Notes

The Making of World of Warcraft



The Making of World of Warcraft
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Eleven million users. Two expansions. $1.2 billion in annual revenue. 16GB of your hard drive. Billions of hours were devoted. Acres of news-print. A Sam Raimi-directed movie in the in the works. A grey market that is worth billions of dollars in gold and other items. A South Park episode. Therapists design characters in the game to provide addiction counseling. Eleven million players.



The sheer size of World of Warcraft is staggering. It's the only videogame like it, and this makes sense for players, but can be a puzzle to non-players and those who don't understand the appeal of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or simply MMOs). WOW is so huge and difficult to ignore that it triggers an extreme polarization.



All of this may be used to obscure the most important aspect of World of Warcraft. Remove the hype and the numbers, the media coverage, and the debate, and what you're left with is an amazing game. Blizzard Entertainment's talented team developed the game with love, skill and obsessive perfectionionism.



If we want to talk about that game, rather than the baggage it has built up over the years - it is sensible to go all the way back to the beginning.
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World of Warcraft first appeared in public view in September of 2001. Blizzard executive Bill Roper had flown into London to make an announcement at the ECTS trade event. Anticipation was high. The already famous studio had revealed its (as yet unreleased) strategy game Warcraft III at ECTS two years previously, and the announcement of the new Blizzard game was a big deal. Even then, the studio was known for doing only a handful of games, and very slow - and very well. The smart money was on the possibility of a sequel to its previous strategy hit, StarCraft.



It wasn't StarCraft II. The next day, Roper announced a whole new direction for Blizzard The company was going to make an extremely multiplayer game, letting people roam the Warcraft world as their own characters. Three races that could be played such as humans, orcs and the bull-like tauren - were revealed and each was going to be completely different. You could play in first-person, third-person or zoomed-out, isometric perspectives.



There was a mixed reaction. There was excitement and intrigue , but also a sense of confusion and dismay. Why would Blizzard - a huge player of strategy games - choose to play with this particular niche? Did they not know how few players played MMOs? Did they realize what they were getting themselves into?



"It felt like a natural progression," recalls Blizzard's grandly-titled vice director of creative development Chris Metzen, casting his thoughts back nearly 10 years. "We had been working on Warcraft III or different iterations of it for a couple of years at the point when we began to think about World of Warcraft, and some of the creative vision really came from the Warcraft III experience."



Sam ("Samwise") Didier, the company's art director interjects. "I'm not sure if this is exactly where it started - but at one point, we had a behind-the-character camera in Warcraft III, much like you see in WOW now. We wanted to create an RTS-slash-RPG vibe for the game.



"We ended up going back more to the RTS side, but I remember seeing those first builds of the game: you're racing around with the Archmage or the Blademaster in the middle of him. The enemy camps are in the front of you and you can even see the distant horizon. I think that helped to give the impression that Wow, our game could look amazing like this."



It was not just this natural progression that sparked the idea for World of Warcraft. It was also the fact that the team was spending a lot of time playing other games.



Metzen admits it's funny. "A majority of us were playing early] MMOs EverQuest and Ultima Online... Well we had a secondary team working on an unannounced project that we thought was interesting - but since we were huge EverQuest fansthat the conversation was, well, maybe we could accomplish this!"


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