Kody: First of all, could you please introduce yourselves to our readers and what your role is on the World of Warcraft development team?

Cory Stockton: My name is Cory Stockton and I'm the Lead Content Designer on WoW, so I basically oversee the design and implementation of the zones, the dungeons, the cities, battlegrounds. Any kind of content that makes it in.

Greg Street: I'm Greg Street, I'm the Lead Systems Designer on WoW. My team oversees anything, pretty much with numbers in the game, so class designers, tradeskills, we also own the user interface, things like that.

Kody: Obviously not everyone has been on the team since the beginning. At what point in the development process did you two join?

CS: I joined the WoW team right about three months after WoW shipped. When I came in, the first thing I started working on was Blackwing Lair. The Vaelastrasz encounter, the gate door... all of that was happening when I came in.

GS: I think just after Black Temple shipped, but before Sunwell.

Kody: Cory, from a level design perspective what's your favorite area in World of Warcraft, dungeon or otherwise, and why?

CS: Oh wow, that's pretty good. Um, let's see... as far as dungeons go, to this day my favorite dungeon is Stratholme. And I think it's, the layout of that dungeon is great... it's got a front entrance, a back entrance. It's got the bastion so you're inside, outside areas where you're out on the streets. Wide variety of bosses, and beyond that it's just got an awesome story that fits in well with the universe. It's one of those dungeons I never really minded running over and over because it felt really great.

From a zone perspective it's really hard to choose a single favorite zone that I like. I'm pretty partial to the undead; I like a lot of the undead zones. Tirisfal Glades is one of my favorite starting zones in the game because it gives you an awesome sense of feeling about what it is, how the Forsaken came to be, what's happening. We really display it well there. It's definitely one of my favorite zones.

Kody: Greg, feel free to answer as well if you want to.

GS: Oh gosh, it's hard to... I was trying to think as Cory went through. There's so many. Upper Blackrock Spire always had a soft spot in my heart. Feels like a raid, plays like a dungeon, some really cool fights in there. Zone-wise, I always liked Zangarmarsh in Burning Crusade because it felt like it was a really well contained story.

In classic I guess, probably, the Plaguelands. Possibly something like Searing Gorge because I always liked having Blackrock Mountain hanging over the top there. Lich King, probably Storm Peaks which is such a really vertical zone with tons of story and lore, and just a lot of cool points of interest.

Kody: What would you say has been the greatest design challenge for each of your teams since you joined?

CS: Probably the biggest thing is trying to create enough variety of content that pleases everyone. I think that's probably the biggest thing because we're always looking to make sure that we've got raids for our high end players, you know, our capped players but we also want to make sure that we try to introduce something for people that maybe aren't raiding, like five mans.

And at the same point, when we look at the expansions we want to have something for new players as well. We want to have a new race that gets them going, or a reason to re-roll. That's the thing we're always challenged with, is how can we come up with enough things in one patch where we can have something for everyone. That's definitely always our goal, we don't necessarily hit it, but it's something we're always striving for is to try to deliver content for all the players. Definitely the thing we struggle with the most I would say.

Kody: Greg how about you? What about class design, or item design, or what have you.

GS: I think a similar answer is, we keep wanting to add new things to the game without it becoming too overwhelming. I mean we're looking now at Cataclysm, and thinking about... we want to add new spells to all the classes, but all the classes have a lot of spells already and they don't have a lot of free space on the action bar. So we think about, how do we keep adding new stuff to the game without overwhelming people, and kind of carving off a niche for each individual ability so we don't have a lot of like... oh, this is the ability that the class never uses.

Kody: I think you did a good job with that with the death knight talents, where certain abilities would replace your base abilities.

GS: Yeah that's not a bad way to go. We initially tried to avoid it, but the more I think about it, it kind of helps make an ability cooler without having another ability on your bar. It's kind of the same thing with the cat druid getting mangle instead of claw and things like that.

Kody: What are you most proud of seeing added to the game, or changed, since you joined the team?

CS: I would think that the biggest thing has been 10 man raiding. The changing from 40, to 25, and going all the way down to 10. As far as having a changing impact on the game overall, it's pretty huge about... it really reached the goal of that, which was to allow everyone to experience raid content in the game. That's a goal we've had for a long time, and we just finally started to see it come to fruition a lot more in Northrend. We saw a little bit of it in Burning Crusade, but in Northrend it's starting to happen, and we're really pushing for a ton of it in Cataclysm.

And it's huge for us, because we spend a ton of time on the raid zones and evolving the stories and doing, you know,  custom events and stuff. And that's content that everyone should be able to see, so it feels great seeing that a lot more people are able to hit that content.

Kody: If you could name one feature or change made since you joined the team that you never expected to be done, what would you say it is?

GS: Looking for group is a big one, equipment manager, and dual spec. I thought all three of those were a real uphill battle, and they ended up working out really well.

CS: Yeah, dual spec was one that I had wanted forever. And we always talked about it, and we always questioned how we would do it. I think another thing that came through is the mount changes that recently went through. Finally getting mounts down to level 20, you know when you think about what a mount used to mean to the game, how big it was, how expensive, and then you didn't get your first one until 40.

Getting that change through was actually a pretty huge deal... it seems really easy to get into the game, we just like changed a number. But there's actually a ton of design behind that about when the carrots show up, and getting a mount is one of our biggest carrots to the players. So I think that change was definitely huge.

Kody: Going through Stranglethorn on a mount is definitely better than on foot.

CS: Ohh yeah. I mean you look back and wonder, how did I do this before a mount?

GS: Or the Barrens.

CS: Yeah, Barrens especially. Now people are going to be used to it, and people will be like "Oh, well I was oldschool and did this on foot."

Kody: If there's one thing you'd like to go back and change before it could be implemented, what would it be?

GS: This is not necessarily a decision I made, but if we could do it all over again I think we would structure the talent trees a little differently. So like, maybe you would actually have to get 5 points in one tier before you could advance to the second one. They're designed to be so flexible that it's really easy for players to pick and choose, at the expense of where they can just skip over a talent that's not appealing and kind of tier through the best DPS talents in the tree. Part of the changes with Cataclysm should get at that a little bit.

CS: I think one of the changes I would do, and we're not doing anymore, is never make one single entrance zone for an expansion. The lessons we learned from Hellfire were many. As great an experience as it was, from a technical standpoint having that many players hit that zone at one time did not equal the experience that we were hoping. *laughter* Splitting that out with Northrend we thought worked extremely well, and it's what we're doing again with Cataclysm. So there were definitely a lot of lessons learned there.

Kody: Greg, what is it like interacting with so many players on a daily basis, all of whom seem to have their own opinions on the direction of the game? Is that taxing at all on you to go so in-depth into the philosophies of WoW's development?

GS:  It's only taxing when I get into like Q&A mode because I feel like... things might be taken out of context or people misunderstand. Therefore something I could ideally write in three to five minutes takes a lot longer because you look at this word and see how they might possibly misinterpret that. I don't mind at all interacting with people, it's awesome to get so many passionate guys out there. You know... they love the game, they want to see it improved, they get confused over things and have questions. All that is awesome.

Kody: Looking back at the evolution of the hybrid classes, how happy are you with where they are now, given recent changes to discourage multi-role playstyles in a given spec? Do you think it's about time to get rid of the hybrid classification entirely?

GS: I'm not sure. I think there's different ways you can design it from the ground up. We really don't see a way that makes sense, to say make mages able to heal or rogues able to tank. Given that, we have some classes that can only do one thing and so they feel like they should be able to do it really well, or why have those classes exist at all?

I think people are pretty happy with the way it is overall, we're certainly thrilled that we've been able to kind of bring to life some of those specs that were not taken seriously for a long time. We're not there yet, but we're a lot closer than we have been previously, and we're trying to get a good direction. I'd love to see in Cataclysm where there's like 30 specs and you can pretty much pick any one you want.

