Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsAlex Afrasiabi on Cataclysm and the origin of phasing
by Mike Schramm 
Sep 25th 2009 at 11:00AM
And boy are they doing it. As we knew, Desolace and Azshara are getting revamped completely, while Feralas is in for some questing changes and zones like Loch Modan are seeing some "light" modification. Blizzard apparently looked at each zone and determined where it lay on the list of todos: Azshara is becoming the 10-20 Horde zone and so will get reworked extensively, but Silithus, while it may need work, probably won't get more than a few tweaks.
Afrasiabi also talks about the surprising origin of phasing and Blizzard's philosophy. More after the break.
Get this -- phasing, the revolutionary technology that allows Blizzard to make a more transitive MMO than ever, started out as one of those 180,000 bugs. After a programmer came up with a way to fix a bug in Blade's Edge that allowed different people to see different things happening in the world, they later decided to use that bugfix as the foundation for the death knight starting area, largely considered one of the best experiences in the game.
Afrasiabi says that Blizzard does know what they're doing (he specifically says they aren't making it up as they go along, forum trolls take note), but from what he describes, it does seem like the process is very organic -- one idea is had, and then it's used in other places and other ways until they've developed something that seems completely different. Blizzard has been criticized in the past for some of their design ideas (the work they do, just in terms of an art and gameplay sense, does tend to borrow a lot from what's come before it), but Afrasiabi does the right thing in the end: he lets the work talk for itself. Blizzard may have borrowed the MMO form from a lot of different places, but no one can argue that what they've done with it hasn't turned out to be extremely impressive.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Instances, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
ikandiman Sep 25th 2009 11:54AM
Log flume ride to Menethil!
maximuz1 Sep 25th 2009 12:05PM
The only thing I dislike about phasing is that it'z sometimes hard to find a guildee to help you with certain group quests. I went to do The Rider of The Unholy and the person who was going to do the healing couldn't see me. He tried just clicking on my portrait to do heals but that didn't work either. I sort of understand phasing in the DK zone, but having it in the endgame areas ... sucks.
Adamanthis Sep 25th 2009 1:04PM
It seems to me that the simple fix for that is to have grouped players by default all see the "earliest" phase of any group member. Players who have unlocked a later phaze could have an option to switch over to it in the right-click-portrait menu.
Earlgrey Sep 25th 2009 12:05PM
To understand what the mean about phasing I think you need to consider the server setup. In death you can see others who are dead, but you can't interact with them. You see living players and npcs when near your corpse, but you don't interact with them either. That can all be done on the client side. Same with a rogue, as that is a single character, so the rogue "broadcasts stealth" or however they might describe it and your client side hides them from view unless they are in proximity to you.
Phasing is a bit more complex because it has to allow for interaction with other players that are similarly phased, while hiding the npcs and players that are not phased with you. At the server level I bet it is considerably more complicated. I think the example in Blade's Edge might have been the first time that was the case, where you saw other players in there with you, and you could interact with them, while those out of phase were untouchable and invisible.
Heaven knows I got smacked around by jerks who were phased in there with me. PvP was pretty rampant while doing those dailies.
mibluvr13 Sep 25th 2009 12:15PM
I'm very upset. I thought this article was going to be about ice cream.
How 'bout adding a new flavor, huh? It's been five years. >=(
Broadcloak Sep 25th 2009 12:49PM
"The cataclysm starts out with rumbles..."
Could this be an inadvertant hint to the pre-launch in-game events.
I'm thinking random ground tremors knocking players over and zone-wide announcements.
Omicron Sep 25th 2009 12:52PM
Considering LotRO launched with very heavy phasing (down to single-player outdoor 'instances' for certain quests) before TBC was released with merely the tiniest bits of phasing present, I don't exactly buy the story of "yeah we invented that by chance".
Hoggersbud Sep 25th 2009 2:08PM
That's not phasing, that's having instances. Which in regards to newbie zones was done in Anarchy Online and probably a dozen others before LOTRO.
Not quite the same.
Isle Sep 25th 2009 1:11PM
Interesting. Not to disagree about where "phasing" came from but I believe it was in the game LONG before Blade's Edge even existed.
Example:
When you die, your spirit run back to your corpse is "phased", you dont see other mobs or players until you are close to your corpse.
Also, as part of the Linken quest in Vanilla (wut's dat?) you had to "die" and could only see a quest giver if you were phased.
This programmer may have figured out a better use for phasing but its been in the game for a while.
Isle Sep 25th 2009 1:14PM
Bah, beaten. (Well not really, cuz I was interrupted while typing at work)
Zarzuur Sep 25th 2009 1:30PM
@earlgrey
Yes I remember too, it was that reason - the bug they fixed in the Mana Cell daily, was to stop people AOEing in one phase from affecting people in the other phase.
Direct damage spells would not be bugged because the invisible targets were not selectable anyway. Whereas AoE targets are auto-selected. So they probably had to put in an extra variable to denote the phase on the server side.
Presumably all the previous change-of-views were done only by the client? This would explain in the death view why you can still see mobs near to your corpse - all the local NPC info is being transmitted, and you are not really split like in phases now.
Lee Weaver Sep 25th 2009 7:05PM
Phasing is horrible get rid of it. and as for " the death knight starting area, largely considered one of the best experiences in the game." I call B.S. That is the most horrible grind fest in the game. I say start DK's at lvl 1 and it might make them actually enjoyable.
Without that you get all this power and have no clue how to use it. kind of like Buying a 55.
But Phasing isn't Bliz's bigest blunder. no that honor goes to mounted combat. nothing like taking a reasonablely good RPG and truning it into a half brained arcade game.
Omicron Sep 25th 2009 5:24PM
Having played LotRO myself for a while (before quitting due to welp, no friends joining me), I can safely say that there's a lot more than just instances going on there, and not just in newbie zones.
Picviewer Sep 26th 2009 1:00AM
Phasing revolutionary? You mean the act of the server sending player A one chunk of terrain/poly data to render while sending player B a different chunk of terrain/poly data is revolutionary? x,y,z is all the same to both players in a chunk of server code, just depends upon x1,y1,z1 comparing to x2,y2,z2. Really the data is all the same sitting there in your buffers just depending upon the response from the server for what bytes to use at a particular point based on a prior event. Break it down even more it's the same as a web server sending user A a chunk of data and ads based on their ip compared to user B the same data but a new set of ads for their ip.
Wubble69 Sep 26th 2009 6:53AM
I guess it needs to be pointed out that all quests in "phased progression areas" are specifically designed to be soloable.
Nobody should "need" assistance from an outside party to do any of these quests.
Sure you may have someone at the same stage of the phasing as you and you can help them out but nobody should "NEED" assistance.
Anybody who has got a character to 55 and unlocked the ability to roll a death knight shouldn't have the slightest "need" to group with anyone in the Death Knight start zone.
Helping someone do these quest is very admirable but these zones are not choke points whereby the player will stall. They are if anything "rights of passage"
For example I hate Wrathgate. It's a terribly long and boring right of passage I have forced upon me. Waiting for 5 mins for people to show up then a long period of whacking shit even thou I cannot die.
But it's 100% perfectly soloable and important to see at least once. Twice ... not so much.