The making of the World of Warcraft
by Mike Schramm 
Aug 11th 2009 at 7:00PM
Eurogamer has a nice long look at the early days of World of Warcraft, way before Northrend and Outland and even Molten Core, back when the question wasn't just how big the game would get, but whether Blizzard, a company known for their polish rather than their size, could pull off an entry in this new MMO genre. They've interviewed some of Blizzard's luminaries, and the piece offers a really good look at what it was like at Blizzard even before WoW's release, when they were hashing out some of the ideas and mechanics that have now set the bar with World of Warcraft: the stylistic Warcraft look, and questing as storytelling (originally, they thought they'd only do quests through the starting levels, and then have the game move to a grinding, monster-killing stage towards the end, but players said the game was boring without quests).There are all kinds of great little tidbits in here: originally, Warcraft III was planned with the over-the-shoulder look that WoW now has, and that's one of the reasons they wanted to create a more straightforward RPG game. Tom Chilton showed up on the team about a year before WoW's release, and to his surprise, the game was almost completely unfinished -- the level cap was only 15, the talent system wasn't implemented, the AH or mail systems weren't in, PvP wasn't in at all (of course, even at release it was pretty barebones), and endgame raiding was nonexistent. Most of the things we think of as intrinsic to the World of Warcraft -- even things like the Horde and Alliance not speaking to each other -- were debated and almost not in at all as they moved towards release.
And this is only the first part of a larger series, so we'll look for part two next week. Great read, and very interesting to see that the developer team on this game is as times as split up and unorganized as their forums. Even before we started QQing and arguing about gameplay and how it should be done, they were fighting the same fights right up until release.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Instances, Raiding, Interviews
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
pietrex Aug 11th 2009 7:08PM
This is quite related to this article, so I'll ask it: will we see more of The Patches of Yesteryear column?
Rai Aug 11th 2009 7:24PM
I hope so.
Adam Holisky Aug 11th 2009 7:28PM
Yes, it's returning this week. In hind sight I shouldn't have started it while a patch was out, but it'll be back tomorrow or Thursday, so all is good. =)
Viper007Bond Aug 11th 2009 7:35PM
Agreed. I started about a month before 2.0, so I'd love to see some more of the early UI's and such. :)
tonedeff Aug 11th 2009 7:38PM
Patches of Yesterday is a great column. Cant wait to see more of that. Nice to see what the game was like long before i joined it
Rotclaw Aug 12th 2009 12:13AM
I agree - this just made me want to see the Yesteryear column even more. Can't wait to see another!
Steven Aug 11th 2009 7:11PM
It's like they were reading my mind. What I would like to know, however, is more about the technical aspects of WoW. How exactly does WoW work? Did Blizz create it's own programming language, or is it a more mainstream language?
I'm totally clueless, but it has been on my mind for a long while now.
Rollo Aug 12th 2009 9:31AM
It's all ones and zeros. :-)
Seraphos Aug 12th 2009 10:46AM
I think I heard somewhere that its mostly C++, but with added LUA scripting.
Karilyn Aug 11th 2009 7:25PM
-- even things like the Horde and Alliance not speaking to each other --
I still think ultimately, this was a mistake. Restrict a server so that players can only communicate with half the people on the server, YET ALSO experience all the lag that comes from sharing the server with those people they are incapable of playing with.
It is a bad design, that is part of what contributes to the ungodly lag in WoW... Made even worse now that Blizzard decided to have both factions share a single city in BC and WotLK (and probably Cataclysm too)
MusedMoose Aug 11th 2009 7:55PM
Wait... How are is not being able to talk to other people on your server at all connected to lag? Those other players would be there, and the lag would be there, whether you could talk to them or not.
Falcon6 Aug 11th 2009 8:01PM
The underlining problem is that this is the World of Warcraft, not the World of Peace. If there wasn't people to have tension with, it wouldn't be a world at war.
Having people choose sides, then restrict them to that side isn't exactly bad design. I'd love to be able to talk with the Alliance on my Horde character and vice versia, but ultimately, it won't go down simply because the world needs tension, and talking it out with the other faction would cause...well, peace.
It's not bad design. It's how the World of Warcraft should work.
Bonksy Aug 11th 2009 8:03PM
Yep, if you removed the Horde, the Alliance would just fill the space, and become twice as big. ...