Kody: WoW's anniversary as a whole isn't the only thing this month; Friday (November 13th) marked a year since Wrath of the Lich King's launch. What are you most happy with in the expansion, and what do you feel could be improved upon?

GS: Let's see, improved upon... I don't think our badge system, in the end, really worked out as well as we wanted it to. It became kind of complicated with all the costs and like, upgrading and downgrading kind of thing. Another problem I think is the health pools are a little low across the board, which has created some problems with the relative power of damage versus healing and things like that. If I could go back I'd love to see health larger overall.

As far as stuff that worked out well, heroic dungeons are back which is really cool. They were kind of skipped over on the way to Naxxramas but now people are really running them again for badges. That's really cool. And like Cory said earlier, even fairly casual players feel comfortable raiding and talking about Kel'thuzad and Yogg. Things like that are really cool and they feel like they're part of the story.

CS: Things that I liked that turned out really well, the whole concept behind Dalaran... something I was intricately close with and connected with... Dalaran was kind of my baby the whole time, and we really learned a lot from the Exodar and Silvermoon in Burning Crusade. We really thought that we needed a new capitol city and we pushed it, but it turned out in the long run that they didn't work out anywhere near what we'd hoped. So we kind of put all our efforts into one central place where everyone could do everything and really feel like a thriving spot. So I think that was a huge success.

Another thing we've really worked a lot on, and you've seen the changes over the entire year has been Wintergrasp. Wintergrasp was a crazy expedition into designing a pvp zone that's non-instanced, and at the time the popularity of Wintergrasp. Obviously the rewards there are great for players, the pvp is there, there's a lot of things we've changed and we feel like we've improved upon. We're planning to do a lot more with that concept in Cataclysm with Tol Barad, the next kind of evolution of that. But that's something that I think Wintergrasp overall has been a success with players, that they really liked it. Seeing that work is something that definitely feels good.

As far as things that didn't work, I think that the biggest thing for us was having kind of two endgame zones, having two level 80 zones. From a story perspective it was awesome... Icecrown had some of the best questing in the game, but sadly not enough players make it there because they hit 80 before they started doing it and went straight into Naxx. So that's something we've learned from also that we want to move forward with knowing that when we build a zone and spend all that time, we want to make sure it ends up being in the level flow so that players go and get a chance to experience that content. There's too much good stuff in Icecrown for players to miss it. So there's definitely some lessons to be learned there.

Kody: Yeah I agree, the whole Arthas quest chain where you actually play as him is awesome.

CS: Yeah, some of the best phasing in the game is done there in Icecrown.

GS: The whole Shadow Vault, stuff like that.

Kody: Content gating has evolved quite a bit over the years, from the early attunements for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to the more involved Black Temple version, and finally the Sunwell Plateau and Crusaders' Coliseum systems. What were the advantages of these systems, and which would you say worked best?

GS: In terms of what we're talking about for Cataclysm, since we're doing it over again we'll get a chance to, I think players got into Naxx a little too quickly... it let them skip over a couple of tiers of dungeons and kind of set the expectation that every time you go to a raid zone you're gonna get these gigantic upgrades.

We would like to see players ultimately spend a little more time in dungeons, I don't think that means going all the way to a Karazhan style attunement. You could do something a lot simpler and you'll see a little of that in Icecrown, kind of related to what we did with the coliseum.

Walk us through the creation of a raid instance like Ulduar. When do your various teams come into play, and how much influence do they have on tasks they're not directly involved in during the creation process?

Cory: As far as the kickoff goes for Ulduar... Ulduar was something we were working on all through Northrend, and we kind of realized that we had the content we wanted to ship it. Then we're sitting there with Ulduar, so we had some time to go back to it and beef it up from what we originally had planned for Ulduar.

We kick off, you know... brainstorming names, story, we have Alex Afrasiabi telling us the background, what we need to get across to players. So we kick off there, and it comes to a level design phase where we lay everything out in 2D. You've probably seen this at BlizzCon; we use these 2D illustrator maps to plan the layout of the whole dungeon, figure out where the bosses are gonna be, what we're gonna do.

From that point we talk about it more, decide we like what we have and start building it in 3D in what we call a "block out." The block out is just a really basic 3D form of the dungeon that we can run around in and see what the first stage is like. With Ignis, we knew how the fight was gonna be with the water pools on the side, how far we wanted players to have to drag the adds into the pool.

So in an instance like that, we're able to lay out all of that in 2D to get a sense of feel for units of measure, and then we get it into the basic 3D form and we can actually go in and spawn him, you know we didn't have his model done yet right, but we could spawn him there and get a feel for if there needs to be any changes before we get the final art going. We do that individually for everything in the whole place to lay it out, figure out how much space we need for the fights.

From there we get the encounter team involved. The encounter team comes in and we have meetings on the actual fights individually, and at the same time the art team begins working on final art. Those two work side-by-side from there until the end of the dungeon, or the production time, whatever that might be. Some dungeons that are smaller, we can kick out in two-to-three months, but something like Ulduar that's huge can take more time -- up to four-to-five months.

And during that time, they're working on the fights in Stranglethorn Arena spawning Razorscale there, fighting him, getting it down for how it's gonna play out and what he does while the art is being built for that room. As things start coming in, we'll start putting things together... we'll start placing the creatures in the actual instance and do internal testing.

Everything goes through testing here, we have a QA team that does that, but we test everything ourselves in 10-man form with the encounter guys, Greg is in on that, Tom Chilton, Alex Afrasiabi, all of us. So we go through as players and get a feel for it. From there it's just tuning, we get feedback after every session and work on tuning everything.

Then it goes on to Greg's team where the item art is getting hooked up, filling out the achievements, which all of those falls under Greg's team.

So could an item guy go up to the encounter guys and say "Hey, I have this awesome idea for a boss fight," or a class designer say "This room would look really awesome with a pink elephant ghost hovering near the ceiling."

[Greg Street laughs]

Cory: Oh 100%.

Greg: We're super collaborative here, our offices are full of very open people and we're talking to each other a lot. If someone gets this crazy idea about something and champions it can often get it into the game.

Cory: A lot of times we'll see a model come in from art and they'll end up creating a weapon the creature is holding and one of the item guys will say "oh I want to drop that," and at that point a task will go in, the artist goes in and rips the weapon out of the creature's hands, scales it down to fit the races in the game and we'll actually use that as a weapon.

Like with Razorscale when we saw his model we decided we wanted to get a mount for that. We had no idea until the art came in for him, and we saw it, and it looked so good we decided we had to get it in as a mount. So a lot of times things just happen... we try to plan as much as we can, but sometimes we end up getting things, and we all play this game just like anyone else. So there's a lot of things like that, that come out even though we didn't start with it planned and using it makes it feel so much better.

The story of how the Warcraft universe has grown over the course of the past 15 years is every bit as epic as the Warcraft games themselves. In the following video interviews, the people who shaped Warcraft were asked two simple questions: one about the moment they realized Warcraft universe was something special, and one about a personal moment while playing any of the Warcraft games. We captured their answers, and we would like to share their memories with you.

Read the full interview here

It's one of those fancy computer games all the kids are playing these days. In fact, there are 13 million kids and adults that play World of Warcraft on a regular basis. Let's just hope they don't band together and form their own country.

Since we're approaching the 5 year anniversary of the game's launch, Morgan Webb went down to Anaheim to interview a few of the guys at Blizzard who started the MMO sensation that became World of Warcraft. First, take a gander at part one of her interview with Game Director Tom Chilton where he discusses what his primarily role was within creating the prolific, Blizzard MMO experience and more. 

