Learning from the past - what made WoW successful - 2006 interview with Rob Pardon

[Kryos]

What made WoW different and great compared to Everquest and other MMORPGs so it now runs for 10 years and still has several million active subs?
What did they do different and what has changed from this concept over the years? I found this interview in an old folder on my harddisc and wanted to share it.

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Notes from Rob Pardo’s keynote at the Austin Game Conference 2006.

Rich Vogel intro: WoW is now a global brand, approaching a billion dollars in revenue and at 7m paying users. Rob Pardo was lead designer of Starcraft and is now VP of Design at Blizzard.

What Really matters: how Blizzard Game philosophy translates into World of Warcraft

We have a set of core philosophies, and I will talk about how we apply them to WoW.

We have a lot of mantras: “concentrated coolness,” “easy to learn, hard to master,” etc. With many designers it’s important to have those shared values.

It all starts with a donut. Allan Adham (original designer & founder at Blizzard) would draw a donut to explain what Blizzard is about. The middle of the donut is the core market. The casual market is the rest. We see Blizzard as being about both, and that the casual market grows faster than the core.

A chief way of doing this is through system requirements.

Easy to Learn, difficult to master is the first Law. Design in the depth first, the accessibility later. A lot of folks seem to approach this the other way — when we first develop our games, we first try to come up with the really cool things that add year sof replayability. Then we start talking about accessibility afterwards.

In WoW, we early on talked about character classes. One of the most important things you can do in a class based MMO is the combat system. So we tried to make the combat classes as unique and different from one another as possible. Dungeons too, we wanted them to be a much more hardcore experience, we wanted only groups in there, and so on. The dungeons are there to serve more of the cor e market. It’s something to strive for, a bridge for the casual players to become a little more hardcore.
PvP was another big depth decision. All of our games have been online competitive games. Early on, we didn’t know how honor would work, whether we would have achievements, but we knew we needed PvP Alliance vs Horde.
Lastly, we knew that raids and end game had to be there. We all played UO, EQ, we led uberguilds. We wanted encounters more like you see in Zelda, scripted encounters.

After that, we started talking about accessibility. Which starts with the UI. One of the first pitfalls with UI is trying to make everything visible from the UI. We try to streamline the UI, present only the stuff that is important. This is why we made the auction house accessible via an NPC, rather than via the HUD.

System requirements is another huge component of accessibility.
Another thing we talked about very early on was the game being soloable to 60. We really wanted it to be available to everyone. If you just wanted to play like a single-player game, you could do that,but you’ll see dungeons, battlegrounds, people with cool gear, and so on. We saw this solo game as our casual game.

We also spent a lot of time on the newbie experience. First and foremost, it’s not overwhelming. We generally shy away from tutorials. I enjoy games like Prince of Persia and God of War, which ease you into the game. That’s the approach we take as well. We drop you right into a newbie zone, and it’s not overwhelming. You’re not in a huge confusing city. The newbie experience is not finding your way out of the starting town.

The newbie zone also gets you right into the action. Everywhere you look, there’s a building or two, a couple of NPCs, and monsters. Within five minutes of starting up, you can fight monsters.

Exclamation point design: a game completely driven by quests. We wanted you to always have a reason for existing, a story. The exclamation point design is something we first did in Diablo II. Even the most casual players click on the guy with the exclamation point that is right in front of them, get a quest, and are off and running.

“Killing with a purpose” is the quest philosophy for WoW. With other MMOs, quests were just go out and see that experience bar move. Getting another bubble of XP is really fun but no accessible. We thought that giving you a reason to kill things was more accessible. A lot of people criticize how many bounty or collection quests are in WoW, but it came out of “killing with a purpose.” This way you are always moving around the world, seeing different things in your combat.

Clear concise objectives: try to provide all info in the game, don’t drive players to websites. We try hard through our quests what you need to do, where to go, where the quest giver is so you know where to go back to. Every time we bring in a new quest designer, they want to do a ‘mystery quest” that has vague information, but the reality is that the player will just go to Thottbot, and the people who don’t do that are the casual players who are the ones you need to handhold!

Don’t make players talk to every NPC to find a quest. We try to make it easy to find the quests, a menu of options for things to do. There is a side effect, what we call the Christmas tree effect, which is too many exclamation points overwhelming the users. There’s a balance between too few and railroading, and too many.

