"Let There Be Gnomes." And There Were Gnomes.

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 48 Comments

Eurogamer has an interesting piece interviewing Blizzard on the making of World of Warcraft.

Blizzard would soon learn that playing and talking about EverQuest was a world away from actually building its own MMO.

“We knew that it was a mammoth undertaking, but I think, at the time, we had no clue just how big and complex something like this would be,” Metzen says now. “Perhaps it was a little bit of naiveté – ‘oh yeah, we can bang out one of those, no big deal’ – and certainly as we got into it, we would learn that these things are just… very, very complex in their scope.”

Oh, and this bit from Tom Chilton:

“If we wanted to have a PvP game, we would want it to be team-based – in a lot of ways, it was like Dark Age of Camelot had done. I was on board with the idea, because I felt like that was one of the advantages that DAOC had over Ultima Online, which I’d worked on.

“DAOC had pre-determined teams, you were either Albion or Hibernia or, er, the other one.”

john_stewart_facepalm.jpg
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  • Ark

    The last comment contrasts nicely with the Midgard statement you made regarding your time in DAOC, from the previously linked interview :) Too funny.

  • ahoythematey

    So complex in fact that they still haven’t fixed their problems with instance server load. (Yes, I’m bitter.)

    I’m surprised they remembered Hibernia but not Midgard. In fact, the whole bit on teams and Ultima Online felt like a load of crap.

  • Mark

    Wait, I know, MidGuard!

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    I think it’s interesting that both Blizzard and SquareEnix have tried their hands at making an MMORPG, and both turned out a product that competed extraordinarily well with the niche they sought to capture. Blizzard – a streamlined, very casual-friendly EverQuest. SquareEnix – a deeper, better-looking EverQuest.

    I came away from that with at least one good observation: that, while the social dynamics of MMORPGs are a major concern, they’re still just games in which being able to craft a good one is the primary skill you need.

  • http://lost-war.com Mist

    I really want to raid his office and yell FOR MIDGARD in his face.

    I mean, seriously, how can you forget the most overpowered realm?

  • Ingmar

    That’s pretty much how it worked on my server. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most overpowered realm if you have 3 guys and a bot as your entire relic defense force.

  • Mortarion

    He must’ve been temporarily concussed by Thane AOE Hammers of Doom and thereby forgotten Midgard.

    They are quite impressive, you know.

  • Ingmar

    <3 <3 my hammers <3 <3

  • DJ Larkin

    I LOLed at the /facepalm pic.

  • Halibut Barn

    Wow, what surprised me was just how much of the game they admitted was still completely missing only a year before release.

  • tannenburg

    Snowy…land…no…Vikingplace…no…wait, don’t tell me, it’s on the tip of my tongue…

  • http://www.cesspit.net Abalieno

    Blizzard digs a hole, everyone jumps in.

  • http://tholal.blogspot.com Tholal

    Wait a second… WoW’s a PvP game?!? When did that happen?

  • Calelari

    Ah, I well remember Stungard and the Hammers of Lag.

  • Jeff

    Wow. How do you forget the one DAoC faction favored by the Mythic Powers that Be.

    I was a Hibby, we didn’t even have itemized dungeons at launch.

    Of COURSE you already know that Midgard did. Damn Mids.

  • Sullee

    lol at the facepalm.

    Blizz talking pvp is like watching a TO interview; you cringe but can’t look away as you know they are going to demonstrate how stupid they are.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Children by the millions facepalm for Tom Chilton.

  • Iconic

    “Wait a second… WoW’s a PvP game?!? When did that happen?”

    When they were making fundamental game design decisions, like the inclusion of the Global Cooldown, and dividing players into two sides?

    It should be pretty obvious to any one who was playing MMOs at the time that WoW launched that the game was intended from day one to be a hybrid of PvP and PvE.

  • http://syncaine.wordpress.com Syncaine

    PvP is a ‘core’ feature of WoW, and one they will return to focus on ‘soon’, remember?

    While they have mastered the art of crafting kindergarten Simon Says, interesting PvP is something that has yet to be seen in WoW.