In Part 2 of 2 of Morgan Webb's interview with Tom Chilton, he revisits the amazing turnout for the original game's launch at Fry's Electronics and what it was like in the Blizzard offices during those first few days.

Ever wondered who was responsible for all those memorable PvE moments in your travels in World of Warcraft? Morgan sat down with Blizzard Lead World Designer, Alex Afrasiabi, to discuss all things WoW quest line-related.

Former World of Warcraft Game Director, Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole in the MMO world), chatted with Morgan about his long-lasting hand in forming WoW. why Westfall is his favorite zone and even touches on Blizzard's next big MMO project.


Watch videos of the interview here.

Have you finished watching Morgan Webb's World of Warcraft interview blowout? We hope not. Let's not kid ourselves. WoW is a massive game and to do it justice, we feel the need for a second set of interviews to satisfy that massively multiplayer online hunger.

First off the bat, listen in on former Star Wars: Galaxies developer, now turned seasoned Blizzard production director, J. Allen Brack, as he chats about his storied fanboy past with Blizzard and how he has progressed into a key development member for World of Warcraft

Then, Morgan Web visits the long-time (15 years running!) Blizzard production veteran Shane Dabiri to chronicle his rise through the Blizzard ranks and the inception/progression of the MMO behemoth WoW franchise.

Whew, that's a lot of, well... WoW

Watch videos of the interview here

Lore and I were given the opportunity to speak with Alex Afrasiabi (AA), also known as Furor, the Lead World Designer of World of Warcraft, and J. Allen Brack (JAB), the Production Director for World of Warcraft. We tried to keep focused on subjects important to the five-year anniversary and the long-term challenges and successes they've dealt with.


Can you expand a little bit on what your roles are in the ongoing production of World of Warcraft?

AA: Yeah absolutely. I am in charge of encounter design, quest design, and everything that falls in between those two things, which is spawning creatures and dungeons, and essentially the story and feel of the world.

JAB: I'm responsible for the production and operation of the game. I have a partner, Tom Chilton, who's the game director, and between the two of us we effectively run World of Warcraft.

What has been your biggest thrill during the development and release years of Warcraft?

AA: The biggest thrill for me was in Lich King with the advent of the Death Knight starting area. Seeing that come together and seeing that format actually work.

JAB: For me, it was shipping Wrath of the Lich King. I felt like it had a really strong story element. It had a really strong interplay between Warcraft 3 so it was a long story we'd been telling from a Blizzard point of view. Launching that game with the Death Knight starting experience and the experience with Arthas and the dungeons was just an awesome achievement.


What major goals did you set in the first year of World of Warcraft?

JAB: The first major goal after ship was to get the service stable and up and running and allow people to actually play the game.

AA: That was our primary goal. We had the content, we had a fun game experience that I think everyone really enjoyed, but the biggest challenge by far was getting enough servers up and getting the service available to players.


What do you feel are the biggest successes you've had with increasing accessibility to newer players since release, both in leveling and in raiding?

AA: We've changed our model a few times. Leaving Burning Crusade we had, talking about raiding, Sunwell. Sunwell was something that really was the territory of the top 1% of our playerbase. We spent a lot of time on Sunwell. It was kind of a cold realization, even though we'd felt it before, we spent a lot of time, we had a lot of very passionate, talented individuals working on the game, and they love the game and they want players to enjoy the game as well, and that was one of those ones where it was, "Sunwell is awesome!" It really was an amazing instance and we would have really loved for more people to see Sunwell.

So what we really went into Lich King with was, first and foremost, that we want our players to see our content. We want our players to be able to experience our content if they so choose: if they're a raider and they want to raid, we want to let them raid; if they want to do dungeons and heroics, we're going to let them do those. That was the big win for us, because Lich King did do that, and we think Lich King has done it well.

JAB: I totally agree with that. I think the popularity of Karazhan was kind of a moment for the team, because for a certain amount of time Karazhan was probably the most popular piece of content we had ever made. Just the realization of how excited people were about 10-person groups and 10-person raids was really a big philosophy changer for us on the team. That definitely led to the 10 and 25-man split on all Lich King content and all future content, because we want players to have the ability to experience content at the raid size that they want.

Those two decisions really go hand in hand.


Are there ways you think you can improve on this for Cataclysm?

AA: I'm gonna guess we'll surprise you. I think there's always ways to improve upon -- one of the great things about working here is we're allowed to make mistakes, and we do mistakes, clearly, and learn from them and improve upon, so I think we'll take whatever mistakes that we've made -- and there are a few -- and use those going forward with our raiding and dungeon philosophy into Cataclysm, and hopefully make it a better experience for the players.

JAB: Yeah we're trying some stuff with Icecrown, specifically in regards to looting, that is sort of an aberration from stuff that we've done before. Everything we've done is just a revision of what we've done before in terms of that stuff and I think that's going to inform a lot of the decisions we make in Cataclysm in terms of itemization and loot and how that works together.


This question comes from Xav of Premonition: How important high end raiding competition is to the overall health of the game, and how has it affected its growth over the years?

AA: I can tell you high end raiding is what birthed raiding in this game to begin with. Jeff Kaplan and Rob and myself and a few others were huge huge raiders in Everquest, and so that was a playstyle that we all really loved, and it was something that we wanted to see in WoW. The social aspect of it was really one of the big things there. You'd get all these people together and they'd cooperatively work towards a goal and the end result was very gratifying. And so, yeah, that's part of it right there. But we continue to honor high end raiding by continuing to have it. We try, I think with the splits now and the heroic difficult, we try to cover our bases now. We try to cover the lower end tiers and allowing access to all content, but at the same time, if you're a hardcore raider like Xav is in Premonition, we do provide the challenges for you as well. You can pick and choose what you want to do. You can get in there with the Lich King in under 15 attempts and hopefully take him down and we'll see how that goes.


What are the hardest decisions you need to make with new zones and cities in Warcraft?

AA: I think the hardest decisions is always... You don't want to stop. We love what we do and we want to always improve on things, and especially when you're going back through Cataclysm trying to bring up the old world and make all these great changes, the hardest part is knowing when to stop and knowing when enough is enough. It's good enough, it's great enough, but designers want to redo everything! It's not feasible, unfortunately, given timelines, but that's the hardest part for sure.

JAB: Yeah, we always want to do the greatest thing we've ever done. Since we want to make every zone the best zone we've ever made, that gets to be a problem when you're talking about the number of zones we've made and the number of zones we need to work on.


How do you keep making the new zones fresh and interesting, rather than "just another desert zone" or "just another mountain zone?"

AA: We have a lot of brilliant people here, honestly. I mean, we have a lot of passionate people. One of the things, it's interesting, is that all of our designers play the game. It might sound strange to hear, but it's something that does become a problem at times. They play the game passionately, with multiple characters, through multiple factions, and they all know what needs to be done. It's a strange thing, but it's wonderful working with them. We definitely have an eye out for 'the new,' you know, so if we're going to put a desert zone out we want to make sure it's a desert zone you've never seen before. So while we're not prevented from doing that, we want to make sure that you're going to get something amazing every time.

JAB: I don't think anyone ever comes to the table with the idea of, "I've got an idea, let's do a desert zone!" They come to the table with, "here's this one piece" of something completely awesome that they want to see in the game, and it goes from there. People will come up with ideas for individual little pieces that will eventually become a zone. We've always wanted to do an underwater zone: one of the things we've talked about with Cataclysm is Vashj'ir, the sunken city of Vashj'ir, how that's going to have a significant underwater component. We've always wanted to do that. People bringing up concept art, or different ideas of, "hey these are the things I want to see in the zone" is really... It's about those moments, those cool experiences that you want players to have, much more than it is about "let's create a desert zone."


How much do the concept artists inspire you guys to create something brand new... how often does that happen?

AA: Very often.

