Aesthetically, Warcraft was wonky and painterly—everything was tilted and had soft edges. All the props and creatures were made using 3D Studio Max software, which produced rounded, exaggerated geometry, so the orthogonal Radiant architecture looked as though we were using art assets from another game. None of the artists wanted to paint generic textures, and no external candidates had applied for the job.
The whole reason we were using Radiant in the first place was because it created mathematically clean geometry. Perhaps it would help if I succinctly explain what 3D level designers actually do: We move things around. We just move things around. We place elements to establish a mood and allow room for traffic and gameplay; we arrange things to make areas interesting and beautiful; we arrange art assets trees, bones, and other props. Level designers create play spaces like architecture or landscapes.
We are a crosssection of disciplines, each with its own rules. We are advocates for lore, gameplay, art direction, and frame rate, and when these goals conflict, we bend the rules to accommodate outliers.
In all areas—design, art, and code—work was redone until it was as flawless as possible. Publishers, distributors, and retailers can take 80—90 percent of sales revenue, leaving little return for the studio to reinvest into its own people with bonuses or funding future projects.
Studios working with publishers rarely have control over their games, especially the shipping dates, which means polishing is never guaranteed. There were no suits. Everyone in the company played games, from the CEO down to our receptionist. Without constantly answering to impatient investors, Blizzard executives had more autonomy. This freedom meant they could delay or cancel their own projects and turn over more control to the employees building the games. And the fact that management frequently solicited opinions demonstrated their genuine interest in our input.
If the worker bees resisted a decision, management put on the brakes and listened. Toph Gorham and I played against each other during dinner one night. Toph was a concept artist who had joined Blizzard on the same day I did, and we sometimes played multiplayer games together after dinner. I thought the fun part of RTS games was micromanaging a battle and using hero abilities, not minding the economy and production, so we played a game with a food cap at 20 to see what would happen.
We had a blast! The gameplay was all combat, and the experience was very much like Defense of the Ancients, an early predecessor to League of Legends. These were the same designers responsible for StarCraft. Allen and Rob not only listened to us but came over to our desks to see how much of the map we used. They asked questions about how many resources we used and how long our game lasted. It took a proactive effort by management to foster a collaborative environment.
By keeping everyone in the loop, management maintained a cycle of mutual support. We had monthly company meetings in the QA area, announced birthdays, and disseminated company updates, announcements, or new policies. I noticed this peculiarity on my first day after hearing employees talk about the executives with reverence. I thought they were joking at first, but no one rolled their eyes with sarcasm. I was told they were very smart, thorough, and patient.
When someone pranked Allen Adham by kidnapping one of his office toys, he went to HR and compared writing samples to the ransom note to unmask the culprit. Is there…something you want to tell me?
Hearing my teammates talk about them with enthusiasm was especially strange to me, coming from the politically charged atmosphere of Madison Avenue advertising.
In the corporate world, decisions and communications often come from out-of-touch executives whose dubious decrees filter down to employees who have little control over their day-to-day routine. Programmers tailored their code to suit the needs of the artists and designers. Almost none of us had worked together before, so office politics were minimal. When someone had something new to show, everyone gathered to offer suggestions and critiques.
Decisions were sometimes reached in spontaneous discussions in the hallway. For example, there were several team meetings about whether WoW should abandon the paradigm of public dungeons established by the undisputed king of the MMO genre, Everquest in lieu of private dungeons called instances that would let players concentrate on monsters without the interference of uninvited party crashers.
Instances were a big departure, and designers and producers wanted to hear the pros and cons because the team was split on the matter. The biggest concern with instanced dungeons was that they were antisocial experiences in what was supposed to be a social game, and the meetings about instancing dragged on until we dispersed into little groups and argued about what else needed to be fixed with MMO games, sometimes until midnight.
But as the team grew, our team meetings were getting unwieldy. I was the twenty-first team member in October, and by March, ten more people had joined. There was remarkably little orchestration; the process and structure was more like a garage rock band—people explored and iterated until someone struck a good tune, after which the others would follow.
The key to making this dynamic work was ensuring that every member of the team was passionate about their work, which required careful, selective hiring. What surprised me most about the games industry was how hard it was to hire superstar employees. We definitely found them, but the search was usually long and difficult.
The year began with two new engineers joining the company. The first was our graphics programmer, Tim Truesdale, who started out in February working on in-game shadows. Static world shadows meant the sun had to rise and fall in the same direction, which made no astronomical sense but visually looked correct.
