•Jeff Kaplan, the former director who was once the face of Overwatch at Blizzard, says he has made a conscious effort to disconnect from the game since departing in 2021.
“I’ve literally not played the game since April 2021,” Kaplan said during an interview with GameSpot. “After I said my goodbye to competitive Overwatch and the Overwatch subreddit, I never go back and read. I don’t watch YouTube . I don’t search for my name in Overwatch. I sort of just disconnect.”
Kaplan left Blizzard after an Activision Blizzard executive threatened to lay off a thousand people if the game didn’t generate a certain amount of revenue that year. He later described the incident as the “biggest ‘fuck you’ moment” of his career.
Aaron Keller has since taken over the director role, and despite what Kaplan characterized as a rocky couple of years, he reportedly managed to right the ship.
The interview covered Kaplan’s transition to independence with his new studio Kintsugiyama and its western action game The Legend of California. Asked how his relationship with the hero shooter changed after stepping down, he said he prefers to remember it as it was in 2021.
“I had a very almost clinical separation, knowing how the [World of Warcraft] thing had gone,” Kaplan said. “World of Warcraft was more painful for me to leave than Overwatch was.”
Kaplan recalled that Echo, added as the last hero before his departure, is what he remembers most about the game’s April 2021 state.
“It is, to this day, one of the most special days in my life,” he said when recalling BlizzCon 2014, where Overwatch was announced. “I’m so immensely proud of everything that everybody at Blizzard did to make it a great game… It is the most talented cinematics group in the history of video games.”
Yet Kaplan said he does not want to dwell on the past, comparing himself to Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite, the character still mourning a football career he never had.
“I don’t want to be Uncle Rico! Overwatch happened. I was a part of it,” Kaplan said. “There’s a group there now and Overwatch is now about them. Both the players and the developers, that’s their Overwatch now. They’re making it, they own it, they play it.” He added: “I’m onto this new thing, and that’s where I’m at in my life.”
Kaplan originally pitched a PvE-driven version of the game with a campaign and replayable missions for BlizzCon 2019. The title dropped its number earlier this year after a soft reboot introduced a new storyline and focus on frequent story updates through cinematics, comics, and audio dramas.
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