4 ms·

Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like,

by patio11 12y ago

Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.

drewbug 12y ago
Are they really that expensive to develop?
- patio11 12y ago
  A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
- zanny 12y ago
  WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places. They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models. Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.
  - Liquix 12y ago
    is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and current pipeline)? fascinating stuff
  - hydrogen18 12y ago
    Are you saying that a team is assembled to do something and then builds up a big buffer of work. Then they move onto something else? So if they needed boss fights, a team might produce 150 pseudo-unique boss fights that are 90% complete. Then when they actually need 2 or 3 for a new dungeon they just grab them, finish them up quickly, and incorporate them into the game?
monk_e_boy 12y ago
They were used and played to death. I remember getting so bored of them, and they are still there for other people to discover. It makes the world feel so big, part of the compellingness of wow.
spiritplumber 12y ago
Thanks, you are my deep revelation for today.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Yeah, mine too. I was also thinking about how... if you've ever been invited to a rich-person's event, like a glitzy fashion show or something (I got a media invite for one once), there's all sorts of free drinks and food and chocolate and what-have-you. But all that expense is justified because if they win you over and have you buying whatever they're selling, they recoup all their losses. I suppose it's the sheer scale that's staggering. Some people are playing at much higher stakes, and it hard to really grasp how things are.
sgt101 12y ago
I played wow from beta. I quit in Cata, came back in Panda and have quit again in WoD. In vanilla I saw that there was much money in the game and lo, I did say, arriveth the $$ arriveth the MBAs. And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off. But here are the sums. They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000. That is a NPV of 3. Can i haz MBA?
pvg 12y ago
The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey. Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression. I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.
- nulltype 12y ago
  Where did you get this cost estimate? Does that include expansion packs and patches?
  - pvg 12y ago
    Google around, it's something apparently Vivendi released, early during vanilla - it's for the first 4.5 years of development before release. It seems pretty cheap - Blizzard spent less time and money for the initial development than any of its subsequent and unsuccessful major competitors.
    - norswap 12y ago
      Goes a long way to show the "power of juice". WoW is game that just feels good on the keyboard, and is intuitive. The controls and the UI are pretty great. It did not have, even at the time of the release, any new features, quite the opposite in fact. The graphical style was cartoon-ish, which accomodated older machines nicely. Wish MMO developers would take a page out of Blizzard's book instead of trying some crazy arm's race of graphics/voice-over/what-not. There's definitely space for novelty, but in gameplay rather than gimmicks.

by patio11 12y ago

drewbug 12y ago

Are they really that expensive to develop?

patio11 12y ago
A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
zanny 12y ago
WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places. They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models. Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.
- Liquix 12y ago
  is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and current pipeline)? fascinating stuff
- hydrogen18 12y ago
  Are you saying that a team is assembled to do something and then builds up a big buffer of work. Then they move onto something else? So if they needed boss fights, a team might produce 150 pseudo-unique boss fights that are 90% complete. Then when they actually need 2 or 3 for a new dungeon they just grab them, finish them up quickly, and incorporate them into the game?

monk_e_boy 12y ago

They were used and played to death. I remember getting so bored of them, and they are still there for other people to discover. It makes the world feel so big, part of the compellingness of wow.

spiritplumber 12y ago

Thanks, you are my deep revelation for today.

visakanv 12y ago
Yeah, mine too. I was also thinking about how... if you've ever been invited to a rich-person's event, like a glitzy fashion show or something (I got a media invite for one once), there's all sorts of free drinks and food and chocolate and what-have-you. But all that expense is justified because if they win you over and have you buying whatever they're selling, they recoup all their losses. I suppose it's the sheer scale that's staggering. Some people are playing at much higher stakes, and it hard to really grasp how things are.

sgt101 12y ago

I played wow from beta. I quit in Cata, came back in Panda and have quit again in WoD. In vanilla I saw that there was much money in the game and lo, I did say, arriveth the $$ arriveth the MBAs. And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off. But here are the sums. They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000. That is a NPV of 3. Can i haz MBA?

pvg 12y ago

The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey. Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression. I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.

nulltype 12y ago
Where did you get this cost estimate? Does that include expansion packs and patches?
- pvg 12y ago
  Google around, it's something apparently Vivendi released, early during vanilla - it's for the first 4.5 years of development before release. It seems pretty cheap - Blizzard spent less time and money for the initial development than any of its subsequent and unsuccessful major competitors.
  - norswap 12y ago
    Goes a long way to show the "power of juice". WoW is game that just feels good on the keyboard, and is intuitive. The controls and the UI are pretty great. It did not have, even at the time of the release, any new features, quite the opposite in fact. The graphical style was cartoon-ish, which accomodated older machines nicely. Wish MMO developers would take a page out of Blizzard's book instead of trying some crazy arm's race of graphics/voice-over/what-not. There's definitely space for novelty, but in gameplay rather than gimmicks.