Network coders labored for long stretches of time where no discernible progress could be shown…until one day when it suddenly worked. The worst thing about server programming was that performance could only be tested publicly, and there were external influences that might contribute to poor performance.
Only under the scrutiny of colleagues and fans could engineers optimize server code, so not many people wanted this job.
It was among the most important—but hardest to fill—positions in the gaming industry. Joe Rumsey would take the client—server model Collin Murray and John Cash built, and break down the server into separate machines, so the processing bandwidth could be distributed among a master server, a worldstate server, a client-gathering server, an update server, and so on.
These machines talked to one another in order to support each digital universe, called a realm. When I first joined and learned about the project, Shane and Eric explained that WoW might work like Diablo, where players could play by themselves while disconnected from the server saving us bandwidth costs.
They speculated players could solo offline until they wanted to team up for group content such as dungeons or raids—then they would have to connect to our servers.
Probably not pathing data. Programmers were typically precise when communicating what they could deliver, and security was something they were careful not to overpromise. There you go! I wish everything were that easy to decide. One of the first things I learned was how unimpressive games look in their early stages.
After someone escorted me to my desk, I looked around the area to see hints of what kind of game Team 2 was making. This way! After a couple of crashes the screen flickered to a blond man standing on grassy terrain; he was wearing a loincloth and carrying a short sword. The only interface was a health bar and a bag icon. Eric looked up at me expectantly as I studied the screen. The character ran past some trees and a small ditch with a wooden bridge over it. Eric looked up at me again with a triumphant countenance, as if he were holding a winning lottery ticket.
I was very underwhelmed. He perked up. He gestured to the screen. There were no combat sounds, only ambient noises of birds chirping. Eric continued. Eric gave me a brief history of the game engine, and I learned that when core navigation running through forests, etc. Eric showed me concept sketches for the zones, and those began to capture my interest. We paged through pictures of monsters and war machines, and for the first time I felt that this game could be very cool.
The look: Elwynn Forest, color study by Bill Petras, Even though the direction of Elwynn was brightened up to a cheerier, Utopian feel, the loose, painterly style became the look for the game. Bill emerged as the art lead for the project, conceptualizing every zone and critiquing animations and character creations.
Bill explained that a newly hired artist named Brandon Idol was the first to nail down the Warcraft style after he painted the textures for the kobold and the gnoll using an exaggerated and comic approach. It was important to capture a strong style for ground textures because players generally look downward.
Each exterior zone was painted with only four landscape textures dirt, stone, grass, and rock. Deserts could be lit with warm sunlight, then cool off to blue hues at night, and when players walked between zones, the colors transitioned gradually. These color blends would be the next big feature going into the next build, and everyone was looking forward to seeing whether the transitions were smooth. They added dimension to the terrain, and the result was gorgeous.
Our project was ready for exterior level designers to begin building a world. So applying for a position as an exterior level designer was a big opportunity. The two-dozen exterior level design applicants worked in wowedit after hours and on their own time. It was tedious and imprecise work, and most applicants had never worked in a 3D editor before; most of them lacked artistic experience, and there were no tutorials. It made the application process incredibly painful, but the people who wanted the job badly enough spent the most time on their levels and generally produced better work.
No one read his twenty-five-page document, but the amount of work he put into his story was a sign he would be a passionate developer. We learned that the two submissions that had received the highest marks were authored by the same applicant, Matt Sanders. They just seem to have an intuition. It takes meticulous effort to write and verify bug reports. Some bugs are trivial or are duplicates of others; some are fiendishly difficult to solve and take months or even years to address.
To eliminate the possibility that a weapon was the culprit of the bug, Josh had to attack a dummy monster using every weapon in the game, a process that took hours. Tasks like these might be split among QA people or sometimes they fell to just one unfortunate soul to sort out. After every weapon was checked, Josh reported the results. The programmers or designers would change something, and Josh would then have to retest every weapon and report results again.
And again. After doing something like this repetitively for hours, for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months, QA drudgery feels less like being in a computer game company and more like a psychological experiment.
These entry-level positions are minimum-wage jobs, but people endure the experience just for a chance at getting a development position, becoming a QA lead, or attaining some other non-developer position. Aside from the politics and headaches that pervade this dues-paying atmosphere, there are some major perks to being in QA.
Being surrounded by gamers every hour of the day creates a strange mix of camaraderie in this every-man-for-himself environment. Full-time QA members are part of company events like movie day, holiday parties, and Las Vegas launch events. But ultimately the best part is working with other people who are passionate about games.