JAB: Yeah, all the time.

AA: It's very common. I mean, our concept artists are amazing, and I think it's a give and take, honestly, that we inspire them and they inspire us. It's a beautiful little circle.

JAB: You'll have the artist who comes in and says, "I have tried to envision this as you've described it," and wow, that's awesome, and we take the ideas to the next level. We'll have pieces come out that are with very rough, high level direction of "this is the idea for this zone, these are the kinds of things that we need to do, go off and create some neat concepts and let's see what comes back and see what we're excited about." That's a big part in it. We'll also do iterative concepts as things are coming together. We spent a lot of time doing what we call paintovers of Dalaran, where we take a screenshot of what Dalaran is today, and then artify that into a concept art format to give us the next step that we need to be reaching for.


After we've been adventuring in Azeroth for five years, what made you decide to blow it all up in Cataclysm?

AA: Blow it all up? [laughs] We're not necessarily blowing it all up. Certainly, yes, there are places that are blown up in a part. This was an easy decision for us. Well, I won't say easy, but it was a decision we went in with happily. It's the old world, it's wonderful in its own ways, but we've ... since the old world, since Burning Crusade, even since Lich King... we've elevated our design style to new heights. As we go through the old world and we play it -- like I said, we play a lot -- it becomes really obvious to us that it would be awesome if the old world met the standards we've set today. That was one of the big reasons going back, we wanted to make sure that the entry play experience -- the first 60 levels, or 50 levels, or whatever it might be -- are as good as Lich King, as good as playing through Lich King or even Burning Crusade. That's the big pull.

We'll blow things up when we need to. A lot of places have regrown due to certain issues and variances and things coming about with this Cataclysm, and we'll see a lot of that, too.

JAB: One of the first decisions we settled on was that we wanted to do two new races. And then the idea of having those two new races level up in the five-year-old level 1-60 experience was not very appealing. That also played into the decision, along with everything that Alex said.


What would you two like to see in the next years of Warcraft?

JAB: Interestingly, we don't really plan beyond the next few patches and the next expansion. We started the design for Cataclysm as we were wrapping up Lich King. Over the course of the next few months we figured out what the patch plan for Lich King was going to be and that's where we are right now. Right now we have a pretty good idea of what Cataclysm is going to end up being and we have some ideas for what some potential patches could be, but that's really about it in terms of stuff we've nailed down.

The real reason for that is because we're going to be much smarter about what the players need, what the game needs, and what the right decisions are once we ship Cataclysm, or once we get a lot more of the Cataclysm development done. Why go through the effort to make a 2-year, 5-year, or 10-year plan, or whatever, when you know it's going to get thrown away, because we're going to be so much smarter tomorrow than we are today. That's one of the things we say around here a lot is, "I don't know today, but I'll know... whenever we ship 3.3, we'll know how that turned out." And we'll be able to make smarter decisions about what the next step is.

AA: Yep. What he said. Totally true. Absolutely. [laughs]


Do you operate as a single team as you develop each new patch and each new zone, or are you split into subdivisions?

JAB: A lot of online game companies have done it different ways. The way that we do it and the way that we've really always done it is one team. We've got one team that's working on 3.3 right now, and we've got some people on that team that are working on Cataclysm stuff, but the idea that we have is that we want to have one set of leadership that's sort of making the overall game decisions because we're not making patch content and Cataclysm, we're making World of Warcraft. We want everyone to be tuned in and dialed into that experience on both the patch side and the expansion side. Everyone is in the same boat, as it were.


As a franchise, Warcraft began as a real-time strategy game with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. After three Warcraft games it moved onto the MMORPG genre. What do you feel the next step for the franchise is? Is there a possibility that it may return to its RTS roots?

JAB: We're really excited about the Warcraft Text Adventure. That's going to be followed up by the Turn Based Strategy Game. No...

The teams that we have help decide what it is that they're excited about making. The Real Time Strategy team that we have is currently working on Starcraft 2. Prior to that they were working on Warcraft 3 and the Warcraft 3 expansion. What we call "Team 2," which is the World of Warcraft team, started out actually making a different game called Nomad, and the team really got excited about making an online game, and making a Warcraft online game, so that's how World of Warcraft was born.

At some point, some team may decide, "Hey, we want to make a text adventure! Or a turn-based strategy game or something like that, and we want to use the Warcraft franchise, and this is how we could do it." Or the guys who finish Starcraft 2, they're working on that and they've got a couple expansions that we've announced for that, they may decide, yeah, it's time to return to the Warcraft franchise and start thinking about Warcraft 4. That's a decision for them to make, and is obviously years in the future.

The answer to your question may be a little vague, but it's really up to the team. The teams get really excited about stuff and when the teams are excited, great things happen. It's much more of a "what is the team excited about" as a decision maker as opposed to someone from on high saying "we will now make a Warcraft turn-based-strategy game. Go, excecute on that!"

World of Warcraft was launched five years ago today, and Kotaku is celebrating all week long, starting with a look at the Warcraft franchise's fifteen-year history with key members of Blizzard's development team.

World of Warcaft is important. The developers tell Kotaku they even dared to dream that they'd some day get a million subscribers. But to tell the story of the fifth anniversary of WoW, we first have to look at the game that started 15 years ago, Warcraft.

It All Started On Arrakis

In 1992, Westwood Studios released a game that changed the way real-time strategy games were made. It was Dune II, the first RTS to incorporate mouse movement, resource gathering, technology trees, and unique weapons and units per faction, all elements that are still being used in RTS games today.

The game caught the eyes and imaginations of several members of Silicon & Synapse, a game development studio that had mainly focused on porting games from other studios. After a brief stint as Chaos Games the studio took on the name Blizzard Entertainment in 1994.

As Blizzard art director Sam "Samwise" Didier explains it, the team's fascination with Dune II led directly to the development of its first blockbuster hit, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

"Back in the Jurassic period we all loved playing games like Dune II. We got inspired and thought this game was awesome and wanted to make something like it. We were all big fans of Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and we wanted to make a fantasy world real-time strategy game."

Taking cues from existing titles was the norm for Blizzard in the early days. Samwise points to another early Blizzard title, The Lost Vikings, which was born out of the team's love for PC puzzle game Lemmings from DMA Design, the studio that would go on to become Rockstar North of Grand Theft Auto fame.

So Blizzard took the formula established in Dune II and expanded upon it in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, adding goals beyond simply building your army and decimating your enemies. Players found themselves rescuing friendly forces from enemy camps, assassinating key members of the opposition, and rebuilding ruined towns. It was also the first RTS game to feature hand-to-hand combat and magic.

One more important innovation was borrowed from a decidedly different sort of game – Doom. Inspired by the fun of playing Doom together, Blizzard added the ability to play multiplayer battles via modem and local area network to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a feature that would become a key feature of the RTS genre.

Expanding The Story

While Orcs & Humans laid the groundwork for games to come, it was relatively light on story. Blizzard rectified that oversight with the game's 1995 sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, elevating Azeroth from game setting to fully realized fictional world.

The game saw the Orcs and Humans gather allies in the Trolls, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Gnomes, laying the foundations for the Alliance and the Horde as we know them today. The game and it's expansion pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, introduced characters and locations that would play a large part in the games to come.

Tides of Darkness also expanded on the multiplayer of the original game. In 1999, Blizzard released both the game and its expansion as Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, allowing players to engage in multiplayer matches over the internet using the Battle.net service introduced with 1997's Diablo.

Class Clowns And Failed Comedians

Along with solidifying the world of Azeroth and strengthening the foundation for the fiction that would grow with each new game in the franchise, Warcraft II also established another signature feature of the series: its sense of humor.

"We had lots of class clowns and failed comedians on the team," explains Didier. "We never really took it too seriously. We wanted really cool characters and events while making fun classic fantasy stereotypes. We included anything we thought was cool, serious or humorous."