Give players a menu of options, but with a limit of 20. Raising the cap on the number of quests is one of the most common requests. We do have technical reasons not to, but the real reason is that the bigger the quest log gets, the less you feel like you are on a mission to do something. If you vacuum up the quests, and then kill indiscriminately, you are probably doing one of them. So putting in a limit makes people make some decisions.

Quest designers are “the cruise directors of WoW.” Their job is to show you the world. When we first do a zone we talk about POIs, points of interest, how many of each type of quest, and that’s the job of the quest designer. Different people like different kinds of quests. So we have to give you a list of possible entertainment to choose from.

Pacing: the bridge between depth and accessibility. Once you have all those deep features, then you have to figure out how you get from the newbie experience to that core experience. For WoW, that’s done through the levelling curve. When I hire designers for Blizzard, one of my pitfall questions that I ask is “why do you think WoW was successful?” One of the hidden answers is the levelling curve — if you extend the levelling curve too far, it becomes a barrier. You hit a levelling wall. Our walls are shorter and there are less of them.

The short levelling curve also encourages people to reroll and start over. We had some hardcore testers who would level to 60 in a week. There was much concern within the company. But I would tell them that we cannot design to that guy. You have to let him go. He probably won’t unsubscribe, he’s going to hit your endgame content or he’ll have multiple level 60s. In games with tough levelling curves, it discourages you from starting over.

Rest system also helps with the casual player who plays 4-5 hours a week. The hardcore player will keep the game in “no rest” state the whole time, whereas casual players will get rewarded for weekend binges followed by days off.

Bite-sized content: we try to tune our quests for accomplishment in chunks. We aim for a 30 minute session, lunchtime battlegrounds. We are doing more “winged dungeons” in the expansion, because we kinda stumbled upon it. We split up the dungeon into separate wings that can be done in 1/2 hour to an hour — like Scarlet Monastery. This was a lesson we learned during development, so we weren’t able to apply it everywhere in the original release. You want to avoid getting to a place where the content of your game doesn’t allow people to play unless they have X amount of time that night.

We aimed battlegrounds at the folks who over lunch would play Counterstrike, or Battlefield 1942.

Concentrated coolness. What this means is, rather than make variety and lots of things to do, make fewer things really cool. The best example in woW is the class system. Lots of games have more classes, multiclassing, etc. We consciously avoided that in order to make each class as cool and different from the others as possible. This allowed us to have unique spells, abilities and mechanics. No red fireball, white fireball, blue fireball, etc. Even the two pet classes, hunters and warlocks, use their pets completely differently. We consciously avoided sharing mechanics across classes. We recently announced that the paladins and the shamans are switching sides. One of the primary reasons why we undid that rule was that we found ourselves merging them into each other for PvP balance. So we decided that it was less important for each side to have its own class than it was to have concentrated coolness for each class.

More classes are not always better. Once you get enough different units or classes, players can only handle so much. When you see someone, you might not know what they can do, and this matters because when you want to form a group, you lose track of the strengths and weaknesses. In battlegrounds, you need to know instantly what the opponent can do to you. Even if you have 50 completely different ideas that are cool, it’s still important not to use them all.

Our class ideas originally came from Warcraft 3. What we chose to do was to take the heroes and combine them. Warrior got aspects of mountain king, blademaster, and Tauren chieftain from War3. We chose to concentrate the coolness.
Tradeoffs. Every decision comes with tradeoffs. designers are greedy by nature — we want everything, moms, dads, cats and dogs playing together. Nothing in game design is black and white, it’s all shades of gray. Whenever we can, we try not to compromise. It usually results in both sides being dissatisfied. If we had solo dungeons, then he group dungeon fans would feel their achievements would be cheapened. So we chose specifically not to have solo instances.

An example of Tradeoffs: system requirements of Wow versus Crysis, for example. Crysis looks awesome. But we would rather have the broader market. So that forced us to the stylized art style that is resistant to looking dated. It did generate lots of negative press, and our graphics programmers always wanted to push farther too. You just have to be prepared. But every game we’ve released, we have gotten the comment that our screenshots were not up to par.

There are benefits to the cutting edge side too. It’s easier to market, and developers want to make the best quality art. You’re fighting against developer psychology if you choose the other route.

World size vs teleportation is another. WoW vs Diablo. We wanted to the scale of the world to feel epic. But you get players getting frustrated and calling it “World of Walkcraft.” You use flight taxis to maintain integrity and having limited teleportation means you can have remote areas where you consciously do not provide a flight path to it.

But on the teleportation side, you get a lot more social connectivity, which is what MMOs are all about. There’s a barrier there if people have to travel and coordinate. We consciously decided to have that tradeoff. Players do want the convenience.