Gnoll and kobold, by Brandon Idol. That is World of Warcraft! All monster skins were painted on a x pixel canvas and fit onto wireframe geometry whose complexity measured only a couple of hundred triangles. The player controlled a squad of three characters: a swordsman, a spell caster, and a character wielding a whip. The interface elements were non-functional, as the artists were only playing around with different visuals when the game was canceled.
Players were able to adventure and equip their troops to fight one another as well as AI opponents. Since Team 2 comprised only programmers and artists, their philosophy toward design was democratic. Too democratic. Because there was no one formally in charge of game design, a direction never solidified and development meandered while people brainstormed unconnected ideas.
There was such a lack of cohesion at the end of its first year that everyone on the team agreed Nomad was a disaster. Attempts were made to save it over the next six months by taking alternative directions, but nothing seemed to work. Team 1 was bogged down with early versions of Warcraft III which were all eventually scrapped , leaving only Team 2 available to make a pitch. Kevin was experienced and design-savvy enough to encapsulate what Team 2 wanted to make—a Warcraft version of EverQuest. Kevin envisioned Quake-style WASD keyboard controls, instanced dungeons, and clear quest indicators to make the MMO experience attractive to casual players.
The idea of actually playing Warcraft heroes, at ground level, sounded like a slam-dunk. The Warcraft world map, , was painted on the wall of the Team 2 area by Chris Metzen. Allen liked to use chess to illustrate how a simple game could be played at a higher level of complexity, and Blizzard had had previous success with this same formula.
Until Diablo, roleplaying video games were niche titles as far as the broad market was concerned. Furthermore, the success of StarCraft in a market already saturated by realtime strategy games proved Blizzard games could still outsell entrenched competition. Everything was measured in terms of intuition and ease of play.
Eric Dodds had been promoted from the QA department to the Nomad project to help out with design, but two weeks after he joined, the project changed into an EverQuest-like MMO. As the newest member on the team, Eric was also the first to call the game, World of Warcraft, although it was so obvious a title that others may have come up with the same moniker.
The apropos acronym, WoW, was only a happy accident. World of Warcraft became the placeholder name unless someone came up with something catchier. It was also crucial that EverQuest had provided a proven example of gameplay and a common frame of reference.
For WoW, the team moved their desks together in the hallway and collaborated. Improved communication reinforced the collaborative spirit: Everybody knew what everyone else was doing. Usually there was an agreement with the producers, as nothing moved forward until they deemed it within the scope of the budget.
One of the initial discussions for Team 2 was to decide what kind of universe to create. Blizzard enjoyed ownership of both fantasy and sciencefiction trademarks, but the team was almost evenly split between the two genres, and the issue became the subject of spirited debate; even upper management was divided. Most science-fiction games were based on firearms and unrecognizable technology that was less visceral than swords and magic.
The EverQuest and Ultima Online hegemony over the fantasy genre led Blizzard to believe correctly that the next generation of MMOs would lean toward science fiction. Fantasy settings were easier to understand, were more established in the public mind, and sold more boxes. An early look at WoW, Players could run through solid objects, and the only interaction with the world was running on the terrain. Programming: The First Hurdle Valgarde, late Note the style of the buildings: Everything was upright and in realistic proportions.
When Nomad was canceled, many of its staff left the company —including all the programmers. Only when the engine neared its completion did Team 2 discover that the frame rate performance was way under expectation.
Both Teams 1 and 2 were daunted by the arduous tasks of improving flawed engine code, so both teams decided to start over. Despite the acquisition of Collin, staff morale remained low due to the major delays with the engine setbacks. Even at this early stage WoW had almost all of its code rewritten at least once.
Switching to 3D was one reason why Warcraft III took so long to ship and why other game studios were producing unremarkable games around the turn of the century: The entire industry was learning the same lesson. Staffing up for 3D game development was time consuming, because few developers had experience, and Blizzard was simultaneously staffing up on two 3D games, naturally making the teams competitive over resources—but the two projects shared tools, code, and people whenever possible.
Game Engines A game engine is a software framework used to create and run a game. Before starting a project, every studio must decide whether to write their own engine or start with an existing package, licensed by another company.
Pre-written engines offer a variety of attractive features, including cross-platform support, close integration with other tools, a user-friendly interface, flexibility, and, of course, all the latest graphical bells and whistles.