For instance, clicking on a unit once in Warcraft II elicits a normal verbal response. Click repeatedly on a unit for no reason and they become annoyed, spouting humorous phrases like "are you still touching me?" Samwise cites this feature as a prime example of adding humor to a game without alienating those craving a serious experience. "Only the people who wanted the comedy had to deal with it."

The Lost Chapter

As Warcraft was inspired by Dune II, Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was inspired by classic LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. Development on this adventure game began soon after the completion of Warcraft II. Using a combination of cartoons and point and click adventure gameplay it would tell the story of the Orcs trapped in Azeroth following the destruction of the Dark Portal, and the rise of the famed Orc warchief Thrall, Sadly, the game never saw the light of day.

In a move that Blizzard would later repeat with StarCraft side-story Ghost, the company canceled the game days before the 1998 E3 Expo in Atlanta, despite the game being mostly complete. The animation was finished, the puzzles in place, and even the voice over work had been fully recorded, but Blizzard felt the game wasn't up to their high standards.

In an announcement issued on the 22nd of May, 2008, Blizzard explained the cancellation to fans. "The decision centered around the level of value that we want to give our customers. In essence, it was a case of stepping up and really proving to ourselves and gamers that we will not sell out on the quality of our games."

When asked if there was ever a chance of Adventures being released, Samwise was skeptical. "We're not taking the old one and finishing it. It wasn't up to par and we'd have to polish the hell out of it. DVDs are really popular because of deleted scenes, but when you watch them you can see why they weren't included in the movie. That's what Warcraft Adventures is."

Still, Blizzard felt the story of Thrall too important to gloss over, commissioning Star Trek novelist Christie Golden to write Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, a novel that bridges the gap between Warcraft II and the next game in the series, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Further Evolution

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, released in 2002, delved deeper into the lore of the series than ever before. It chronicles the rise and fall of Arthas Menethil, the prince who would become the Lich King; introduces the Night Elves and the Undead; and introduces the Burning Legion, the demonic scourge of the Warcraft universe.

Deviating from previous entries in the series, Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, integrates storytelling into the gameplay itself, rather than feeding the player through mission briefings. This allowed for a more seamless and immersive game, further cementing Blizzard's reputation as top-notch storytellers.

Warcraft III, like Warcraft II, included a World Editor program, allowing players to craft their own scenarios and maps, and players took full advantage of the feature, creating their own game types. One such custom game, Defense of the Ancients, gave rise to a new sub-genre of RTS, in which players control a single champion that gains levels and abilities as it battles alongside computer-controlled units. Defense of the Ancients-inspired games like Gas Powered Games' Demigod and the recently released League of Legends from Riot Games serve as a lasting reminder to the legacy of Warcraft III.

Welcome To Our World

In early 2000, Blizzard's development team found themselves fascinated by another type of game.

"Everyone here had been playing a bunch of Everquest and Ultima Online," says Samwise Didier. "It goes all the way back to the whole Lost Vikings/Lemmings thing. It was a genre we enjoyed, and Warcraft was a good fit."

Blizzard announced World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer take on the Warcraft universe in 2001, and for three years fans eagerly awaited their chance to take their first steps into the world of Azeroth, unfettered by the rules of the real-time strategy genre.

The game would pick up the story four years after the events of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, with the world split into two major factions – the Alliance and the Horde. Players would experience the battle for Azeroth from an entirely new, more personal point-of-view.

As the 2004 release approached, Blizzard was aware it had something special on its hands, though some members of the development team had more faith than others. World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack relates a particularly amusing story about a pep talk given by Blizzard co-founder and lead designer Allen Adham.

"Allen Adham got everyone on the team in a room to talk about how great his confidence was in the game, and how he thought we had something great. He said, 'One day this game will have a million subscribers.' No one believed that. We thought it was crazy. We thought, 'You're a liar.' There was no way that any game would have a million subscribers."

World of Warcraft launched in North America on November 23, 2004. Fan reaction to the release was so massive that the game was plagued with downtime and server queues for the first week, as Blizzard opened new worlds to deal with the exploding population. By December 2005, the game had 3.5 million subscribers. By December of 2008, that number had jumped to 11.5 million.

How does a PC game attract 11.5 million players? World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton says the game has something for everyone.

"It's easy to learn, but hard to master, which attracts different sorts of gamers. The hard to master part keeps the hardcore players around, while the casual players enjoy the wide variety of things to do," Chilton explains. "Ultimately it's just a really good game."

Massively Mainstream Appeal

The success that World of Warcraft has achieved over the past five years is nothing short of astounding. It was the best-selling PC game of 2005 and 2006 according to NPD data, knocked from the top spot in 2007 by its own expansion, The Burning Crusade. In 2008 the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, took the top spot.

The success of the game goes far beyond sales numbers. World of Warcraft has become a pop culture phenomenon. It's been used to advertise products like Coke and Toyota, while its own advertisements have feature pop culture icons such as Mr. T and William Shatner. A 2007 episode of Comedy Central's cartoon South Park, "Make Love, Not Warcraft," won the 2007 Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program.

Like Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft is a game that has gained recognition far beyond its already expansive audience. For a fantasy game that is strictly PC-based, that's no mean feat.

The Future

So where will the World of Warcraft be in another five years? Tom Chilton delivers a blissfully blurry outlook for the world's most popular subscription-based MMO.

"One of the cool things is: who knows where it will go next? The world itself is filled with so many possibilities. We've got outer space demons. We're about to add little green guys and werewolves (in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion). There are so many different directions you can go in. Magic, guns, machines – anything we want to come up with we can fit into the World of Warcraft with no problem."

And the continuing success of World of Warcraft doesn't preclude the possibility of a Warcraft IV. Just don't expect it any time soon, with teams tied up with Diablo III and StarCraft II.

Real-time strategy or massively multiplayer, the Warcraft universe continues to make its mark on the world, with each new game and expansion adding layer upon layer to a tale that J. Allen Brack believes could go on forever.

"We've got quite a bit to do before we run out of ideas. New people are constantly joining the team, bringing their own ideas with them. The full story will never truly be written."
 

To celebrate WoW's fifth birthday, we sat down with Production Director J. Allen Brack and Blizzard art mastermind "Samwise" Didier to chat about microtransactions, the game's art style, and what the hell is up with all the pandas.

WoW turns five next Monday (the 23rd), and to celebrate the occasion, The Escapist spent time chatting with a few of the people who call the shots in the world's biggest MMORPG. Last time, we spoke with Blizzard's VP of Game Design Rob Pardo, but this time, it was a two-for-one deal as we sat down with the game's Production Director J. Allen Brack, as well as former WoW Art Director "Samwise" Didier (now on the StarCraft II team, but Blizzard's resident art guru nonetheless).

The two echoed Pardo's sentiments about how WoW's success caught them unawares - as Samwise puts it, "WoW gave us Street Fighter status" - with Brack relating a story about the wildest dreams of company founder Allen Adham, the man most optimistic about the game's success before its launch: "After E3, [Adham] got the WoW team together and was talking about how great it had looked on the floor, how great the game was, and about how we had something special on our hands. And one day, he said, we were going to have a million subscribers ... the team thought it was very nice of him to say, it was very cool that he said that - but we did not believe him in any possible way."

Brack spoke about the recent hot-button issue in the WoW community, namely the Pet Store as well as the ability to pay real-world money to change a character's appearance, gender, race and faction - seen by many as a sign that WoW will adopt a microtransaction system atop the monthly subscription fee. "Actually, we've had a lot of paid services in WoW for a long time. We've had the paid character [server] transfer for ages, and you could say all of these services are a type of microtransaction ... WoW is much more fun a game if you're playing it with your friends, and these services make it easy to do that."

