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Making WoW - Learning from the Mistakes of Nomad, AMA with Author John Staats
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Criado
18/12/2019 em 14:10
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perculia
Last year, John Staats published The WoW Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of vanilla Warcraft. With Classic WoW now launched, we thought it was the perfect time to check back in with Staats and highlight the book again!
We're excited to announce that every week or so, we'll be publishing an essay about vanilla WoW by John Staats. This week's essay is
A Dozen or so Developers
, discussing how the development team learned from the failure of their previous project,
Nomad
, and who was the first to call WoW
World of Warcraft
.
If you find this essay interesting, consider purchasing The WoW Diary on Amazon:
WoW Diary Book on Amazon - $39.99
Special Boxed Edition on Amazon - $149.99
Have any questions on the essay or vanilla WoW development in general? He'll be checking out the comments section and answering them, so you may learn something new!
A million years ago, I designed and built half of the dungeons in vanilla WoW. If you have any questions about making the game, I’m happy to answer, here on Wowhead. - John Staats
The
Ultima Online
(UO) fans on Team 1 had talked about making an MMO since
StarCraft
’s development cycle. UO had also served as the initial inspiration for Team 2’s formation to work on a persistent, massively multiplayer, squad-based tactical combat game called
Nomad
. Players were able to adventure and equip their troops to fight one another as well as AI opponents. Since Team 2 comprised only programmers and artists, their philosophy toward design was democratic. Too democratic. Because there was no one formally in charge of game design, a direction never solidified and development meandered while people brainstormed unconnected ideas. The team’s attention was continually torn between
Nomad
and other games people wanted to make. Nomad’s lack of design leadership drove the project through so many conflicting gameplay compromises that it turned into something that made no one happy. There was such a lack of cohesion at the end of its first year that everyone on the team agreed
Nomad
was a disaster. Attempts were made to save it over the next six months by taking alternative directions, but nothing seemed to work.
When
EverQuest
(EQ) became all the rage, both Team 1 and Team 2 wanted to toss their hats into the MMO ring. Team 1 was bogged down with early versions of
Warcraft III
(which were all eventually scrapped), leaving only Team 2 available to make a pitch. With encouragement from Bill Petras, the lead animator, Kevin Beardslee, put together a presentation for the company’s manager meeting, in which top-level decisions were made regarding projects. Kevin was experienced and design-savvy enough to encapsulate what Team 2 wanted to make—a Warcraft version of
EverQuest
. Kevin envisioned Quake-style WASD keyboard controls, instanced dungeons, and clear quest indicators to make the MMO experience attractive to casual players. The idea of actually playing Warcraft heroes, at ground level, sounded like a slam-dunk. The lead for
Nomad
at the time was Jeff Strain, who presented Kevin’s deck to Blizzard’s CEO, Mike Morhaime, and the other executives. In the same meeting, they gave Kevin’s pitch the green light while simultaneously killing the hopeless and reviled project
Nomad
. Allen Adham, the company’s original founder and CEO, came out of retirement in 1999 to begin as Team 2’s game design director since he too, was an EQ enthusiast.
MMO’s text-based precursors, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), were well over a decade old, but Allen borrowed from
Diablo
’s philosophy of making gameplay accessible to casual players. Allen liked to use chess to illustrate how a simple game could be played at a higher level of complexity, and Blizzard had had previous success with this same formula. Until
Diablo
, role-playing video games were niche titles as far as the broad market was concerned. Games like EQ and UO appealed only to hardcore RPG gamers, so their audiences were relatively small.
Diablo
’s success convinced Adham the team could make a friendlier version of
EverQuest
for a larger audience—and that it would still have enough depth to satisfy the core gamers. Furthermore, the success of
StarCraft
in a market already saturated by real-time strategy games proved Blizzard games could still outsell entrenched competition. Using Diablo’s model of simplistic game design, Allen laid the groundwork for an MMO meant for the masses. Everything was measured in terms of intuition and ease of play.
Eric Dodds had been promoted from the QA department to the
Nomad
project to help out with design, but two weeks after he joined, the project changed into an
EverQuest
-like MMO. As the newest member on the team, Eric was also the first to call the game,
World of Warcraft
, although it was so obvious a title that others may have come up with the same moniker. The apropos acronym, WoW, was only a happy accident.
World of Warcraft
became the placeholder name unless someone came up with something catchier.
By July of 1999, a dozen or so developers began what would become Blizzard’s largest project. WoW broke more ground in three months than was achieved in
Nomad
’s eighteen-month lifespan. Adham’s presence provided the new project with solid design direction, a refreshing departure from
Nomad
’s speculative meandering. It was also crucial that
EverQuest
had provided a proven example of gameplay and a common frame of reference. During
Nomad
’s development, everyone worked in their own offices and focused on their own ideas. For WoW, the team moved their desks together in the hallway and collaborated. Improved communication reinforced the collaborative spirit: Everybody knew what everyone else was doing.
Decision-making was less formal, as “meetings” spontaneously happened throughout the day. Although Allen was in charge, he described the process as “a representational democracy” instead of simply giving everyone equal veto rights. The game designers listened to everyone’s arguments but were ultimately responsible for the final decisions themselves.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, check out The WoW Diary (book) on Amazon, it’s PDF, or signed box edition.
WoW Diary Book on Amazon - $39.99
Special Boxed Edition on Amazon - $149.99
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