Jeffrey Kaplan's legacy

Community General Discussion
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In 2009 at the GDC, then Blizzard dev Jeffrey Kaplan said the following

"“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a ****ing book in our game, because nobody wants to read it,” he explained.

“We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game,” Kaplan, who left WoW to work on Blizzard’s next MMO, explained. “We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorsese, Tolstoy or the Beatles, the better off we are.”

I have to assume the developers took his words to heart, as WoW’s narrative post Mists of Pandaria has been nothing short of a disjointed, dispirited, soulless mess without logic or consistency which all culminated in the recent Sylvanas cinematic.

Everything that needs to be said on this cinematic has been said, but it’s a fitting capstone to the past several years of narrative disasters, narrative disasters that owe much to Jeffrey Kaplan’s comment.

We didn’t want or need Shakespeare or Tolstoy but we did demand basic competence and something of an engaging plot. And not to harp on endlessly about Final Fantasy 14 but in a the course of the launch day content of their latest expansion they introduced the character of Emet Selch and built him into one of the most compelling antagonists in gaming history. Blizzard has made Sylvanas the focus of the plotline for the past three years, with over a decade of lead in time before that and we got what we got.

I have to conclude that Blizzard sees the RPG section of this game as an impediment to the rep grinds, raids and time trial esports dungeons it seems to want to hurry us into which is why the plot is given short shrift at seemingly every opportunity. The fact the Legion plot worked as well as it did, and it’s the one relatively successful arc since Mists nearly a decade ago, seems to have been a fluke.

The RPG elements Blizzard has left to wither on the vine are critical for building player engagement with the world they have created. Their grotesque mismanagment of their own story and the lack of RPG systems such as player housing for players to participate in (because they don’t contribute to player power) are the culmination of Jeffrey Kaplan’s comments.

I wonder how he feels knowing they took his words to heart? Why be moved by a memorable scene that keeps us invested in this world and remembered in the years to come when they can put out something nonsensical rapidly so we can get to the real meat of the game, grinding out the latest reputation.

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It’s very common that WoW of the past solved the biggest problems from WoW in the present. It’s like the game is regressing into something more primitive, ironically by adding more systems, all the time.

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Hey I was a defender of this team until recently, but I’ve recently become a ‘hater’ as the parade of bad decisions seems to never end.

The game ‘jumped the shark’ in Warlords of Draenor. Mists of Pandaria told a wonderful story with their last truly engaging villain and then they tossed it all out for complete nonsense. Had Legion’s plot not worked as well as it has, we would have had seven years of non stop bad writing. As it stands, we’ve had five with two consecutive expansions of terrible plotting.

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I’ll defend large parts of the team.

Something very notable is that, if you dig away the croft on top, an absolutely amazing game reveals itself underneath.

Honestly, the first 10 weeks of Shadowlands? Don’t think I’ve had this much fun in WoW in many, many years. But then Blizzard started swinging their nerfbats and the Covenant system became more and more dominant due to its progressive nature, and soon enough I changed my mind. :frowning:

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They can rebuild, but 10.0 needs to mark an end of WoW’s disaster of a third era.

Classic to Wrath marks the first era, when anything seemed possible and the game mined the plot of the MMO.

Cata-MOP marks the second era. Cata was a blip, but it laid of lot of groundwork for the future and MOP was an almost perfect expansion in terms of content and plot. I will go to my grave arguing that the Horde’s descent into civil war under Garrosh, a tragic yet atrocious leader tormented by the fear of not living up to his father, is the single best expansion story Blizzard ever told.

But the third era began with WOD and is defined by their worst mistakes, expansion specific systems, soulless grinds and a completely nonsensical plot that saw many promising plot threads wasted (with the exception of Legion).

The Covenant system is awful. Segmenting the plot into four separate sections rather than having a single arc for everyone to participate in is bad for the narrative. But tying player power to Covenants is worse, an example of how a perfect RPG system was wasted on yet another futile grind for player power we will lose in just over a year.

10.0 needs to be a reset. I mean a good, hard reset. Focus on what works.

Jettison segmented storytelling. Tell a single narrative to your playerbase. And make it a good one, stop telling simplistic, clichéd nonsense so that people who don’t care about the plot can still follow along. Most of the people who play this game now are adults and they deserve somewhat more complexity.

If you are developing yet another tiresome borrowed power system that makes it difficult for us to play our other specs, stop. Don’t do it. We cannot take another one. Artifacts were a cool idea that worked once and they rapidly lost their shine when you took the powers away from us, repeating it twice more in BFA and inevitably at the end of Shadow Lands. Power should come from gear alone. And if you don’t want to give us a cool ability forever, don’t give it to us. The amount of time wasted developing systems that are only intended to be used for two years when that could be spent on content is no longer acceptable.

