YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Kaplan

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326
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2026-03-11
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2026-03-11
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  1. “By playing lots of games, you cannot be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit out of as much as you can and understanding on a deep level. 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 and also like a lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong or lacked the correct interface or they didn't put the right visceral polish on it. There's an executional aspect to all of it. When I'm playing, I'm not only like thinking about what makes us fun. I'm thinking about what makes this not fun. But I'm also...”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's extremely difficult, and not everybody's good at doing that. 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 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”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Needed. And what Wow did that it doesn't seem like an innovation? It doesn't seem like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional but really wasn't.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you'll have those moments where there'll be like, you'll come up to a log and press triangle to duck or else or whatever the duck button is. Left stick to duck to go under. And that's like the ultimate in directed gameplay. Like they're telling you exactly what to do. On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate it. The ones who hate it are like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like you drop me in this world. I'm supposed to dig or something. And that's the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they're going to cycle out. Not all players.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The fundamental difference there was that Wow allowed you to play as a single player. 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. And the fact that people could come into wow and just kind of the game design, the game design way of describing it as directed gameplay.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours because I think that's fun. But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, why don't we make the path of least resistance? So in this case, the way to get the best experience, the fastest, not to be killing creatures in one place, but will overload the experience into the quest themselves, and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines. It sort of did a lot for the game, and I think it was like a fundamental change in the genre. Like if you look at the things that EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players, and Wow Blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players. And I think”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And we're like, wait a second, you expect to just have quests just keep going? And they're like, yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way. And we kind of had an ocean moment right after that Elwyn Forrest playtest where we realized like we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were going to need. And we changed, we developed this philosophy that's kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point. I've heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design it along the path of least resistance. So basically what that means, like in EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level, is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Set up the world that way. You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwyn. I do a dozen, 20 quests in Westfall, and we do this team playtest. And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, et cetera. And they play World of Warcraft. I think we played for like an hour or two, and we only did Ewen Forrest. And the overwhelming feedback from our team, and these are people who really didn't play EverQuest. They're like, my God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests like right away.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And our assumption was because of the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level-based game. You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures and you'd usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find, so like fast respawn, kind of easy things to kill. And that's how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember Alan kind of telling us like, hey, the quest, when Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures are, you'll do a quest, and then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards. And that's how he imagined it would work. So we kind of”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And Pat and I started working on the design of the system and how it would interact. And Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface, you know, like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into like two zones. He was going to take Elwyn Forrest, which was the starting area for the humans. And I was going to take Westfall, which was Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzon, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just Has stories in his head and visions. Chris is like artist, storyteller, world builder, extraordinaire. And he sort of describe what he wanted going on in those zones. You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas. So we finished Elwyn and Westfall. We did like a team playtest.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So Pat and he was the most wonderful guy. We had so much fun. So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system. It was Alan's idea to have it in the first place. And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all. And the idea was at first we actually on a whiteboard in Alan's office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date. And EverQuest had, you know, I think four or three expansions at that point in time. And we're like, wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has. It's going to be a lot of quests. And it's kind of up to me and Pat to do it all. And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Deal with the application, or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it. And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat. And then on my first day, they put Pat and I in an office together. And he's like, yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Sure, yeah, there were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways. Alan Adham was the lead designer on Wow when we first sort of decided we were going to have a quest-based game. We used to joke that like EverQuest barely had any quests in it. It did have quests. They just weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a website. And Alan knew that he wanted Quest to be a big part of World of Warcraft. And so he hired me. That was my entry-level position at Blizzard. And on the same day he hired a guy named Pat Nagel, which was hilarious to me because Pat was this funny title of HR and facilities at Blizzard because it was such a small company. So like if you sent an application in Pat would”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it. It brings me pleasure and fulfillment. And all of that said from a place of caution, especially in this era when people are very touchy about it, I don't try to impose that on anybody else. I don't want anybody to feel like they're obligated to, but please understand it's what makes me who I am, that work ethic. I enjoy it. I actually. Some of my fondest memories are from those wow crunches.