Jeff Kaplan, the former director of Monitoring and current studio head at Kintsugiyama, working on a western action game The legend of Californiahas been quite outspoken in recent months about how things went wrong for him during his final years at Blizzard. He left the company in 2021 after what he described as the “the greatest ‘fuck you’ moment” of his career when an Activision Blizzard executive threatened to lay off a thousand people at the company if Monitoring did not achieve a certain profit that year. Kaplan’s interviews since the announcement Legend of California gave us an insight into the stress of working on Monitoring led to the launch of Monitoring 2and a particularly interesting anecdote that he shared in an interview with Interviews on the world of video games chronicles how the sequel’s notoriously confusing announcement at Blizzcon 2019 came to be.
The hour-long interview covers many points in Kaplan’s career, including his work on World of Warcraft before pivoting towards Monitoringthe first days of the cancellation Titan MMO that would pave the way for Monitoringand what he does now with Legend of Californiabut there is a significant part of the show where he talks about how he slowly became disenchanted with his former employer. He cites a “revolving door” of “business guys” from Activision and Blizzard coming in and making creative decisions, including a mandate that the team was not allowed to work on new heroes for the original. Monitoring because they had to work Monitoring 2; thus, the years-long content drought. Kaplan says that working on Monitoring from 2018 to 2021, he experienced “constant fights” with leaders, until he finally felt like he no longer agreed with the way things were going.
One of these fights included the announcement Monitoring 2 at Blizzcon 2019. At the time, the company promised a story campaign, cooperative missions, and a competitive ecosystem shared with the original game, but almost none of that came to fruition in the years since the game’s official launch in 2022, and Blizzard has since abandoned the 2 of the title entirely. It was as if players were watching Blizzard dismantle what it had promised in real time, and from Kaplan’s recollection, it sounds like in his eyes Blizzard announced the game prematurely.
“(I) fought a lot with, at the time, it wasn’t Mike (Morhaime). I loved Mike, who was the president of Blizzard, and another president of Blizzard, my executive producer, for announcing Monitoring 2. (I) walked into their office, I was like, “What do we do?” We don’t really know what this game is, we don’t know what the business model is. This is a huge mistake.
Kaplan also says he was frustrated that Blizzard announced both Monitoring 2 And Diablo IV At the same time, he feels like it didn’t allow either game to have its “moment” at Blizzcon, which he says was a decision made as a form of corporate swing.
“They had a lot to prove as new leaders,” he said. “They wanted to prove that ‘Blizzard is back and Blizzard still has it.’ And I’m like, “You guys are fucking idiots,” you know? I don’t know how else to say it, but after three years of burning out and not agreeing with any of the decisions that were being made on the franchise and no longer feeling like I had any agency… before, I was like “I’m the game director, I decide the direction the game takes”, and as of 2018, I lost that. And after three years of fighting to get it back, I realized that this company now belongs to these business people, to the Blizzard management team, to the Activision team, and I don’t really belong here, and I’m tired of fighting. I don’t want to put my name on a project that I don’t believe in.
Kaplan does not name any names, but in terms of chronology, J. Allen Brack would have been the president when Monitoring 2 was originally announced in 2019. Brack resigned from his role as president in 2021 following the company’s sexual harassment lawsuit scandal that year.
Despite everything, Monitoring is in pretty good condition these days, it is finishing its 10th anniversary with 10 new heroes and a reworked storyeven though Kaplan admits that he no longer follows the gamefor his own good.
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