World of Warcraft: Retrospective

Making the Right Decisions

As was referred in part one of this feature - and looping back to my point about making your own luck - in this case the decision wasn't made by the business people, but by the developers. In this case the trust was well merited, and while it's tempting to suggest this should be a lesson for other companies, the development talent has to be strong enough in the first place to make those decisions.

"So we went down the road, and ended up thinking that the new franchise we were trying to develop was not the right one for the type of game we were trying to make," continues Sams. "We weren't getting the kind of enthusiasm and traction internally that we thought we would from creating that - so the team came back and said they wanted to do a restart, to approach it from a different perspective, and do it in the Warcraft universe.

"We said yes, that it sounded fine, and they went about doing it," he added.

Of course, just allowing a development team to work on a project is no guarantee of success, and as WoW's executive producer in the early years (and Blizzard's EVP of game design today) - Rob Pardo - admits, it wasn't as if they had a ready-made blueprint for a product, much as they may have looked at what others had been doing in the space.

The Ongoing Process

The biggest difference to products they'd worked on before - even with the Battle.net experience - was the persistent service mentality.

"I'd say for the most part we were pretty naïve about all that - we approached the game development of WoW in much the same way we approached development on our other games," he says. "But I also think that was a strength, because a lot of MMOs at the time really approached it from the community side first, rather than the game side first. When we started developing WoW, we looked at it as a game like any other, except that it was multiplayer only - and we had a lot of experience doing multiplayer games previous to that.

"Obviously it was a client-server game, and we hadn't done one of those before, so there were some differences on the general philosophy side, but as far as game development philosophy I think we approached it in the same way as previous games."

And while many of the aspects of what was released may have been new, the instinct for balancing classes and professions from the Warcraft and StarCraft days was invaluable.

"Absolutely. I definitely think that because we had so much experience with doing multiplayer balance and game mechanics, that really gave us a leg-up when we started doing WoW. We really knew how important that was.

"There were a few studios out there that made the multiplayer last, at the end of the project, and they really don't have the time to developout gameplay mechanics or do all the tuning that's necessary for a game to last 500-plus hours.

"Just our general philosophy to how we approach multiplayer really helped us in developing WoW - certainly the approach we took to game balance, tuning the game in general and pacing were all things that carried over to World of Warcraft."