The concern, says Brack, is that people are wondering if - and worried that - WoW will become a game where you pay $5 for a level 80 epic sword, but "We're absolutely not talking about doing that."

While Samwise has been responsible for much of WoW's unique visual aesthetic, Brack fielded his share of art questions, too. In Burning Crusade, the equipment that players received while leveling had mostly unique models, but that resulted in a very ugly, patchwork feel to characters' outfits. In Wrath of the Lich King, the team went the opposite route, reusing item models and graphics to create a more cohesive look - but with the problem that players complained they didn't feel unique. In Cataclysm, said Brack, Blizzard was probably going to stay with the Lich King model even though he recognized that there were "definitely challenges with that approach."

"Given the choice between the two, it's really a 'pick your poison.' While the uniqueness is lost in the level-up, that's not what's important. You want a character you can take screenshots of, and that you think looks cool. So we really want them to have some kind of consistency, where your character looks like they have a coherent art style."

Another art question the team was wrestling with was the current state of character models. Burning Crusade's Draenei and Blood Elf player races looked better than the original ones, and the Goblins and Worgen look better still - leaving the original eight looking rather dated. Brack said that updating the character models was certainly something the team wanted to do, though perhaps not in Cataclysm, and that too had its own difficulties:

"It's something we struggle with - how much of the game do we want to change at any one time? Especially if it's with the characters, since players identify their characters with themselves, and get attached to how they look ... Even though things would be better with new models, we'd probably spark a lot of player outrage." One solution that the developers were mulling over was giving players the ability to choose between the original models and the updated one depending on their preference, but it wasn't likely to come as they remade the world.

Though Samwise bemoaned the loss of his beloved Barrens - his favorite zone in the original game - Brack said that the remade Azeroth of Cataclysm is "the WoW we always wished we had."

"We're so much better developers today than we were five years ago. It's a really appealing idea as a developer, and we really think it'll be cool for new players since they'll get the full best experience possible, and it'll be really neat for existing players who've moved on from Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms - they get to go home. They can re-level up something that feels familiar but has a lot of new elements so that it'll still be fresh."

But does the "WoW [the developers] always wished [they] had" include the fan-favorite Pandaren race? According to Samwise (who originally created the East-Asia-themed race as an April Fools' joke for Warcraft III), part of the race's popularity is the fact that they've never been really involved in the main Warcraft storyline. "They're not as tough or as violent as Boba Fett, but everyone loved Boba Fett even though he just had three lines in the movie, because he was cool. The Pandaren don't have a lot of lore but they're like him, kind of mysterious."

If there were a billion Pandaren running around Azeroth, then would the fans still like them as much? Still, even if they might not be showing up in WoW anytime soon, says Samwise, "there's always that dream that there'll someday be Pandaria somewhere in a Blizzard game. Maybe a new StarCraft race - what do you think?"

World of Warcraft turns five this month, and we sat down with Blizzard VP of Game Design Rob Pardo to chat about the biggest triumphs and biggest mistakes of the mega-MMORPG, and why he's not worried that their new MMOG will kill it.

It feels hard to believe, but in just over a week on November 23rd, World of Warcraft will have been live for half of a decade. Love it or hate it, WoW is one of the most important and influential games in recent memory - but five years ago, nobody could have foreseen just how big it would become, including the man at the helm of the project:

"I certainly did not expect it to have such a transformational effect on our company and the industry as a whole ... we thought that WoW would be able to expand [the MMO genre], but I figured that... if any game would ever pass the 10 million subscriber mark, it would be in many years, many generations of MMOs, many different evolutions of the genre," Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design (and one of TIME's People of the Year in 2006), told The Escapist.

With twelve million active subscribers around the globe - and a total subscriber count "easily more than double - maybe closer to triple" the current base, WoW smashed all previous records to become a dominant force in the industry. Though some point to WoW's prominence in the MMOG space as a stranglehold that makes it more difficult for newer games to succeed, Pardo disagrees - in fact, he thinks that WoW's success helps other games by introducing more people to the MMOG genre. People who would never have otherwise tried an MMOG beforehand picked up WoW, "(a)nd then when they were done, they decided to go, 'Hey, I'll give Lord of the Rings Online a chance, or Dungeons and Dragons Online a chance.' The genre benefited from the growing of the market."

On the other hand, anyone who tries to take the throne from WoW has "a huge hill to climb," because it would be up against a full decade of game design - the five years before Warcraft launched as well as the five years of post-launch development.

Of course, Pardo and Blizzard recognize that WoW won't last forever - which is why he isn't too worried that Blizzard's unannounced "next-gen MMOG" will cannibalize the WoW playerbase, leaving the company doing twice the work for the same amount of people. "Obviously, we want to compete with ourselves, and create something bigger than WoW ... We know that someone is going to beat WoW one day. Someone is going to make a bigger MMO, it's going to be faster and better."

"If someone's going to beat WoW, it might as well be us."

Of course, Pardo also recognizes that there might not have to be too much cannibalization, since many of the people currently playing WoW weren't the ones there when it first started. "There's a whole bunch of people who tuned out of WoW two years ago or four years ago, but who really enjoyed it, and when another MMO comes out that tickles their fancy, they'll jump into it."

Yes, despite the game's massive success, the developers are extremely aware that they've made mistakes, says Pardo. The lack of a proper Looking For Group tool was something he was "really unhappy" to not have at launch, and that tool is only now coming five years later in Patch 3.3. Aside from all of the technological errors like having too few servers at launch to keep up with the demand, Pardo thinks that the single greatest mistake as far as design of the game is concerned was the choice to introduce competitive "e-sports" into the game via Arenas.

"I'm not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game ... we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? ... I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I'd go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn't make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we're trying to figure out how to guide it."

Mistakes aside, though, Rob Pardo thinks that his team's biggest success is the game itself, and how they achieved their goal - to introduce the fun of high-end MMOG play to a wider audience - beyond all imagining. "[O]ur goal was to look at the genre, and we saw what was super fun about it ... 'Lets make a game where people can get to that fun, see it, and get invested in this wonderful genre instead of scoffing, and passing over it because it was an MMO.'"

"There were lots of little implementation details, but the idea was this: 'Let's just take this super fun genre that people don't know really exists, and expand it out so that everyone can enjoy that.' We set that goal and achieved it, and I'm most proud of that."

With massively successful PC MMO World of Warcraft celebrating its fifth anniversary, and the overarching Warcraft real-time strategy game series its 15th anniversary, there's plenty to talk about. Of course, Blizzard's series of games has always been beloved by gamers, but matching the success that WoW has found in the marketplace is a task that few franchises are up to.

It's difficult to remember at times, but Blizzard had humbler beginnings. To chart a course all the way back to the company's origins, back when it published console game titles for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, Gamasutra spoke to Samwise Didier, the senior director of StarCraft II and art director of the first three Warcraft games, and J. Allen Brack, production director for World of Warcraft.
In this in-depth interview, the two reflect on the company's history, the evolving style of the Warcraft series, the position the company finds itself in in the overarching Activision Blizzard culture, and even the future of geek culture in the mainstream -- with video games and fringe film now at the top of the cultural heap in many respects.

One of the things that's most interesting about Warcraft is that it is borne entirely out of games, not an external license, and now is an extremely successful setting that spans genres. How does it feel to have helped create such a huge property?

Sam Didier: It's actually kind of like watching your child grow. I've fathered many illegitimate children, Warcraft being one. You create this thing, and you have all kinds of great hopes for it, but you never really know how far it's going to go.

Warcraft started out as this small game. Not a lot of people knew about it, but the people who did were really into it. I took a lot of pride in that. And now that it's kind of grown into this gigantic, nation-wide, worldwide entity, it blows my mind that there are people out there who know more about this game than I do. They'll let me know when I'm incorrect. When I'm stating some fact about the Warrior class, they'll go, "Oh no, that got changed in this patch." "Oh. Okay."