Another tradeoff is prestige gear versus customizable gear. Players ask for dyeing armor, all that. When I played Ultima Online I loved that. It was a great feature. But there’s only so much art time you have, and we chose instead to concentrate the coolness on armor from specific rewards instead. The whole point for a lot of hardcore players is to show off your advancement. So we chose the best gear to be from raids, so we can recognize someone’s achievements based on their gear. The tradeoffs is that you lose everyone looking different and users expressing creativity. And if you try to have both, you’ll end up muddled and somewhere int he between.

The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There’s this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we’re successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It’s a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it’ll be more difficult.

You’ll get a lot of “why does it matter that this feature is polished? It’s so small.” But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature.

Polish starts in the design process. (pic of skeletons in a room, which he says is the designers in a room). We’re kind of in a new era at Blizzard, when i started we had very few people with the title game designer. That’s been changing over the last few years. It’s interesting bringing in an experienced designer from outside, because they want to make a unit week, add a mechanic constantly, work 100 miles and hour. We have to get them to slow down. You need to talk through things with everyone else, and you have 100 features and they all have flaws and don’t work with each other. So when we are in a design meeting, we try to consider everything. Will it work in this raid encounter, in PvP, as a newbie, for the art, solid mechanics, etc. Contrary to popular belie, we do consider production. Mounted combat is an example of something killed by production time. Bounce ideas off everyone. Let the beer goggles wear off.

When we develop maps, we do it on the whiteboard, so we can iterate, and there’s no cost to changing things.

Phase 2 is when we actually make something. The first thing we try to do is make it fun. Northshire valley, for example — we spent an inordinate amount of time on it. Where do we put the trainers, how does the combat feel, etc. We probably spent more time on it than any other area, by an order of magnitude. After we made it fun, then we made it big. We didn’t go out and build the entire world of WoW until we knew what we were building. It didn’t make sense to do that until we had figured out all the details of the fun. If you have to retrofit the fun into the content, you’re gonna be screwed. When we went into the friends and family alpha test, people were surprised that it was fun. It was a lot easier, once we knew what was fun, to do levels 10-20, and 20-30 and so on. The design at that point was creative design, not mechanics.

Control is king. Game control is taken for granted a lot of times. I remember on Warcraft 3 I could feel a little bit of lag on the mouse cursor, and I kept saying it to the programmer, but he kept saying he couldn’t see anything wrong. Finally he coded in a hardware cursor so we could run both cursors at the same time, and lo and behold there were three frames of lag. And that matters, it’s important. People will leave over that, but you’ll never know that is the reason.

“Beware of the Grand Reveal.” This is a pic of a dungeon that was supposed to be in the original release but is in the expansion, because the subteam went off to work on it in a vacuum, disconnected from the rest of the team. The grand reveal was when they came back and showed it. It was supposed to be a raid dungeon but the doors were too narrow. So back to the drawing board it went, three months of redo because we didn’t redo along the way.

Lastly, have fun with the game. Put in the little in-jokes. If developers are having fun making the game, chances are the players will have
fun with it too.

Phase 3: the finish line. Feedback strike teams is something that we have used for a long time. We pull devs from all the teams and put together a diverse group with a mix of play styles — RTS guys who don’t like MMORPGs, etc.

Don’t take small decisions for granted, especially in that newbie experience. We had cases early on where people grouped up with 1 other person that they would get into the next area at 4th level, and that meant they had a bad experience. So we try to ask a lot of questions and don’t let things die on the feedback and striketeam list.

The beta test for us is not about finding bugs. It’s not really about getting a lot of game feedback. it’s about stress testing from a technological and gameplay level. We encourage our testers to exploit the hell out of the game. In our RTS beta tests, people always get upset that we run a ladder in the beta test, because the guys on top are exploiters. But that’s the point — we want to see who the top ten exploiters are so we can look at their games!

Don’t ship until it’s ready. This matters even more with MMOs. You might hear that it’s improved later, but no one actually goes back to try it. You will really cripple yourself, you put at risk the next five years of your product. So hopefully all you publishers will give the developers more time.

I hope we turn this genre into something special. The thing I think is really unique about MMO games — you look all the other genres, and the genre depicts a very specific type of gameplay. But massively multiplayer, this genre has the biggest frontier, it has the most we can achieve, and we should be pushing at all kinds of different directions.

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Do you think Blizzard kept their ideas alive or did they water down/change them over the years?