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Kind of, which I think is Not necessary. I don't think executives who take off and work 40 hour a week 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. I find myself, I don't think I've ever worked less than 10 hours in a day. Like 10 hours is like a normalish day to me.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think my reflections on it many years later and having gone through pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled. I think where Crunch is problematic and people are good to be vocal about being opposed to it is when it's forced and unnecessary. There's a lot of like, hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But you can only eat so much of it. And the carpets are stained and like dudes are falling asleep on the couches. It was an unhealthy work environment. It gets pinned on because at a lot of places it is executive driven. It is mandated from the top, but the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself. I just wanted to. I remember Coming in on Memorial Day with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day and working through Christmas. And those were things I wanted to do. I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched. The date slipped, so you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, we're going to crunch early so we don't have to crunch later in the project. And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us. Like, I really genuinely believe That he believed in that But with games, anything can happen. And they're just, we slip uncontrollably all the time. And we slipped and it sort of created just this death march, endless death march That to this day, members of the WOW team will remember Newport Rib, if I say that they'll have twitches because they would cater the dinner. They'd bring it in at six or seven at night. Everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was like the worst diet ever. I actually like Newport Rib, no shade on them.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Watching everybody leave, which was a trickle out. Like everybody kind of trickles out like at different hours, you know, the family guys go much earlier than the single guys. And then watching everybody show up again the next morning, and they're all like dressed different. They look all refreshed. And I'm just like in the same position, you know, like eyes are beat red.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Shipping Warcraft 3. And because I had not been involved with the game at all and I was a brand new wet behind the ears game designer, they're like, you're just going to help test whatever we tell you to test. So, we're trying to goal master, and there's a crash that happens rarely. If you run one of the cinematics, you have to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels. And then there was a crash that happened. And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it. And then they needed somebody to just over and over again. I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug. And I sat there for 30 hours and just watched cinematic for 30 hours straight. And it was the funniest thing. Like it was almost surreal.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Additional help or additional testing or something like that. When I showed up in May of 2002, it was all hands on deck World of Warcraft for E3. Got through E3 and then all hands on deck, the whole company get War 3 out the door.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, the games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It's just called Crunch. Like, do you crunch or not? These days, Crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon if we were to work overtime, somebody write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime. Back then, we worked insane. And I mean insane hours. The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours. That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft 3. This was in my, I think, Wore three shipped on July 3rd, two thousand two. So this would have been like late, June, early July. Probably late June. And I had nothing to do with WarIII. I should just say that, like, in the credits, I'm additional.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Everybody had seen the success of EQ, EverQuest, and everybody was going to make an MMO. And it was just a question of who was going to win.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “At the time they were making EverQuest 2, like if we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced and EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest 2. It wasn't, oh, cool World of Warcraft. It was EQ2 was going to 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 Raf Coster, who had come from that Ultima Online. And he's just a really smart game designer. If you can ever watch one of his lectures, like he lectured a lot at GDC. And we're like, oh my God, they're making EverQuest II and Star Wars galaxies. And they have the Star Wars intellectual property. We're fucked. Like, how are we going to compete”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And I've said this later with hindsight. I think a huge part of Wow's success with especially with the early Wow team, Team 2 and 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 Yahoos basically. Who was like, yeah, we can compete with Sony Online.