It's really a cool feeling, though, to know that something that we created here as a bunch of dorky guys and girls could become something everybody knows about. When we first started making the games here, people would always ask us if we made Street Fighter or if we made Doom. And nowadays, when someone finds out that I work in the game industry, they go, "Oh, did you work on World of Warcraft?" I always say, "No, I didn't work on it," because otherwise I'd spend the next three or four hours arguing about how come we changed this spell or altered that class.

So, your answer hasn't changed, but your reasons have.

SD: Yeah. [laughs]

J. Allen Brack: For me, it's pretty humbling, honestly, to be part of something so huge. In terms of Blizzard games, I have only worked on World of Warcraft. I worked at other places before, but I was always a fan of the Warcraft series. I learned how to use a null modem cable for Warcraft 1.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

Same here. My friend and I used to play Warcraft 1 all the time via null modem.

JAB: Yeah, exactly. So, for me, it's been really a dream to be able to play the Warcraft games for so long, and then to work on World of Warcraft. It's very humbling and very much a dream job.

Sam, you've been at Blizzard since before Blizzard even moved into PC games, right?

SD: Yeah. The first games I worked on were like Lost Vikings and Rock 'N Roll Racing -- all of our Nintendo and Sega games.

So as someone who was involved in the art direction of Warcraft for its entire history, I'm curious how much intention you guys had behind the evolution of its tone. From the original game through Warcraft III, then WoW, there's been a big shift -- more exaggerated and stylized, for one thing. Were you consciously trying to distinguish it from its influences?

Sam Didier: The influences are pretty clear -- Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings. We're all big comic book fans. But the actual art style evolved more out of us being comfortable making our own games. When we first started with Warcraft on the PC, people said that nobody on the PC liked action games or anything like that. They were saying, "Oh no, the PC audience is older, and they like slow-paced games and more realism in the graphics and storylines."

So we started off with Warcraft being kind of tame. It was a little bit more like medieval Europe -- your classic castles and farm buildings and stuff like that. Once that games were a success, we kind of started putting a little bit more of our own flavor into it. Warcraft II had a lot more humorous elements.

I remember the Orcs got more defined in that respect.

SD: There was a lot more non-typical European kind of medieval chivalry-type stuff. That's when we started throwing in ogres and dwarves and goblins and elves. And as we progressed to the [Warcraft II] expansion and Warcraft III, we really started asking, "You know what? What do we want to do with this? How do we want this style to go? We've pushed the comic book look, the bolder colors, into it. What do you guys want to do?"

That's when we really started pushing the art style we wanted, because we knew that the first couple games were successful and that we had a fan base. Now we didn't have to hold our cards close. We could kind of just start doing the crazy things we wanted to do. Hero [units] were coming out and there were all sorts of other things like that, so we really got to flex our creative juices.

But we always had bulkier, heavily-proportioned guys, and the colors, I think, were more primary -- reds, blues, yellows, things like that. We didn't have too much dull gray and dull brown. It was a little more vibrant, I believe, from the beginning.

At that time, J, you were working at Origin, followed by Star Wars: Galaxies, right?

JAB: Yes.

Can you speak to how your experiences on those games led you to Blizzard, and what you've brought to World of Warcraft?

JAB: Definitely. I actually got into the game industry shortly before Warcraft 1 came out. It was one of the first big games that I remember playing.

Descent had come around at that time, and Doom II had come out around that time, and those were the three games we were playing. I had also played Dune II, the real-time strategy game Westwood made, and thought that was really great, so I was excited about the real-time strategy genre.

I started at Origin and worked on Wing Commander games, and eventually got to working on an online Wing Commander game with some people who had worked on Ultima Online.

We had them come over to be the online experts, and we had some people come over from the Wing Commander team to have the Wing Commander expertise, and the idea was we were going to make an online Privateer-style game. That was really exciting.

So this was after the EA acquisition.

JAB: Yes. The EA acquisition happened for Origin a lot sooner than people remember. EA purchased Origin in 1992. But that was the first time I ever really got into online games. I had been bigger into BBS games. But then Ultima Online came out. I played a good amount of that. I got into online games then, and I've worked on online games ever since. I was part of the startup for [Sony Online Entertainment's] Austin studio. We worked on a game that became Star Wars: Galaxies.

They're really an exciting type of game to work on. They have a lot of different problems to solve. I like solving problems. My job is very much solving problems, and online games seem to have more problems than most to be solved. [laughs] There are plenty of opportunities to feel like, "Hey, I did some good here."

Shipping an online game is a huge achievement, and you definitely learn a lot. I think that experience of game development as well as running the live game for Star Wars led to Blizzard being interested in me. I played World of Warcraft when it game out, and I loved the game. I was a big player before I even came to Blizzard.

Does it ever get frustrating to go such long periods of time between release? Blizzard has a reputation for taking its time, but there was about a decade or so where the company created several new franchises and released games and expansions on at least a fairly regular basis.

SD: No. To me, we've always taken our time making games. Back in the day, with Warcraft, it was a year to develop the game. Now it's multiple years. But a lot of it deals with how much we can actually put into the game. With the old Nintendo stuff, you only had so much space. The game was done when you were out of space. But now the game is done when we say it's done. We can put as much into it as we want.

It was nice back then being able to work and finish games and crank them out, but now it's like working on a giant masterpiece. Everything that we're making, we want to be as good as any of our other games, so we have to make sure that we put all the love and dedication into it.

You can't really rush that and expect it to be a super game, something that people will be playing for five years, that people will be playing for ten years. Whatever the drawbacks are for taking a long time, I think they're worth it. The longevity of the games is more important to me.

StarCraft II

And you're primarily working on StarCraft II now?

SD: Yeah. StarCraft is my main focus. I'll still, every once in a while, get asked to work on certain other things, but it's not really on World of Warcraft anymore. That team has got the ball rolling. Everything is awesome over there.

JAB: We look at Sam as kind of our grandfather consultant [laughs]. He comes in and helps out with very specific things or ideas or things like that to make sure we're staying true.

World of Warcraft is its own beast, but StarCraft II will be the first other game Blizzard has released during this console cycle. There aren't as many big high-budget tent-pole PC strategy releases this time around. Is that on the team's mind much?

SD: I'm sure the PR and marketing guys think about that more than I do. StarCraft's taken so long to make, and we also had to work on Warcraft III and [its expansion] The Frozen Throne in between the release of StarCraft [and StarCraft II], not to mention WoW and various other projects. I just don't really worry about when it's going to be released, or if it's been ten years from this and that.

We're working on games and having fun working on the games. It's usually marketing that's pushing with, "Well, you know, it's been so long since this game came out." We were like, "Well, we're currently working on Warcraft III. We can't work on StarCraft right now. How about when Warcraft III is done, we'll start on StarCraft II?" "Okay."

JAB: There are a lot of different ways to run your game business. Blizzard definitely has the philosophy of, "Make a game that the team is really excited about working on, and you're going to get a great product. If you have a great product, then it's going to do well." That's the way Blizzard has chosen to be successful.

Having been a company that, for almost all of its life, been a subsidiary of various larger companies, do you ever get the sense that that's something that your given parent company has to adjust for? Internal teams usually aren't given that flexibility. Do you think you're at a point now where you've just demonstrated it will pay off, and they'll leave you alone?

SD: Yeah, definitely. [Blizzard co-founders] Frank [Pearce] and Mike [Morhaime] like to say that they've had half a dozen different bosses over the last fifteen years or so, and that with each of them, they have to sit down and have the discussion: "This is our philosophy. This is what we want to do. This is how we want to do it. And this is the past success we've had following the model."