Despite these compelling arguments, Blizzard wrote their own engines because the pros always outweighed the cons. Pros of Writing a Game Engine In-House Perfectly Suited for the Task at Hand: In-house engines are more efficient in terms of processing power because they are optimized from the ground up to perform the type of task that is the focus of the game.
If a game needs lots of textures to render at once, programmers can tailor the game to do precisely that. Better Long-Term Profitability: Licensed engines come at the cost of losing a percentage of future revenue.
Writing an in-house engine avoids this, and it opens up the possibility of licensing your own game engine to other companies or giving it away to fans to buoy brand loyalty.
Bigger Audience: Not only does focused optimization mean that the game will run faster, but it can be targeted to run on low-end computers, which dramatically increases potential sales. Artists and designers experience more fatigue waiting for the engine to support their art assets and gameplay.
Until the engine is robust, an atmosphere of complacency could reduce productivity. More Expensive and Harder to Schedule: There are far more upfront costs in writing a proprietary engine, mostly in terms of salaries. This is particularly painful because some specialists are difficult to find. Prototyping Is Harder: Prototyping can rarely be performed early, and changes can only be made by programmers which is costly, since their code will likely be throw-away.
This means designers might not get a feel for the game until the tail end of the dev cycle. This introduces a risk because a studio might not know whether their game is fun until the bulk of its capital is spent. Studios make engine decisions early, often before funding. Midway through , Team 2 had hired a veteran 3D programmer, Scott Hartin, who proved to be the perfect person to write the WoW engine from scratch.
Everyone worked in rows of desks, silently, all day long. If you finished early, you were expected to work on it for another two weeks. Even before John joined, it was growing more evident that using other parts of the Warcraft III code was unrealistic. MMO engines process three types of geometry: rendered, collision, and pathing. The engine also handles collision geometry, which is the invisible force fields that prevent players from falling through floors or walking through objects.
As collision geometry stops players from walking through walls, pathing geometry below guides monsters around them.
A snapshot of the code task board in March Mark Kern joked he had pages and pages of programming tasks—so many that it was too depressing to even count them all. Twain had been doing all of the internal tools that kept track of completed artwork, such as a model viewer that allowed producers to browse and see how completed monsters or animations would appear in-game. Joe Rumsey was working on logging packets on the network code and monster spawning.
David Ray was in charge of the world editor and had just finished a tool that applied random sizes to trees, which made the exterior level designers faster. Combat was on the horizon, and Jeff Chow and Collin would soon be working on code that supported player animations.
In three months, John and Collin had created a true separation between the client software used by the user and the server. Putting the engineering team on the right track did much for morale, so productivity dramatically improved. Initially, Blizzard tried to write the game using an inefficient language called Java.
Scott Hartin had all but solved our rendering pains, but rendering geometry was only one of three types of geometry an engine needed to handle. Rendering geometry is anything visible on the screen what players see , such as the visual effects, the UI elements, the characters, and the environment including textures covering the surfaces. Too much rendering geometry can slow down the frame rate and earn rebuke from the programmers and producers who want the game to run smoothly.
There was also invisible collision geometry, which prevents characters from falling through the floor or moving through walls or objects. Pathing geometry was also invisible, but if rendered it would look like interconnected floor tiles. We also needed engineers for tracking art assets, so a programmer named Twain Martin, who had written the database for the customer support department, was assigned to the task of converting the early Java files into a database.
While the database system was working, and on the network, somewhere in the building, the hardware itself had been forgotten and no one could locate the machine when an upgrade became necessary. The predicament was an amusing illustration to me, at least of how overlooked database programmers were. After days of searching, it was discovered under an unused desk. Twain also wrote a system for how art assets could be introduced into the build. This might sound wishy-washy or disorganized, but it made the entire art team more efficient.
There were just too many types of art assets to predict an all-encompassing, draconian naming convention, which would have resulted in either too many directories or complicated filenames. Note that the item inventory was more developed than in the screenshot on page 36, and the looting functionality was now in the game. Aside from the icons, everything in this version was abandoned. David described the three types of database information: static: a simple list of items and quests less than a megabyte; our backup was a floppy disk persistent: tracks items and quests many terabytes of storage account: this was handled by the battle.
PC hard drives sometimes fail and lose data, which was why they are regularly backed up. But the hard drives used for storing player data cannot lose data. Even reverting to a backed-up state would be a terrible faux pas that would enrage the customer base. No game company can risk losing persistent character information, so the type of hard drives used for MMO data storage are unimaginably expensive.