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And then there were a lot of us who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types. Like, for example, the guys building the dungeons, they hired out of the Quake community. And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO designer on the staff at that time, it was, you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers. They started building Quake dungeons as like. Quake levels as the dungeons at one point WOW was even made in QE radiant, which was the quake engine, and then they later retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine. So we were like this hodgepodge, like the bad news bears is how I would describe the WOW team of this mix of veterans. And then people like me, I'm just some fucking idiot, you know, who played a lot of EverQuest”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And Rob and I sort of changed our point of view and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in. And so, you know, the early days of Wow, it was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. You know, we had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Deberry was legendary blizzard developer. Bill Petris was the art director. And then we had Metzen, who was sort of like, Metson was the cool big brother. We all, you know, aspired to be. I'm older than Metson, but I looked up to him like a big brother.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions, and he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren't a loner in the world. And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side. And Rob and I just argued and argued against it. And then sometime before Beta, Alan retired. He went on to run a hedge fund of all things, like got super into poker, got super into finance, Left and retires like, I think it was nine months to a year before, wow shipped, which is kind of nuts. And Rob takes over as lead designer in Alan's stead. And to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was go speaking to what we were speaking about earlier. He said Alan's a smart guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for Horde Alliance, we got to do it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “But the Horde Alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest it was mixed race. They had all the races kind of like wow did, but they could all group with each other. And Pardo and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision Alan was making. And we argued Alan, Rob, Bob Thitch, and I would have lunch every single day. And we would just talk about wow and the core design of wow. Rob wasn't even on Wow at that time. He was finishing Warcraft 3. And we would fight over the horde alliance split if it was a good idea or not. And Alan had, he came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you. Like the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their horde tattoo. It's epic. It's like Become who they are. Like, if you were to say, like, hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me, we're alliance on Ticondrius. You'd be like, Dude, like, okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It's almost like when you're making a blizzard game, you're making Chris's imagination at some point. And Chris famously said the lead character of World of Warcraft is the world. And I always believe that. So you're trying to create this place that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable and gorgeous. It should feel massive and it really is. It's can take a half an hour to get from one end of the world to the other. But it's this world you're living in. The world is divided into two warring factions. There's the horde and the alliance. And that was a very important, very controversial decision that was made by Alan Adham, was the champion of the horse. Alliance”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world. Like it's a world that you can live in with real other people and everybody's kind of living out their fantasy. Chris Metson, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft and really like Alan Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard, calls Chris the Heart and Soul of Blizzard.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And you've sort of elevated this person whose idea wouldn't have been championed, whose idea by the insecure egotistical lead of early 2000s would have just said no. Now their idea is the thing everybody in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving and they get all the credit.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “You shouldn't do what you just did to those people. You should always listen to what people have to say and try to make their ideas work. And I just, over and over, I was like, okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let's try to make it work. 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 people's ideas. Where your first reaction is like, no, that's wrong. And then just kind of Going, but how can we make it work? And the most gratifying part when it succeeds is they get all the credit.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “With a couple people who weren't game designers. And it's always tricky as a game designer because constantly everybody's throwing ideas out on a game team. Like there's no shortage of ideas ever. And we were in some meeting about something and these people kind of threw out these ideas. And I wasn't mean to them, but I very kind of systematically like an insecure, you know, ego driven new lead would do. I kind of, well, let me tell you why that's wrong and let me tell you what we're going to do instead. And after the meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me aside and he said, you're a very smart designer, but”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “One thing I think a lot about is ego and I think about insecurity. And insecurity we all have, like all of us as human beings have insecurity, it just manifests itself in different ways. And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes. So like some people, for example, use their insecurity to rip other people apart. Some people destroy themselves through their own insecurity. Some people destroy everybody with their insecurity. But I had that moment as a young lead when I first was made a lead on World of Warcraft where I felt it was very important to be right and to be shepherding the correct idea. And I actually got pulled aside. Like Pardo and I had a meeting.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I had that, like, I think, you know, I'm no expert. I'm a game designer. So as much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully. I don't have an important job.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “That is the best prop artist in the industry. That's who's going to show up on our doorstep. So when they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artists in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism. So when that person speaks up and says, I think like with Overwatch, for example, I think we should do this, you know, we should do X instead of Y. Instead of saying, well, I'm a believer in Y, why are you against my idea X? You should take a moment, have a deep breath and say, man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something. Why don't I listen to it?