Jeff Kaplan, once the face of Overwatch at Blizzard, hasn’t led the hero shooter in over five years. The former director of the game left the company in 2021 for reasons he would later go on to describe 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 make a certain amount of money that year. Since then, Aaron Keller has stepped into the director role and, despite a rocky couple of years, has managed to right the ship. What does Kaplan think about how the game has turned out? Well, he’s actually made a conscious effort to not engage with the game since his departure, so he doesn’t really know.

In a lengthy interview with GameSpot, Kaplan talked about his experience of going independent with his new studio Kintsugiyama and working on the western action game The Legend of California. In the interview, GameSpot asks about how his relationship with Overwatch changed when he stepped down from his director role, and he says he’s content to remember Overwatch as it was in 2021 when he left. He cites his previously removing himself from World of Warcraft as a learning experience that made leaving Overwatch easier, as it was very difficult for him to sever his relationship with WoW because it was “such a part of who [he] was and how [he] identified.”

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