As a result, engineering efforts focused on minimizing both data size and the processing power needed to retrieve it. David Ray was an aerospace database engineer before working at Blizzard, and he once talked to a fellow database programmer at Boeing who had considered her database large until David described the scope of our game: A single realm dwarfed her Boeing database. WoW had launched with eighty-nine realms in North America, supporting a total of a half million players, each of whom had the potential of making ten characters.
Since a single quest used just twenty bytes of storage space, the total server space needed per quest was a hundred megabytes. Item storage was worse. In fact, bag and bank space was directly limited to server hardware costs.
The fact that items themselves had slots for enchantments and augmentation further bloated their file size. Some characters looted hundreds of monsters a day, and each looted item had to be stored in order for GMs game masters, who were the equivalent of customer service representatives to be able to restore lost items.
Since the scale of tracking items was mammoth, the database code needed to be as efficient as possible, and Blizzard had only a couple of engineers to do it. Initial server blueprint, May A basic model was sketched on the whiteboard and agreed upon between the programmers and producers. Server architecture took a long time to write, and mistakes in the planning stage could not be made. In fact, networking mistakes could cripple projects or even a company—as many other MMO developers would learn the hard way.
The breaking news at the conference was that Ultima Online 2, one of the major MMOs, had been canceled. The defunct title would have mixed steampunk elements into a fantasy genre in an attempt to stand out from traditional swords-and-sorcery settings. In this case, the industry was witnessing wavering support for a title with an entrenched Ultima Online audience. Publishing deals could fall through at inconvenient times, and this was one of them.
Everyone on the team acknowledged how lucky we were to work for such a stable company. It was mostly a job fair, and its panels were largely a waste of time to anyone already in the industry. The topics were familiar and covered by prominent developers and celebrity Game Gods. Blizzard stopped speaking at industry roundtables because the questions were always directed at us and it made discussion between companies awkward.
In an effort to prepare for the ECTS, Shane Dabiri, one of our two producers, had asked everyone to stay late on Monday and Wednesday nights to prepare. It was the first official push, and a sensible request because there was so much left to do. We wanted WoW to be more finished than any game announced in Blizzard history, but to do this it would take longer hours to get more art and code into it. At the ECTS, we were planning to show off our game to a few magazines but not to the general public in a closed room, giving each magazine twenty minutes to ask questions.
That was typical of any game—usually studios only showed off whatever was presentable devs rarely sat on features. We could, at least, polish our exterior zones and make them presentable. As a rule of thumb, the access a game studio provides is a strong indicator of how feasible or finished a game actually is. The lowest access is no in-game footage, but just a cinematic of the IP intellectual property.
Amazon Kickstarter Edition. Amazon Slipcase Edition signed and Companion Booklet. Warcraft books. Audiobook Digital Hardcover Paperback. Categories Sources Hardbacks Digital books. Universal Conquest Wiki. Front cover. I adore you for making this list! Thanks, love!
And I adore you for the super hype feedback you gave there. Thanks for subbing to YouTube as well! Mate this content is amazing! I have read almost all the books. Can you tell me if the chronicles are just a condensation of all books or are something new in them?? The chronicles give a broad overview of what happens, and thus it gives spoilers for other books. Man, you are crazy, this is amazing, this is absolutely a great job. Wow, no one should miss this list.
I will tell everyone to check this out. Thank you, Thank you dude. While the programmers shut their doors, the easily distracted artists gathered to watch the train wreck but just as quickly grew bored watching the process. On the screen about a dozen or so team members had orc and human characters dressed in our newest armor pieces. Devs considered it cool to be in-the-know about the latest features, cheats, and art assets, so everyone was on the lookout for the latest fashion statements.
He talked into his phone, which was conferenced to half of the actors. We learned after losing an entire day to filming that we needed a smoother camera. Days later, after the programmers delivered a smoother joystick-controlled camera, the footage was reshot, yet the results only supplied a few seconds of in-game footage.
An excerpt, from page The laughable Alterac Valley tests looked coordinated compared to the early raid tests, despite all the debriefing and instructions given. While the designers described each fight in chat which was ignored , people got bored and made choo-choo sounds prompting others who found it annoying to tell them to stop—which only encouraged more choo-choos.
Players barely buffed one another, and all communication was done in chat, there was neither voice software or raid interface whatsoever: Players could see health bars of only immediate party members.
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