Notes

The Making of World of Warcraft



The Making of World of Warcraft
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Eleven million people. Two expansions. $1.2 billion in revenue. 16GB of your hard drive. Millions of hours of play. Acres of news-print. Sam Raimi's directed film in development. A grey market worth billions of dollars in gold and other commodities. A show called South Park. Therapists creating in-game characters for addiction counselling. Eleven million players.



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



Yet all of this can sometimes be used to obscure the most important aspect of World of Warcraft. You'll find a fantastic game if you strip away all the hype, numbers, media coverage, and debate. A game that was created by skill, passion and obsessive perfectionism by an extremely talented team from the company that created it, Blizzard Entertainment.
Here we go again


If we are looking 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.



World of Warcraft first popped into public view in September of 2001. Bill Roper, a Blizzard executive, was in London to announce the game at ECTS. The anticipation was high. The already famous studio had announced its (as yet unreleased) strategy game Warcraft III at ECTS two years previously, and the announcement of a new Blizzard game was a big deal. The studio was known for releasing few games, but very slowly - and very, well. The smart money was on StarCraft 2, the sequel to its strategy-based hit.



It was not StarCraft II. In the afternoon, Roper announced a whole new direction for Blizzard the company. It was going to make an extremely multiplayer game, letting people roam the Warcraft world as their own characters. The three races that could be played humans orcs, bull-like tauren, were made public. Each one would be fundamentally different. You can play as a first, third-person, zoomed out, or isometric perspectives.



There was a mixed reaction. There was excitement and excitement certain but there was a sense of confusion - even dismay. What is the reason Blizzard an industry leader in strategy gaming be tinkering around with this particular genre? Did they not know how few people played MMOs? Did they realize what they were engaging themselves in?



"It seemed like a natural progression" reflects on Chris Metzen Blizzard's vice-president of creative development who stretches his brain back almost 10 years. "We were working on Warcraft III or different iterations of it for a couple of years prior to the time we really started to think about World of Warcraft, and many of the creative vision really translated from the Warcraft III experience."



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



"We ended up going towards the RTS, but I do remember those first builds of game You're running with the Archmage or the Blademaster just next to him. The enemy camps are in front of you, and you can see the horizon. I think that helped to establish the feeling that, Wow, our game could look amazing like this."



It was not just this natural progression, however, that inspired World of Warcraft. It was also the fact that the team was playing a lot playing certain other games.



"It's funny," admits Metzen, "at the time, a lot of us were playing [early MMOs] EverQuest and Ultima Online... We had a separate development team working on an unannounced project which we thought was cool, although it was still being developed - but given that we were all fans of games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, the conversation at the time was, perhaps we could do one of these!"


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