[Deleted]

Opened thread, hesitant to read it all, decided to pick random paragraph:

"Another tradeoff is prestige gear versus customizable gear. Players ask for dyeing armor, all that. When I played Ultima Online I loved that. It was a great feature. But there’s only so much art time you have, and we chose instead to concentrate the coolness on armor from specific rewards instead. "

FUCKING LOL. Cba to read the rest if it is just complete lies.

[Kryos]

Opened thread, hesitant to read it all, decided to pick random paragraph:

"Another tradeoff is prestige gear versus customizable gear. Players ask for dyeing armor, all that. When I played Ultima Online I loved that. It was a great feature. But there’s only so much art time you have, and we chose instead to concentrate the coolness on armor from specific rewards instead. "

FUCKING LOL. Cba to read the rest if it is just complete lies.

That interview is from 2006. Burning Crusade was just released. I think some sets from BC are still very cool. Warlock T6 for example.

[seraknis]

Opened thread, hesitant to read it all, decided to pick random paragraph:

"Another tradeoff is prestige gear versus customizable gear. Players ask for dyeing armor, all that. When I played Ultima Online I loved that. It was a great feature. But there’s only so much art time you have, and we chose instead to concentrate the coolness on armor from specific rewards instead. "

FUCKING LOL. Cba to read the rest if it is just complete lies.

if you read the incipit you would know that it's an interview from pre-tbc 2006.

[Deleted]

“Killing with a purpose” is the quest philosophy for WoW. With other MMOs, quests were just go out and see that experience bar move. Getting another bubble of XP is really fun but no accessible.

Don’t ship until it’s ready. This matters even more with MMOs

No wonder he left.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

Can we just face the music?

Tons of old developers who made WoW great are gone now. All the design leads are people who joined in Wrath or Cataclysm. Isn't it telling how every time this new dev team tries something original, it sucks? It just completely sucks. And the best possible scenario is them copying something the old dev team did.

Why do we have any faith left in WoW? Is our addiction and sunk cost syndrome clouding our judgement?

[Apanonar]

Funny to see that WoD throws almost every priciple he mentioned over board

[Grimbold21]

Its like hes talking about a whole different game....

[Kevyne-Shandris]

Notes from Rob Pardo’s keynote at the Austin Game Conference 2006

Check your calendar -- it's 2015 now.

The internet has changed since 2006, which next year will be 10 years ago.

Want to be playing WoW on your Core2Duo processor and 2GB of memory?

Yeah, tech changes and so do how players play the game.

I don't like 10 button mice and 512 macro MOBA style MMORPGs, but this is how Blizzard is designing their flagship for the MOBA boys who race through everything, and character progression is about gear not even what toon they play (so much for actual character progression since it's all about FotM and purples).

Don't want to go back to the RAID or die days. 15hrs sitting on your ass farming for pixels of trash? People make money now for that time, instead.

Priorities.

[huth]

For that matter, what made a game successfull isn't necessarily what keeps it that way.

[Ryme]

Don’t ship until it’s ready. This matters even more with MMOs. You might hear that it’s improved later, but no one actually goes back to try it. You will really cripple yourself, you put at risk the next five years of your product. So hopefully all you publishers will give the developers more time.

Well isn't that the truth.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

Can we just face the music?

Tons of old developers who made WoW great are gone now. All the design leads are people who joined in Wrath or Cataclysm. Isn't it telling how every time this new dev team tries something original, it sucks? It just completely sucks. And the best possible scenario is them copying something the old dev team did.

Why do we have any faith left in WoW? Is our addiction and sunk cost syndrome clouding our judgement?

Sad thing is WoW even has it all too ... it's resources are just wasted.

There's 4 interests in WoW

1. Raiding.
2. PvP.
3. Dungeoneer/Questing/Role-paying (core PvE).
4. Mini/Multi-gaming.

Only 1 interest in WoD that's getting all the attention. So what did they think could happen with WoW? Are they so deluded by living in that separate creative bubble (that's separate from the rest of the company too)? Because with 4 distinct groups all 4 will want the same thing -- gear -- to keep them happy. Keeping 1 interest happy at the expense of 3 others is a prescription for disaster.

Then when they do get something just right -- and it's fun -- next patch it's ruined. Pet battles pre-6.1 (and pre-Quintessence tweaking that borked that fight completely -- nothing we had worked on it, it was broken) and the followers worked excellent together. The mini/multigamer paradise.

