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Gamespot Warcraft Anniversary Interview
The anniversary interviews keep rolling in, this time it's Gamespot who had a chance to talk with Jeffrey Kaplan and Rob Pardo, two members of vanilla WoW's design team. This isn't the typical question and answer interview -- Gamespot added some editorial flavor to it -- so I've quoted a few interesting bits and will let you check out the rest for yourself.
"During Starcraft development, there was a whole host of us playing that were playing Ultima Online. There was a bunch of us that saw that being a fun genre…It was definitely during Warcraft III development that a lot of us started playing EverQuest…It was during that EverQuest era that we realized Ultima Online wasn't a fluke, and it was going to turn into a full-fledged genre. And we really saw what was amazing about that genre, and felt like we had an opportunity to do our own spin on it."
Pardo said that one moment that stood out to him was realizing each of the 30-odd avatars standing around at a crafting forge in Ultima Online were controlled by an actual person. These sentiments were affirmed when EverQuest came along and added a deeper connection between players, Pardo said. The game designer should know, considering he led one of the preeminent guilds in EverQuest--Legacy of Steel--during the early 2000s.
Blizzard lead designer Jeff Kaplan assumed control of Pardo's guild after the Blizzard executive retired from EverQuest to focus his efforts wrapping up development on Warcraft III. In 2002, he was brought on to aid in development of the original WOW, and he said that it was no easy task adapting the franchise from its RTS roots to a more RPG setting.
"It required a huge shift," Kaplan said. "You do a lot of things in an RTS for very different reasons than you would do things in an MMO. As it relates to story, if you look at the ending of the original Warcraft III, you've got the Humans, Orcs, and Night Elves all united to overcome Archimonde at the World Tree. That didn't work for the structure of the MMO at all, we knew that we wanted to have Horde and Alliance pitted against each other. We had to re-create the rift that went all the way to the original Orcs and Humans."
"It's also hard to deal with the psychology of the dev team," he continued. "We would often feel obliged to do things exactly how they were done in the RTS, which isn't always right for the gameplay of an MMO. An example is, we wanted to give an ability called Death Coil to warlocks, because we thought it was really fitting. In Warcraft III, Death Coil was a Death Knight-only ability, and not only did it do damage, but it healed. People had a rough time coming to terms with the fact that it was OK to make changes and do what was right for the gameplay of WOW, even if that somehow contradicted what people saw in Warcraft III."
Of course, the scope of a MMORPG is substantially than that of an RTS. That difference of scale was reflected in Blizzard's initial plans for what it wanted to include with the original WOW when it shipped in November 2004. In fact, according to Kaplan, Blizzard initially intended to include the areas from The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and much of Cataclysm with the original launch.
"We planned it out extremely far in advance," he said. "To put it into perspective, Outland and Northrend and a lot of the ideas in Cataclysm were all part of the original shipping plan of the game…Every so often we'll have those moments from a project management and planning standpoint where we'll really go, well, what are we actually get in and where should we actually be at. But part of what gets us there is scoping the project out for years and years to come and always having an idea of where we want to go, and that's what lets us steer the ship and eventually get there."
Regarding Purchasing WoW from Resellers
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
We are beginning a special three-day sale of World of Warcraft on November 27 – 29, where the price of the original game will be only $5.00! Digital copies of the game, including an authentication key, will be available for purchase through our online store at this low rate as well. For more details on this special sale, please visit: http://u
It’s possible that in some locations copies of the game which were purchased during this sale could be returned and be resold at full normal price. These resold copies may have already been used which would result in an invalidated authentication key unable to be used to create a World of Warcraft account. While we will try to prevent these situations, we recommend you purchase the game through the official Blizzard Online Store, or by ensuring you’re only purchasing an unused copy from a reputable brick-and-mortar retail location.
The Chronicles of Leeroy - Episode 8
The latest live action Warcraft short in the Chronicles of Leeroy series is now available. Check it out here.
We've just finished making our 8th live-action Warcraft movie, The Chronicles of Leeroy Episode 8 - Two Copper Coins
This episode sees Celeste (Level 1 Alliance mage) finally receiving her reward for questing. Also Leeroy, Maxius and Arathaya bump into a Holy Paladin in Stranglethorn Vale. Think we can all probably guess what;s gonna happen
Here's the direct link to the movie http://www.herculean...ovie.php?mid=14
You can find all the other episodes at http://www.herculeanproductions.com
Tell us what you think and if you have any ideas for future Leeroy episodes let us know.
Hope you like it!
Carl aka Maxius
Aka Vikkar, undead priest, Kor?Gall
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