  • Jeff

    Do you guys actually PLAY the game???

    The HUGE problem of “unable to launch instances at this time” along with the resurgence of heroics for badges has ignited world PvP. Masses of horde and Alliance waiting to get into the same heroics end up in large scale battles. The instance thing has been really frustrating but the battles have been fun,

  • Baroo

    The HUGE problem of “unable to launch instances at this time”…

    I’m surprised by how little commentary there is on this subject… or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. But it’s a pretty crippling problem for those of us still dabbling in WoW. And one that in WoW’s prime would have had the masses sharpening their pitchforks, and heating up the oil.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    The trouble with pegging WoW’s instance problem as a fault of the game is that the instance problem is caused by overwhelming popularity of the game at large. Like any other effective machine, there reaches a certain point in which the load has to balance, a link of the chain will always exist which bears the most strain, and it so happens that instancing is WoW’s. The moment you fix the weakest part of it, the stronger the whole machine becomes, but some other part will now be the most strained.

  • Drey

    @geldonyetich: +1

  • Doug

    That says so much. In DAOC, in the beginning, the newbs clicked the cup (omg good guys!) the role players picked hibernia (OMG! ELF!) and only the hard core picked Midgard as it was the toughest to level and the lowest population.

    Of course later on everyone found out Midgard was made to crush the spines of its enemies, and it could not be stopped, but until then it was a nice reward for the few who leveled there.

    This means Blizzard was staffed by newbs and RPers… which explains WOW nicely.

  • Freakazoid

    Everyone likes to think that, because their side was smaller, that their side was better. More often, it is what losers console themselves with in the face of more numerous opposition. They make up reasons to continue playing the loser. “We’re more mature”, “Zerging takes no skill”, and so on.

    I am suprised he forgot midgard, though. When it came to population vs effective group makeups, midgard was right in the middle. Albion had more population but less effective group makeups, while hibernia had the lowest population but the most effective group makeups. At least that’s how it was during the shoruded isles era (best era).

  • Tremayne

    Back in the day we said that “kiddies go to Albion, powergamers go to Midgard and hippies go to Hibernia”. Seemed true enough on my server – Alb had the disorganised hordes, Midgard had the Achiever-type rapid levellers and on Hibernia, well, half of my realm-mates were too stoned to make it to relic defence :)

  • Sullee

    @Geldon

    Except that is all a load of crap.

    Justifying their problems as a result of too much success is such a gross simplification as to approach fanboyism. Blizz has been harping that tune since they launched and didn’t have office space to staff appropriately. It was old and weaksauce spin then and it has gotten more pathetic as the game has aged.

    Simply put staying within the technical capabilities of their servers is a design issue that they have failed at. This can easily be seen with PvP which everyone who played at launch knows that blizz cannot support at large scale; they actually made design changes to discourage large scale world pvp, city raids, etc. Except with WG they tried and oops, still failed.. seemingly not just because of bad design but also because of poor testing.

    Sorry, you don’t get to throw up your hands and say ‘too many people’.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    @Sullee
    Two sides of the same coin.

    Things break. Designs fail. Hardware limitations intercede. You either learn to cope with that, or you’re basically just being the pushy customer who demands perfection, and cheap.

  • Dave G.

    Ahh, I remember my beloved patch 1.62B, which finally turned berserkers from unstoppable killdozers, capable of mowing down entire groups by themselves with a few buffs, into something approaching sanity. The wailing and the tears of all the overpowered kiddies in midguard crying that the world was ending were sweet, so so sweet. And yes, I know I mispelled midguard. Think of it as disrespect.

    Anyway, the whole instance issue is something which turns me off MMOs these days. EQ did without instances for a very long time. DAoC did without instances at least until I left in 2004. UO had no instances. I know the subscription numbers were nothing like WoWs, I just think it’s crappy that you’re advertising this massive freaking world, yet large chunks of content are locked away in little sandboxes. It seems like an inadequate kludge to me.

