World of Warcraft Cataclysm: exclusive interview, part one

Designing an MMORPG is a unique creative challenge. The initial game universe can take up to five years to build and often requires the formation of a complex mythology to provide and maintain its narrative thrust through future add-ons and expansion packs. In this sense, it's more like working on a TV series than a game – the design team just keeps writing new content, expanding the story, while hopefully attracting newcomers – and it can go on for years.

So how does a development studio remain fresh, engaged and creative on such a lengthy and precarious production line? And where do they get their ideas? To find out, I spoke to three WoW veterans: lead designer Tom Chilton, lead content designer Cory Stockton and lead systems designer Greg Street. Here, they talk about the influences behind World of Warcraft, and some of the concepts they're taking onboard for the future of the game...

So what were the key influences behind World of Warcraft when Blizzard started out on the project?
Tom Chilton: It was most heavily influenced by the early MMOs. At the time, a lot of people at Blizzard were playing games like Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and were really into that kind of game. The WoW team originally started off with a different project – they were making a game called Nomad, a role-playing game, but the decision was made that it was not making the progress we wanted. So one day we announced: "You're no longer working on Nomad, now you're going to make World of Warcraft!"

And what are your key inspirations for the mythology and narrative elements on the game?
TC: It's a combination of a lot of things. We're absolutely influenced by Dungeons and Dragons, and Tolkien, we're influenced by movies – and not just movies with fantasy settings, we're influenced by contemporary and sci-fi movies. All that plays a role.

Cory Stockton: We all look to film, we look at the grand sets and think, "wow, that's crazy, how could we translate that?" Seeing something like Avatar or Lord of the Rings, it's just the way they can take a space and make it feel alive. We're influenced by tons of games and not just MMOs. I've always been a console gamer, so for me, I see Metroid, which has lots of exploration and discovering new things, and I see a lot of Zelda in WoW.

Look at some of the boss fights we're doing nowadays compared to way back. One of our first raid boss fights, Ragnaros – he's stuck in a room and barely moves, the room never changes. But you look at the fights we do now, we have bosses who break down walls; you can break off parts of their limbs, then that falls through the floor, and the player jumps through too. If you think of the Zelda bosses, they interact with the whole environment. When I look at WoW, that's what I think of, the action adventure genre. You've got to get the MMO part of it out of your head. For a player, when they're doing a dungeon or a quest, there's no reason that you can't do things you can do in a console game. It's the idea of erasing those barriers.

There are definitely some areas that have reminded me of Super Mario 64 and Prince of Persia – the way you need to plan your way through the environment
TC: Exactly, and I think you're going to see more of that in Cataclysm, and that's because our toolsets have got so much better. We tried to do some of that stuff in the past, but it probably wasn't as polished as we would have liked; now, with our vehicle system, we can do so many more things. And they're not even just vehicles; we can use the system to have you grab a rope and swing on to a pirate ship – that's done using the vehicle system, but to the player that's all invisible, it just feels like a cool mechanic.

And just like Nintendo's games, the idea of balance is vital?
Greg Street: My background prior to Blizzard was working on real-time strategy games and that was 100% about unit balance, making sure characters felt unique but not over-powered. I approach it like a maths puzzle. Things need to have a budget – if a spell is too expensive no one is going to want to use it, or if a spell does the exact same thing as another one it's not going to be attractive. It's almost like bringing the economy of an RTS into an MMO.

We've talked about games and genres that you've all been inspired by, but are there any star game designers you look up to? Maybe the likes of, say, Richard Bartle or Raph Koster?
CS: I look up to Miyamoto, I look up to Sid Meier. It's not just their games, it's their philosophies on game design. With Miyamoto, it's the idea that control is king – whatever crazy ideas he has for games what always matters is that the controls are unbelievable.

We have the same design philosophy at Blizzard. When we do something in WoW, it's got to feel instantly reactive, it can't feel laggy, it can't feel confusing. Something as simple as the jump – you see people jumping about in WoW all the time and the reason they do that is because we tuned the living crap out of it. The animations are tuned exactly right, the way we send those commands over the server, we have prioritisation on stuff, so certain animations will play smoothly. And we have randomness built into that, in the way the night elf does an occasional front flip. A jump animation isn't just that, it has multiple alternatives. And no one would think that a jump animation matters that much, but we put in so much effort because we knew players would be doing it all the time.

With Sid Meier, you get the influence on the overall game as a whole. He's got this theory of each game taking one third prototype, one third crazy ideas, one third proven ideas, and you put those together and you see a game evolve.

How would you describe the development process on WoW these days?
GS: We tend to work from these very long task lists of ideas. When we have a new idea, we put it on the list then we spend time either bumping them up or bumping them down. In the software we use to track our tasks we're in numbers like 20-30,000 ideas. And we'll see an item at number 5,000 that's just been bumped for years and years, and maybe some day we'll do it, of if the game has gone in a different direction, we just delete it. So for every patch we'll get the list out and say, "okay, is there anything on here we want to try to get in?" Often it just takes a designer who's very passionate about something. People have a lot of power on the team to just push something they're very excited about, to get it in the game. Often all it takes is one champion to get the ball rolling.

How do new features get implemented – is the process led by the programmers or the design team?
CS: Basically, we come up with a crazy idea, and then it comes down to, can [the coders] implement it?! If they can't then we ask, "what can we get?" And then it's down to time – how long will it take to get this done? We come up with a bit list and just see if we can implement it. A great example would be when we added flying to Burning Crusade – that was the biggest addition to WoW at that point – it was a huge programming task. We knew we had to have it, it was the key back-of-the-box feature, but it was clear we'd take a super long time to get it, which meant there were a couple of other things we couldn't do. But we had to decide, what will make the biggest impact for the players?

How much of the current design work is based on watching emergent player activities in the game world and thinking, "hey we should actually support that more fully?"
CS: It totally happens, both from playing the game ourselves and watching other people play. A good example would be Wintergrasp, which was our open-world PvP zone in Northwind. It was the first time we'd ever done something like that, – it was PvP but it wasn't in an instance, so any one could come. And it was really crazy, getting it into the game, and it turned out to be one of the most popular parts of the Wrath of Lich King overall.

But we made a massive number of changes to it after it went into the game because people were playing it in very different ways than we expected. We had a system where you had to get a certain amount of honourable kills to get vehicles, but the players ended up doing something completely different to get vehicles so we modified the whole system. The way that they were attacking the bases was way different to how we had planned. The problem with something like that is, with the beta it's hard to get critical mass of people to play it, but when it goes on the server and you have a thousand people going on there at one time, a group mentality works very differently to a small number of players. Definitely, with things like that, we just make updates with every patch. Now we haven't touched it for a while, because it's running exactly how we want.

TC: I'd say most of what we do now is driven by player feedback. It might be feedback we've been hearing since six years ago and we only now have an opportunity to do it, and sometimes it's things that have come up recently. And as you'd expect there are way more ideas than we ever have time to do.

Part two tomorrow