But really, like it says in the article, the split unites players of each faction, giving them identity, partnership, and a goal; kill the bad guys.
Karilyn Aug 11th 2009 8:30PM
"Wait... How are is not being able to talk to other people on your server at all connected to lag? Those other players would be there, and the lag would be there, whether you could talk to them or not."
You need twice as many people per server in order to create the necessary support network for the server.
You need enough players to support a Horde economy and raiding, and enough players to support an Alliance economy and raiding...
The saddest part, is way too many servers don't even manage to get enough for one side, and sometimes either side to have a functioning community. What percentage of servers NEVER manage to clear high end raiding content? That's not a good thing.
Arturis Aug 11th 2009 10:10PM
When I first started playing, the Undead still spoke Common, just like the Alliance members - meaning that the Undead would taunt the alliance players mercilessly during PvP and act as a go between (or negotiator) between the two sides. Later it was changed so that they spoke Gutterspeak instead, but in some ways I kind of preferred the original language setup better.
Not that I like being mocked during PvP, mind you. ^_^
Worcester Aug 11th 2009 10:49PM
When servers become horribly out of balance, Blizzard allows for free transfers to keep populations in check. It's worked just fine.
As other posters have said, in this game the world is at war. At the very least, the world is in a cold war... a state tension. The language barrier helps to create that tension. You don't know for sure what the motives of the opposing faction are up to. It creates mistrust and skepticism. You don't have to act on it, of course, but it's definitely there.
The sense of danger is what's appealing about WoW. Sure, there are monsters that could kill you... but they stop following you after a while and they never camp you. They have one or two abilities and are completely predictable. Enemy players, on the other hand, never cease to surprise me.
Fear of the unknown. It's pretty powerful.
Deadlock Aug 12th 2009 3:38AM
I have to agree with Karilyn, if the only interaction with the opposite side is mindlessly ganking each other, what's the point in being on the same server? 95% of world PvP consists of a high level guy griefing a low level who has no chance of beating him. I moved to play on a PvE server once I realise this, so now the only interaction I have is the occasional /wave or seeing horde griefing the quest NPCs or FPs.
If the server was all the same faction, it would be twice as easy to find groups for instances and raiding. If I want PvP, I can go do battlegrounds or arenas where I can actually fight people my own level.
If the two sides could talk that would also be a huge improvement for RP servers, where the roleplay might branch out beyond sitting in ye olde tavern and discussing the weather.
Irem Aug 12th 2009 7:44AM
I'd love to see interfaction communication happen just from an RP perspective, but I know a lot of people don't RP and are just as happy not hearing the sweet nothings Xxarthasxx wants to murmur to them as he dances and jumps up and down repeatedly on their corpse after ganking their level 30 (not that our own factions are any better, usually). It'd be awesome if they'd implement some kind of long quest chain/rep grind that would allow people to speak and understand a neutral language. That'd let people take the risk of being annoyed if they wanted to, and it'd probably be enough of a hurdle that every complete idiot wanting to talk smack to the enemy faction wouldn't jump it.
Irem Aug 12th 2009 8:07AM
And because I forgot to add this before hitting post: it's true that on a PvE server I can go days without seeing a member of the Alliance if I really want to. If I'm not in Dalaran and they're not attacking a city, they might as well not exist. That doesn't really help create a sense of tension or anything, since when I see an Ally out in the field I pretty much know what they're there for--they want to quest, or mine, or navel-gaze, and they know I'm there to do the same thing, and we have zero impact on each other unless she's on the node I wanted in which case oh well, there are other saronite deposits in the world.
I think being able to talk to each other would actually put a new coat of paint on it, because now the other person isn't just there, she's potentially a friend and potentially an enemy. Talking can actually help increase tension...after all, being able to communicate doesn't automatically fix things in the real world, and we see how well it's worked out for the NPCs (the current Horde/Alliance kerfluffle came to a boil at a summit meeting, for instance).
AutumnBringer Aug 12th 2009 10:29AM
I remember reading way back on the Blizzard forums a post by the then CM Caydiem (I told you it was a while back) that one of the main reasons they removed interfaction communication was due to the overwhelming amount of nastiness that was consistently going on between the Alliance and Horde. They felt that it made the environment less enjoyable or something.
Sorry, I don't have a link for that, so you'll just have to take my word as some random stranger on the Internet unfortunately, but hopefully someone else has a link for it ... somewhere :)