    PVP was clearly a selling point for WoW on release. Then they figured out that they couldn’t actually support the kinds of PvP people wanted… massive zergs. So they had to try and scale it back with instances which, again, seem inadequate. You have this massive world, it shouldn’t have to be artificially sandboxed to enjoy.

    Meh. Call of Duty 4 is all the PvP I need.

  • http://www.muckbeast.com Muckbeast

    Perhaps if Blizzard spent more than 5% of their revenues on the game, they wouldn’t have these problems.

    After 4-5 years, Blizzard bragged at a stockholders meeting that they had only spent $200 million to maintain, staff, and continue development on WoW. That is less than $50 million a year, and they bring in over $1 billion a year in revenue.

    So yeah, no excuses.

  • Sullee

    @geldon

    No. It isn’t two sides of the same coin.

    This isn’t a semantics issue It isn’t about customer perception or the cost of the service or about perfection. That’s all more crap.

    Flat out blizzard’s success does not excuse their mistakes and design failures. Fanboys with a simplistic understanding can try to rationalize things like their current instance server issues with an arguement like you have which magically exonerates blizz from all culpability. It doesn’t wash though.

    Blizz should be perfectly capable of controlling server populations, of adding more when needed, of anticipating demand based on past metrics, of testing and limiting designs that will cause issues, etc. In general their server architecture scales, period. More people doesn’t break anything and if it does then you better believe that is the #1 issue as getting more people to play is the bottom-line goal.

    Is it the end of the world if it doesn’t work? Of course not. However whitewashing this and other issues with the whole (paraphrasing here) ‘it’s caused by their success’ is fucking stupid. If anything blizz’s success and experience should mean they are a little better at dealing with these issues and should not be caught on the reactionary side of things so often. This isn’t a small startup with launch issues… the whole spin that they used back then doesn’t fly. Bad design is just that and industry professionals and companies shouldn’t be brazenly soaking in it like they are made of teflon.

  • CooltoHate

    @Baroo – by subscriber numbers, wow is still in it’s prime. @ the lolpvp crowd, wow’s pvp is rather easy to be bad at (that would be you, who claim it’s not intricate or whatever) and takes actual skill to be good at… Try again when you’re not so fail.

  • Vetarnias

    @CooltoHate

    Hmm, could you be a specimen of the WoW fanboy? By subscriber numbers, a lot of things might be “in their prime” but it does not make them good (you know, like McDonald’s?).

    And by all means, let’s have this inevitable reasoning of “if you find the PvP bad, you must suck at it”. I, my good sir, had the misfortune of playing WoW on a PvP server. I never went into one of those instances because it’s instances, but I was subjected to PvP often on the main world. And that PvP was awful because it was just the usual level-based and gear-based nonsense that permeated every aspect of World of Warcraft, meaning there was nothing to do when a bored level-80 staked out the Yeti Cave and could one-shot me when I just wanted to do the quests I sucked at PvP.

  • Gx1080

    Lessons learned:

    *Listen to your testers in everything, not only bugs.
    *Get a “Vision” that you know that will sell and STICK to it.
    *If you got to cut features to make the rest of the game good, do it.
    *A big priority its making the engine capable to handle smoothly the game.
    *Being the 900-pounds gorilla corupts (ok, thats an old one).

    Oh well, back to my vacation.

  • CooltoHate

    @Vetarnias, your reasoning behind saying pvp was awful is because you rolled on a server with a ruleset that you didn’t like? And out of some … moral imperative? … you refused to go into instances (battlegrounds?) that would place you on more equal ground? No no, you’re right, it really is a huge flaw of the game that my level 10 wtfbbq can’t beat that level 80 bbqwtf. Try out the arenas and then tell me that pvp in wow isn’t dynamic, intricate, or requires no skill. If you’re looking for a pvp game where you can hop in on day 1 and find something like that, you’re right, WoW sucks for that purpose. Stop using a hammer for your screw.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    @Sullee
    I’m hardly a World of Warcraft fan. I consider it streamlined EverQuest, which washes poorly with my moore Hardcore focus. I didn’t play the game longer than 4 weeks.

