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.
If former Blizzard vice president and game designer Jeff Kaplan had his way during WoW’s development, however, the games industry might have followed altogether different paths. In 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 it 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.”
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Kaplan acknowledged that there are “a lot of arguments” in favor of WoW’s third-person perspective, like the benefit of having a full view of your character. But Kaplan explained that his preference was defined by EverQuest, which enabled his entry into game development when his rants about its game design earned him a reputation with his Blizzard employee guildmates.
“EQ was all first-person, and weirdly, because it was first-person, I saw my guildmates up close way more. And I feel like I saw and appreciated the character art way more,” Kaplan said. “I wasn’t seeing myself, but I knew other people were seeing me that close, so in EQ I actually cared what my character looked like more than I did in WoW.”
As a thought experiment, imagining the world where WoW was first-person quickly spirals out into some fascinating directions. Would a first-person WoW have had the same level of landmark success? How would its systems and mechanics be different to account for the player’s different sense of—and relationship with—the MMO’s spaces? And what strange ways would its influence have spiraled out into the wider games industry if the WoW clones of the late 2000s and early 2010s had the same first-person perspective?
Would we all have gotten sick of first-person MMOs in the same way we abandoned the action bar? Would that timeline’s Destiny be a third-person juggernaut that would then shape industry standards in its own image?
Those implications are staggering to consider, but I’ve saved the most profound for last: Would Blizzard’s pauldrons have been so huge if you had to spend hours trying to look around them in first person?
