4 ms·

Are they really that expensive to develop?

by drewbug 11y ago

patio11 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
  is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and current pipeline)? fascinating stuff
- hydrogen18 11y 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?

Are they really that expensive to develop?

by drewbug 11y ago

Are they really that expensive to develop?

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 11y 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 11y ago
is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and current pipeline)? fascinating stuff
hydrogen18 11y 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?