Like J. said, there are a lot of different ways you can be successful, but luckily, the various different companies that have owned Blizzard have respected that and seen Blizzard grow under their watch, as it were, time and time again.

I think a lot of it is definitely the history and the reputation. We have this legacy and we have this brand following and brand loyalty. That plays into it as well.

JAB: I think as long as we're releasing such awesome games, I think we don't have to [worry]. When we release a bad game, then I think we might have to be worried about more management from above, but we haven't.

As long as we have enough time to make a great game, it's been proven that that game is going to be played for longer than the number of years it took to develop.

The whole Blizzard philosophy is that the Blizzard brand is the most important thing. We want to make sure that no matter what game we ever release, that the player perspective is, "This has Blizzard on it. I don't need to know what's inside. I know it's going to be a great experience."

That's probably gotten a boost from World of Warcraft. There are a lot of people who never played a Blizzard game before that.

JAB: I would definitely agree. I think it's generated a lot of interest in other Warcraft games, and Diablo or StarCraft or other games Blizzard has worked on over the years. With WoW in particular being online, there are a lot of people where it was the first video game that they ever played, which is really mind-boggling.

How invested do you feel in the broader PC market? Blizzard's safety is probably not in question, but do you worry about a less vibrant PC ecosystem going forward?

SD: I don't see the PC market as being bad. I mean, we didn't have 12 million players ten years ago. Whatever the format, console or PC, I think if there is a good game, it's going to be played. We're working on PC because it's familiar to us and it's relatively easy and it's not changing formats every other year and there aren't three different versions. Console, we have to worry about [those things]. I think the PC is really a good market to target.

JAB: It's obviously because we've made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there's a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that's absolutely not the case. We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it's going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it's developed on the PC.

It's very similar with World of Warcraft. We developed the game for the PC. It's a very PC-centric control scheme and the way of playing the game is PC-centric. But we're a company of gamers. I have two consoles at home. Sam has consoles. We're a culture of gamers. We will definitely work on a console game at some point. I have no doubt about that. It's just [a matter of] what game. What makes the most sense?

Are you working on one now?

SD: About seven actually. [laughs] We've got StarCraft 17 in the works.

JAB: That's on the Xbox 870, right?

SD: Yeah.

JAB: And World of Lost Vikings. We announced that at Worldwide Invitational Paris a couple years ago.

That one didn't get much pickup in the press, for some reason.

JAB: Probably because it was French.

It's definitely the case though that the PC is changing. It's going in an even more heavily online direction, but in some cases that means away from the traditional core packaged goods business.

JAB: I think we agree with that. And I don't actually think that that's a bad thing. It's one of the strengths of the platform, right? With the introduction of broadband, with the near-infinite hard drive space that everyone has, with the huge amounts of memory, it makes sense that you would play to the platform strength.

So, yeah, PC gaming has definitely changed. Now, to be fair, I've been reading in various magazines and websites that they're very convinced for more than 10 years that PC gaming was dead.

Right.

JAB: And here we are still, increasing the number of Blizzard fans on PC.

SD: Or making zombies.

JAB: Let's talk about that. That's a good point.

SD: It's awesome.

JAB: But I think that, looking at the history, every two years there was the article saying, "This thing has happened on the console that's going to make PC gaming die." And then PC gaming always seems to figure out a way to reinvent itself -- either through MMOs or online games or other things that have a strong multiplayer component, or just the superior keyboard and mouse control scheme.

The way you were describing development, it sounds like you have one team that's largely RTS-focused, having gone from StarCraft to Warcraft III to StarCraft II.

SD: No, the way it started is the team that I'm on is called Team One, because it was the first team we had here. That team worked on the bulk of Nintendo and Sega games, then Warcraft, StarCraft, Warcraft III.

And we did have Blizzard North; that was our dedicated Diablo team. But when World of Warcraft was starting, some of the artists from [Team One] moved over to starting up that team, so the [World of Warcraft team] got founded as Team Two. Then the Diablo team is Team Three.

We also have about seventeen other teams that are working on super secret things that we can tell you about later if the price is right. [laughs]

But because we've worked on RTSes, it doesn't necessarily preclude us from working on anything else. It's just that after StarCraft, we wanted to hit up Warcraft again. And after Warcraft, we wanted to go back and see StarCraft.

I don't know what the calling will be after we finish StarCraft II, but by then it will be about 2020 [laughs]. So, we'll have to see how that goes.

Will there be a Warcraft IV?

SD: We haven't actually done any talking about it, but who knows? With the way Blizzard runs its studios, the team leadership is really in charge of what that team does.

And there's obviously a lot of input. We've got [creative director] Chris Metzen and [game design executive VP] Rob Pardo, who have a lot of opinions, and Frank Pearce, who has a lot of opinions about what we should be doing.

The bottom line really is that things that the team is excited about turn out great. So whenever StarCraft II is done, that team will start brainstorming about something they want to figure out and see what they get excited about, and that's probably what they will end up working on, because it takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of effort to make games. It's really the passion you have, the success that you want to receive from that product that really makes it an awesome experience.

Warcraft III

I've gotten the sense from various statements made by [Activision CEO] Bobby Kotick that he'd like to capitalize more on the PC in the future -- in part because of its lack of platform royalties and oversight by a platform holder -- but in general Activision is geared much more towards understanding the console market. With Blizzard now being part of the family, do you guys do any consulting along those lines for the parent company or other studios?

JAB: We do talk with other studios. Activision is a big company and has a lot of smaller studios underneath the Activision umbrella. We meet with guys from those studios from time to time. We met with the Infinity Ward guys. We met with the Guitar Hero folks. It's more an informal get-together than it is any kind of, "Let's chart the course for the PC for the next five years type of thing." It's more just organic things.

People from Blizzard have said when they started working on World of Warcraft, they were targeting subscriber counts of a few hundred thousand or so, because that was what had been previously demonstrated in MMOs. Why do you think Blizzard's success has been so uniquely massive in the traditional subscription-driven space?

SD: I can tell you that, dealing with dark powers, we've made allegiances with things that we probably shouldn't, but we don't talk about that. He who shall not be named has told me not to talk about it.

Really, it's kind of a stupid answer, but I think Warcraft is just an easy world to get into. Everybody knows some little bit of fantasy, whether it's from playing Dungeons & Dragons when they were kids, or reading Lord of the Rings. It's a pretty simple world to get into immediately. As far as the game itself, the reason why it's so popular is it's just a fun game. If the game sucked, no one would be playing it. It's just a fun game.

JAB: I think the archetypes for fantasy games are well known. Our generation has kind of grown up, as Sammy said, with D&D and Lord of the Rings. It's really weird as a kid to be the outcast.

SD: Outcast is a little cool and powerful. I'd say the dork, the geek.

JAB: Okay, to be surrounded by other geek guys who were looked upon with disdain. Being that guy as a kid, and then growing up, we've [seen] the rise of geek culture and the takeover of geek culture -- shows like Fringe and Heroes that could never have existed on TV just a few years ago. Movies like Dark Knight and Iron Man. Things that, years ago, would've bombed. The generation is starting to be itself and be part of the world. Here's a game that really resonates with a lot of people who had that experience.

You also now have generations growing up who, even if they don't have experience with those particular things, are born into a world where there have always been video games.

SD: We're making babies, and our babies will continue on in our legacy.

JAB: Yeah, I think that's the maturing of the game industry. The generation that is here now is the first gamer generation that was there from the beginning, that remembers a time when there were no video games.

Now they're in this epoch where there are video games. Life and culture have changed as a result of that. It's hugely significant. There's no one being born now into a world where video games didn't exist. For them, video games are just like TV. They're just like radio. They're just like movies. It's not a new or special thing. It's just another form of entertainment.

We're getting really philosophical here!