6 ms·

How World of Warcraft Was Made

80 points by nodivbyzero 8y ago

meritt 8y ago
The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.
- Fomite 8y ago
  Yep. I could play, raid, etc. in a fully functional way on an okay-ish laptop. This was a pretty big deal for me.
- jonshariat 8y ago
  This. I wonder how different things would have played out if the other AAA titles had lower requirements. That being said, WOW also focused on other game tools that opened it up to a wider audience that other games who only listened to their "core audience" never would consider.
  - perseusmandate 8y ago
    I think we've seen this with most of Blizzard's games. StarCraft was such a big phenomenon partially because it was able to run on almost any machine during a Korean recession when people were time rich and cash poor and when a large amount of computing was done on non-gaming machines at internet cafes. And then of course you have Minecraft, PubG, Fortnight, The Sims ect
- mustaflex 8y ago
  If I remember correctly the game ran somewhat fine on my geforce mx440 (passively cooled).
- dandr01d 8y ago
  Yup. My very average laptop with integrated graphics was able to handle 40 man raids. Those were the days!
- dsl 8y ago
  So many people I played with were able to enjoy the game because it would run on the $350 eMachines PC they got at Walmart. Accessibly really increased the draw of the game for regular consumers because you could get your friends into it easily.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    I ran the game on a beat up dell laptop for several years, 40 man raids and everything. Had to run it on the lowest settings, but was able to get 30 FPS on it. I remember I played so much that on the left side of the laptop where my palm rested all the paint had worn off of the laptop.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Indeed. The greater bulk of my play during original game, The Burning Crusade, and even the beginning of Wrath was all on an iMac G5 with a Radeon 9600, not a top end gaming PC. Original and TBC both ran great on it with trouble only starting to creep in with Wrath and its texture resolution bump.
ArchTypical 8y ago
TL;DR This wasn't much of a writeup, more of a nostalgic media-piece.
k__ 8y ago
I saw so many people drop out or destroy their relationships because of WoW. I'm lucky the monthly fee was too much for me bacm in the days :/
- abledon 8y ago
  Yup doing molten Core on a 56k modem just won’t cut it, unable to progress further —- delete game!
- macNchz 8y ago
  I first started playing during the public beta and went on to log something like 50 days of play time on my character in the first year the game was out. I was in high school at the time and several of my friends got in much deeper than I did, to the point of failing classes and dropping out of school. I’m ultimately thankful to have been drawn away by girls and beer and whatever other teenage distractions. To this day I feel the experience of very early WoW was easily the most magical I’ve had with a video game, though. The incredibly vast unexplored world, the total lack of walkthroughs or guides, the excitement of exploration and discovery. Just thinking about it 14 years later makes me want to buy the latest expansion...
  - wst_ 8y ago
    I remember, as it was yesterday, my birth as level one Night Elf. I was a veteran PC player already but this... This was catharsis. I remember beautiful and kind of sad island of Teldrassil, wandering around the dark forests at twilight, boldly visiting deep caves full of spiders where no 6 level player have gone before, magical wells, rich lore and true heroes from the past standing in front of me, giving me tasks whole world depended on. All this in the company of epic soundtrack, which I still have and listen to when the wind of nostalgia comes. Only few times in my gaming life I was so immersed in the fictional world - this being one of the best experiences of my life. And even though I've visited plenty of other areas during my play time, on both sides of the conflict, I've always kept Teldrassil closest to my heart. That atmosphere can't be compared to anything else.
  - thewizardofaus 8y ago
Jyaif 8y ago
"After leveling for a bit, you'd eventually drop down to gaining half of the experience that you'd normally gain. Players absolutely hated it. So Pardo flipped it around. The early, enhanced leveling was framed as the player gaining bonus experience, while the non-rested state was framed as normal, making players were much happier." Love it.
btown 8y ago
> "From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the popularity of the game?'" True for so many startups as well, where "max level/endgame" is the arrival of users with needs you didn't anticipate, whose momentum and confidence you rely on to present your brand in the marketplace. For every ounce of stress, though, there's two ounces of excitement, and that's its own fun.
canada_dry 8y ago
My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days! Good times. Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.
no_identd 8y ago
Why & how WoW succeeded, in my opinion: User Interface Customization using Lua. Also, I think WoW indirectly taught a lot of developers about Taint checking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking ) - something I still feel extremely bitter about missing from Javascript, replacing it with "Signed Script Policy" in retrospective seems like a bad idea, to the point where people re-invented it after it got removed, but still no community maintained implementation exists: https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS (The paper for this has 579+3 citations [+3 because there exists a separate citation network due to Google Scholar being, well, Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950. Yet I don't see this kind of feature in any mainline javascript implementation.) https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint (Different project, it seems)
- Ataraxy 8y ago
  I agree about the addons. They effectively outsourced the user experience of the game to the users and their UI was pretty awful back then so it was welcome. That being said, I always found the Guild Wars 1 user modifiable UI woefully underappreciated along with many other things about the game.

