Jeff Kaplan, the former director of Overwatch and current studio lead at Kintsugiyama working on western action game The Legend of California, has been pretty candid in recent months about how bad things had gotten for him in his final years at Blizzard. He left the company in 2021 after what he described as the “biggest ‘fuck you’ moment” of his career when an Activision Blizzard exec threatened to lay off a thousand people at the company if Overwatch didn’t reach a certain profit that year. Kaplan’s interviews since announcing Legend of California have offered us some insight into just how stressful working on Overwatch had gotten leading up to the launch of Overwatch 2, and one particularly interesting anecdote he shared in an interview with Gaming World Interviews is about how the notoriously perplexing announcement of the sequel at Blizzcon 2019 came to be.

The hour-long interview touches on many points across Kaplan’s career, including his work on World of Warcraft before pivoting to Overwatch , the early days of the canceled Titan MMO that would pave the way to Overwatch , and what he’s doing now with Legend of California , but there’s a sizable portion of the show where he talks about how he slowly became disenchanted with his former employer. He cites a “revolving door” of Activision and Blizzard “business guys” coming in and making creative decisions, including a mandate that the team wasn’t allowed to work on new heroes for the original Overwatch because they had to work on Overwatch 2 ; thus, the years-long content drought.

Source link