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Fast forwarding a little bit when we formed Team Four, which went on to make Titan and ultimately fail. And then it got rebooted as the Overwatch team. The idea that I tried to get through to the team was to make an assumption. And really Blizzard is one of the top game developers in the world. And we were very fortunate when I was there. And I imagine it's this way today that we could recruit whatever talent we wanted. The best of the best wanted to come work at Blizzard. And if you sort of go through the paces of that and say, okay, when we recruit somebody, let's say we're recruiting an artist to make props. Boxes, chairs, whatever.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “They don't understand what we're trying to make. And when you back up and you think about the statement that you just said, it's like such an asshole statement. Like really all the artists don't get it. Like that's, A, that's not true. B, that sort of demeaning to them. Like they signed up for this is their life's work too. This game is going to be as much theirs as it is mine. So who am I to say a statement like that?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Alienated from them and vilify their point of view You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism rather than trust and belief in them. And I find on smaller teams where we all know each other's names, I know what everybody's working on every day. They know what I'm working on. Everybody can talk to each other. There's none of that. Stereotyping of a discipline on big, unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, well, the artists just don't get it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. 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. If we're a small team, let's say we're going to make a game and it's at sort of the incubation period of a game and there's only 10 of us. All 10 of us are in the room for every decision. You know, I'm not a server networking guy, but I'm in the room for that discussion. I'm not an illustrator, but I'm going to sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks like. As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized. It's exactly like you said. And there's a weird thing that happens. This is just kind of a human nature thing. The less you interact with somebody, the more you sort of become”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And programmers, you know, they're just so brilliant and organized in their thinking and everything's so logical. And then in the middle are people like the sound designers, the game designers, and the producers. They're kind of a little bit in all those fields, but it's the brilliance of taking people who are so vastly different in their interests and talents, but aiming them at that shared goal or that shared vision of the game, that like really makes something special.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “The creative tension behind games and what makes game teams so unique. If we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum, on one end, you're going to have the artists. Who their creative, dare I say, emotional, you know, they are artis on that end. And on the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers. Who their minds just work very differently from the most creative art? Like, artists could be sitting, you have a meeting with them and they'll just sit illustrating. If there's any piece of paper they're drawing on it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know, the server client model or the networking or whatever, others are more like gameplay focus. On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team. on every game team, you're going to have graphics programmers who will work with people like the lighting artists or the environmental artists, character artists on shaders, and basically any way to make the game, they'll always ask what's your vision? What are you trying to get it to look like? They'll want to illustrate what should the world look like. And they'll be the ones who say, I know how to write code that will let you do that. So you partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist. And that's actually.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, lighting, you're going to have lighting under the art team, but they're going to be best friends with a graphics programmer. And, you know, like I mentioned with design, there's this wide spectrum on the engineering team. You have some guys who are like”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Because most of the time, we're playing without these things, and it just feels a little off and wrong. And when you have a great lighting artist or you have a great composer or sound designer, like the experience, you're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise. But that's who comprises the game team.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “So that's the design group. There's production, which is project management, and production is different at every game company you go to. So if you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard, production might be very different. They might be the boss. They might actually be a designer, or they might be more of a project manager. And then one of my favorite disciplines on a game team that's often overlooked is sound and audio, which is comprised of the sound designers. And composers. And there are two things. I think there are two things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they're missing. And that's audio and lighting”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yes. So game designers, there's a spectrum, like same with art, same with engineering of roles within game design. Some are more heavy on the system side. So like any game that you've played where loot drops, you know, Diablo 4, World of Warcraft. You know, escape from Tarkov, whatever, if there's loot dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully what drops where and at what percentages, that would be like a systems designer. A content designer, somebody who's going to make quests or write storylines, or there might even be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on story. designers run the gambit and then you've got these jack of all trade designers that can do it all”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Engineers or programmers who are writing the code, you've got the art team that's making all the visuals for the game. And that spans everything from like 3D modeling, characters, environments, to also animation, tech art, you know, making it all work. You've got game design, which some companies don't have design. The artists and the engineers do it. Valve famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer. But in companies where design is a discipline, which it very much is so at Blizzard, game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people, you know, setting up all the systems and content in a way that gets the player to navigate through the game.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source