80 points by nodivbyzero 8y ago

The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.

Fomite 8y ago
Yep. I could play, raid, etc. in a fully functional way on an okay-ish laptop. This was a pretty big deal for me.
jonshariat 8y ago
This. I wonder how different things would have played out if the other AAA titles had lower requirements. That being said, WOW also focused on other game tools that opened it up to a wider audience that other games who only listened to their "core audience" never would consider.
- perseusmandate 8y ago
  I think we've seen this with most of Blizzard's games. StarCraft was such a big phenomenon partially because it was able to run on almost any machine during a Korean recession when people were time rich and cash poor and when a large amount of computing was done on non-gaming machines at internet cafes. And then of course you have Minecraft, PubG, Fortnight, The Sims ect
mustaflex 8y ago
If I remember correctly the game ran somewhat fine on my geforce mx440 (passively cooled).
dandr01d 8y ago
Yup. My very average laptop with integrated graphics was able to handle 40 man raids. Those were the days!
dsl 8y ago
So many people I played with were able to enjoy the game because it would run on the $350 eMachines PC they got at Walmart. Accessibly really increased the draw of the game for regular consumers because you could get your friends into it easily.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  I ran the game on a beat up dell laptop for several years, 40 man raids and everything. Had to run it on the lowest settings, but was able to get 30 FPS on it. I remember I played so much that on the left side of the laptop where my palm rested all the paint had worn off of the laptop.
kitsunesoba 8y ago
Indeed. The greater bulk of my play during original game, The Burning Crusade, and even the beginning of Wrath was all on an iMac G5 with a Radeon 9600, not a top end gaming PC. Original and TBC both ran great on it with trouble only starting to creep in with Wrath and its texture resolution bump.

ArchTypical 8y ago

TL;DR This wasn't much of a writeup, more of a nostalgic media-piece.

k__ 8y ago

I saw so many people drop out or destroy their relationships because of WoW. I'm lucky the monthly fee was too much for me bacm in the days :/

abledon 8y ago
Yup doing molten Core on a 56k modem just won’t cut it, unable to progress further —- delete game!
macNchz 8y ago
I first started playing during the public beta and went on to log something like 50 days of play time on my character in the first year the game was out. I was in high school at the time and several of my friends got in much deeper than I did, to the point of failing classes and dropping out of school. I’m ultimately thankful to have been drawn away by girls and beer and whatever other teenage distractions. To this day I feel the experience of very early WoW was easily the most magical I’ve had with a video game, though. The incredibly vast unexplored world, the total lack of walkthroughs or guides, the excitement of exploration and discovery. Just thinking about it 14 years later makes me want to buy the latest expansion...
- wst_ 8y ago
  I remember, as it was yesterday, my birth as level one Night Elf. I was a veteran PC player already but this... This was catharsis. I remember beautiful and kind of sad island of Teldrassil, wandering around the dark forests at twilight, boldly visiting deep caves full of spiders where no 6 level player have gone before, magical wells, rich lore and true heroes from the past standing in front of me, giving me tasks whole world depended on. All this in the company of epic soundtrack, which I still have and listen to when the wind of nostalgia comes. Only few times in my gaming life I was so immersed in the fictional world - this being one of the best experiences of my life. And even though I've visited plenty of other areas during my play time, on both sides of the conflict, I've always kept Teldrassil closest to my heart. That atmosphere can't be compared to anything else.
- thewizardofaus 8y ago

Jyaif 8y ago

"After leveling for a bit, you'd eventually drop down to gaining half of the experience that you'd normally gain. Players absolutely hated it. So Pardo flipped it around. The early, enhanced leveling was framed as the player gaining bonus experience, while the non-rested state was framed as normal, making players were much happier." Love it.

btown 8y ago

> "From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the popularity of the game?'" True for so many startups as well, where "max level/endgame" is the arrival of users with needs you didn't anticipate, whose momentum and confidence you rely on to present your brand in the marketplace. For every ounce of stress, though, there's two ounces of excitement, and that's its own fun.

canada_dry 8y ago

My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days! Good times. Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.

no_identd 8y ago

Why & how WoW succeeded, in my opinion: User Interface Customization using Lua. Also, I think WoW indirectly taught a lot of developers about Taint checking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking ) - something I still feel extremely bitter about missing from Javascript, replacing it with "Signed Script Policy" in retrospective seems like a bad idea, to the point where people re-invented it after it got removed, but still no community maintained implementation exists: https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS (The paper for this has 579+3 citations [+3 because there exists a separate citation network due to Google Scholar being, well, Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950. Yet I don't see this kind of feature in any mainline javascript implementation.) https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint (Different project, it seems)

Ataraxy 8y ago
I agree about the addons. They effectively outsourced the user experience of the game to the users and their UI was pretty awful back then so it was welcome. That being said, I always found the Guild Wars 1 user modifiable UI woefully underappreciated along with many other things about the game.