And start actually developing the RPG bit of your MMORPG. More customisation options. Player housing. Reputation grinds with their own interesting stories so we can get to know these factions, which you actually did in MOP but then backtracked on because you attached power to the reputation and got people frustrated doing those grinds out of necessity rather than because they wanted to.

We know what game we want. It’s a game we want to have fun in. What we currently have is a game designed to get us to log in every day to drive up their MAUs and make things look promising for their shareholders and content seemingly designed for esports rather than actually being great for the game. Dungeons for example are time trials for this purpose.

I hope the game is salvaged, I really do but we’ve had four expansions of bad decisions and we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt and they keep doubling down on the same bad decisions. The number of times a legitimate point has been put to Ion Hazzikostas and he has instead responded that we are approaching the system he designed wrong is aggravating.

FF14 is offering them stiff competition now. And Riot Games is building an MMO set in their league of legends universe. Their are companies out there now more than willing to eat their lunch if they don’t stop taking us for granted and up the quality of their product.

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I think it’s high time that Blizz hired real, serious and experienced epic fiction writers. Since MoP, the story has gotten worse and worse with each exp.

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You are presuming the bad plot is by accident rather than design.

I am not sure anymore. I’m starting to think this lazy, sloppy storytelling is intended so that those players who don’t pay attention to the plot and happily skip the quest texts and the cutscenes aren’t overly confused about what’s going on.

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Interestingly I disagree with at least half of this post, and it also disagrees with the first era of WoW.

I’m not gonna go into it too much though in a thread that’s fundamentally about a bad story though. Besides I’ve written plenty about it already.

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You completely misunderstood what Jeff was talking about.

Look at how Overwatch tells its story. It does not make you read thousands of quest logs. It does not make you read anything. Overwatch mainly tells its story though short stories in form of videos and comics that are found outside of the game for those players that care about the story. For those players who only want to play the game, there is nothing in-game that gets in their way.

Jeff knew that it does not make sense to try to tell some epic story in a multiplayer game and that is why Overwatch is heavily focused on gameplay, and the story is only in the background.

This design philosophy and statement made by Jeff also in no way relates to the poor quality of WoW’s storytelling in recent years.

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It’s the perfect opposite, indeed. Shadowlands makes the mistake that Jeff identified and did everything he could to avoid.

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I don’t think they do it on purpose, I just think they don’t have enough talent and ideas. Those who skip texts and do not pay attention to the story will always do so, no matter if the story is good or bad, and therefore there is no reason to dumb down the story because of them.

It’s very naive if you think Blizz is doing it on purpose.

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I think Kaplan was just whinging about quest text.

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It’s exactly this why I don’t find Overwatch engaging to play. The gameplay is boring and repetitive. While I LOVE the setting and the world they created. But the game is very ‘meh’ at best.

I’d rather have a game with a nice engaging or interesting story any day of the week.

The problem is; whether someone finds a story engaging or interesting is totally subjective.

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In general, I like some background story to provide atmosphere. I think Overwatch initially had too little of that. Although the Overwatch videos and comics that Blizzard produced were really cool, they were published in small chunks after the game got released, and they’re not integrated into the game. Maybe Overwatch 2 will do a better job at this.

In Warcraft 3 we interacted with the leaders such as Thrall, Jaina, and Arthas much more - we even got to play as them. That game gave us lots of missions with voice-acted dialogue and videos in-between which told a coherent story within a play time of maybe 15 hours. That worked well. In World of Warcraft, however, those characters ended up just standing around the same place 24/7 for years, which makes them feel kind of meaningless and artificial.

In World of Warcraft, the environments and all the “less important” NPCs create the atmosphere, like that Orc dude in the Barrens who is looking for his wife. Blizzard tries to make Anduin, Jaina, Sylvanas etc. feel epic by dedicating a few minutes of cutscenes to them every 12 months, but the rate of content delivery is much too slow. And because Blizzard cannot deliver quickly enough, they resort to really lame techniques to time-gate the content, typically by having characters just teleport away and hide for 12 months until the next cutscene gets released.

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Simple. Blizzard did not take his word to the heart. What Kaplan said doesn’t mean : “just create some nonsensical story, or even better no story at all, as player only care about gameplay”. What he meant is probably more something like this : “video games allow us to tell stories in a way that no book, nor movie can. We should focus on delivering our stories by taking advantage of these unique possibilities, instead of forcing players to read hundred of lines of quest logs or force them to watch cutscenes in which they have no control at all”.

But, you should really keep whining and complaining that blizzard does an horrible job, all while giving your money to them. That’s a very popular and dissonnant behavior among us.

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