During a 10-hour stream of his new studio's upcoming frontier survival game, The Legend of California, Kaplan said that in its early days, he envisioned World of Warcraft as a first-person game and tried to get others at Blizzard to do the same.
"I really wanted WoW to be first-person," Kaplan said. "I argued a lot for that." The game that ultimately shipped in 2004 took a third-person perspective, one of the design choices that would ripple across the industry for decades to come. Had Kaplan's push succeeded, the entire trajectory of MMO design might have unfolded differently.
His reasoning came from personal gaming history. Kaplan had come from EverQuest, where there was a "weird third-person camera that didn't really fully work that great," and he didn't play with it on. Those formative years with one of gaming's most influential MMOs shaped his conviction that first-person perspective was the way forward for the genre.
Much of the current videogame landscape can be traced back to systems and design decisions either first conceived or formalized in World of Warcraft. From the universal RPGification of game mechanics to live service gameplay loops to incremental gearscore advancement, videogames as we know them look like they do in large part because of WoW. A first-person version would have set a radically different precedent for how hundreds of games that followed would approach their design.
Kaplan acknowledged that "WoW is great" as it is in third-person, and there are "a lot of arguments about seeing your character more." The decision that ultimately prevailed at Blizzard has proven itself through more than two decades of success. Yet Kaplan's advocacy for an alternative vision reveals how fragile design decisions can be in their moment, how the games we take for granted might have been entirely unrecognisable.
The revelation comes as Kaplan revealed he was working on The Legend of California, an open-world first-person shooter developed by his new independent game studio, Kintsugiyama. He views his upcoming game as an indirect realization of those long-held aspirations. After years away from the public eye, Kaplan is finally building the kind of game he once advocated for, free from the constraints that shaped World of Warcraft's development decades ago.