Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s former director, said he’s not played the game he was the public face of since April 2021, when he left developer Blizzard after nearly 20 years to go indie. He called his relationship with Blizzard’s shooter one of “clinical separation.”
Kaplan revealed this to GameSpot in an interview that dove into his history with Blizzard and the creation of his new game, The Legend of California.
When asked if he had continued to play Overwatch or kept tabs on it in the wake of it dropping the “2” from its name and its addition of 10 new heroes over the course of the year, Kaplan said he hadn’t. He said he’s essentially cut all ties with the game he used to direct.
“With Overwatch, I had a very almost clinical separation, knowing how the WoW thing had gone,” Kaplan said. “I’ve literally not played the game since April 2021.”
He continued: “I don’t, for my own psyche, I don’t read the subreddits. After I said my goodbye to competitive Overwatch and the Overwatch subreddit, I never go back and read. I don’t watch YouTube [videos]. I don’t search for my name in Overwatch. I don’t search for Overwatch. I sort of just disconnect. I actually tell all the algorithms like, ‘Yeah, I’m not really interested in Overwatch anymore. I know you think I’m the Overwatch guy, but like, that’s just not for me anymore.'”
It was a lesson Kaplan learned when he left the World of Warcraft team in 2008 after working on Blizzard’s MMORPG for six years. He said it was more painful to step away from WoW than it was for Overwatch.
“Oddly, leaving WoW was a training moment for me,” he said. “When I left WoW to work on Titan [the game that would eventually become Overwatch], it was, I think, November or December of 2008. And WoW was who I was at that point. I worked every minute–every waking minute–on WoW. If I wasn’t working on WoW, I was playing WoW. And every time I played WoW, I had this notepad next to the desk that I’d be filling out to walk in the next morning and go, ‘These are all the things we need to change.’
“It was kind of shocking in a very negative emotional way to step away from WoW, because it was such a part of who I was and how I identified. It was who I was as a game developer.”
As a result, when it came time to leave Overwatch and Blizzard behind, Kaplan said he was “used to that moment” of having given everything to a game, and the need to establish a “healthy separation” between him and his former work.
“I was kind of used to that moment of what it meant to give all of yourself, your heart, your soul–because it’s not just a job, there’s no one who can do this and have it just be a job–and then have this shocking moment where you realize it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the team, belongs to the players, it belongs to Blizzard, but it doesn’t belong to you,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan said he was trying to avoid becoming Uncle Rico from the film Napoleon Dynamite, an old man reliving his glory days of playing football by watching tapes of his games.
“I don’t want to be Uncle Rico,” Kaplan said. “Overwatch happened. I was a part of it. 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. I’m onto this new thing, and that’s where I’m at in my life.”