    However, I don’t consider it at all a stretch to say that an instance limitation placed in the game because an excessive amount of players are overwhelming their instance design architecture is caused by their success.

    Should people drowning in money be able to fix every problem that comes their way? On the surface, yes. However, in all aspects of design, one law you can count on is this: the devil is in the details.

    I have a very simple solution. If the game’s instancing problems are so pressing that it destroys your enjoyment of the game, seek out another game and play it instead. As long as you’re still paying them as much as ever, what indication do they really have that their money-printing machine is in any way inferior?

  • Ingmar

    Having to spend a minute trying to spawn an instance is “crippling”?

    Really?

  • Alarik

    A minute?

    I’ve seen people try for more than half an hour without getting in some nights, although that is thankfully rare on my server.

    I know I’ve had some nights where I ended up not running anything because half the group got sicking of waiting before we actually got an instance to come up.

  • Baroo

    @Ingmar – Not the case on busy servers and it’s instance-dependant. WotLK instances are given higher priority and thus have shorter wait times. But it is borderline impossible to get into an old world instance on high pop servers between the hours of 10am – 2am… they literally may as well not even exist.

  • Ingmar

    I play on Doomhammer, which is one of the highest population servers, release day server, etc. Even during prime time I’ve never seen it take more than a minute or two to give me an instance.

    Thinking about it though I haven’t tried an old-world instance, though.

  • Viz

    @Sullee
    If their server architecture scaled period, wouldn’t the logical solution be to not have realms at all, just lump everyone into a massive database, and let them join whatever server they want when they log in?

    It’s almost certainly true that Blizz could be doing more to solve the problems, but I doubt it’s as simple as you’re making it out to be… especially given the industry track record with regards to server stability around launch and patch times.

  • Iconic

    “Hmm, could you be a specimen of the WoW fanboy? By subscriber numbers, a lot of things might be “in their prime” but it does not make them good (you know, like McDonald’s?).”

    I wager that you’ll probably eat more meals at McDonald’s in your lifetime than you will at any other restaurant or restaurant chain. There’s a reason for that, which isn’t “because it’s bad.”

    You might not feel that the quality of the food is the best, but the quality of the business is very high.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    You might not feel that the quality of the food is the best, but the quality quantity of the business is very high.

    Fixed that for you. ;)

  • Vetarnias

    McDonald’s is cheap, convenient, omnipresent, and gastronomically tolerable. However, the food is utritionally suspect, the company treats its employees like dirt, its advertising is the zenith of annoyance (or should that be the nadir?), and it has become a metaphor, along with Coca-Cola, for all that is wrong with American hegemony.

    And for the record, there’s a small restaurant close to where I live which has cheap prices, great food and a varied menu. If I want to eat out, it’s usually where I go, not McDonald’s.

  • -gold seller link deleted-

    I’ve read that article on Eurogamer and I did feel that extent of anticipation when WoW was about to come out on September 2001. And now, I’m not sure if I have the same feeling on the release of Aion: Tower of Eternity which is said to be next to WoW or possible WoW-killer. Do you?

  • Vetarnias

    I will just say this: If you’re not a shill for Aion, you certainly have the most unusual user name. And for the record, all I’m hearing about Aion is how “Asian” it is; that’s usually a red flag when it comes to gamers in the West. Won’t kill WoW, not by a long shot; only Blizzard can kill WoW now, intentionally or not.

  • Gx1080

    Quick question: Unlike EA/Mythic, when the NCSoft guys said that they will kill WoW? The only ones saying that are the fanboys.

  • Viz

    And yet, in spite of all those horrible things they do, millions of people eat there every day. In fact, Europeans, who claim to find all this American “imperialism” so pig-disgusting, seem to be much more enthusiastic about eating at McDonald’s than Americans are. Furthermore, employee treatment may suck by US standards (because working at McDonald’s is a shitty job by US standards) but it’s pretty good by the standards of many other countries that McDonald’s operates in (because it’s a pretty good job by those countries’ standards). See how that works?