least resistance.

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I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.

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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.

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And it went from this kind of thing that I didn’t believe into to actually, like, a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director. And some of the best ideas have come from developing other peoples’ ideas

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That is the best prop artist in the industry. That’s who’s gonna show up on our doorstep, so when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artist in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism.

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And there’s a weird thing that happens that’s just kind of a human nature thing. The less you interact with somebody, the more you sort of become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.

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The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine. And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.

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So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like this sounds really trite, but focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be.