Someone at Blizzard really thinks casual = lazy, because 6.2 comes and now Pet battles are so easy it's not even worthwhile to do anymore. All that effort with the Pet Menagerie gone. So much so even with Squirt before me in this game now ... and Erris ... my heart isn't in it now.

Blizzard kills interests with the "no comfort zone" meddling. Kills it.

People can't have enough challenge that isn't extreme on either side, you know balance? Not 15hr piss-in-a-bottle-difficult; nor here have your gear nonsense.

Simply want a time sink with a goal that can outfit my character for the sheer amount of time I can put in at an interest. Not the shipyard way of raw gatekeeping; nor "Want your gear? RAID or STFU!!"; nor you deserve nothing but pet stuff, bye.

Balance in gear acquiring.
Balance in game play.

Balance.
Balance.
Balance.

[Psydos]

Its like hes talking about a whole different game....

Reminds me of Tigole during Blizzcon 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Falm0H7VEiQ

Too bad he left since Ulduar.

But War(craft) never changes. Or does it?

[Kokolums]

Blizzard doesn't understand what made their games successful.


What truly launched Blizzard Entertainment was advanced social tools. Specifically, Battle.net. Back in the 1990s-early 2000s, BNET was THE PLACE to go. A kid wants to play some games? He sits in front of his computer, logs onto the internet, and then logs onto BNET. Then he chats with friends, has a good time, and hey maybe he logs into Diablo II, Starcraft, or Warcraft 3 for a bit.

BNET was the CORE of the company success.

Then came WoW. WoW was not connected to BNET. But, it did a great job of replicating social features with global chat and forced communication between players to achieve goals. The social tools were highly advanced in Vanilla WoW.

Then came the decline. They moved away from what made them successful and it hurt every single franchise they had.

1. They ripped global chat out of WoW and increasingly added anti-social tools in its place. The feverish climb in subs abated, flattened out, and then declined.
2. Blizzard replaced BNET with BNET 2.0. BNET 2.0 was mocked as "BNET 0.2" because they ripped almost all of the social tools out of it. It was more or less a glorified launcher app with a poor quality friends list.
3. They ALMOST released Starcraft without chat channels at all! Only when a large amount of complaints rolled in did they add some rudimentary channels that were far inferior to what people had in SC1. Without the network of support from BNET, the game suffered from lack of play.
4. D3 was also released on BNET 2.0 and has suffered from a lack of players as well.



Everything they listed as core company goals misses the mark. What made Blizzard a success was advanced social tools. It was the gaming company for extroverts. And they've completely changed as a company, and every franchise suffers because of it.

[clevin]

"Another thing we talked about very early on was the game being soloable to 60. We really wanted it to be available to everyone. If you just wanted to play like a single-player game, you could do that,but you’ll see dungeons, battlegrounds, people with cool gear, and so on. We saw this solo game as our casual game.
"

and

" Dungeons too, we wanted them to be a much more hardcore experience, we wanted only groups in there, and so on. The dungeons are there to serve more of the cor\e market. It’s something to strive for, a bridge for the casual players to become a little more hardcore."

This supports my thought that LK and the introduction of LFG was the beginning of a philosophy very different from what Pardo outlines above. Instead of the casual game being solo play with more group play taking some effort and skill they moved to making dungeons easy enough that 5 random people would do well in there. For all of the very real advantages of LFG (and there are several), that was when the game changed.

[OneSent]

Design in the depth first, the accessibility later.

They've been doing the complete opposite of this for the past 5+ years. Soooo many negative, long-term changes were made to this game in the name of 'accessibility'. They became obsessed with getting as many people as possible to pick up their game that they diluted any depth it might have once had.

Concentrated coolness. What this means is, rather than make variety and lots of things to do, make fewer things really cool.

Here's another one they no longer follow. How many times do you hear people complain that there's nothing to do in WoW, and yet we have tons more features and things to do in-game than we ever did back when this interview was made?

It's because all of this variety and new content is just trivial, fluff bullshit that doesn't really have any huge impact on your character or the game world itself. You could basically do it or not, and it wouldn't matter one bit.

All of the pet battles, achievements, garrisons, mini-games and daily quests in the world cannot hold a candle to true, meaningful character progression; Character progression that was killed in the name of 'accessibility'.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

It's funny, because Pardo's philosophy is something Blizzard should strive to follow, but they obviously rejected it because he left, clearly unsatisfied with working there.

Gotta cater to the lowest common denominator. More demographics that play your game = more money. That's the train of thought here. There is almost zero thought given to the health of the game overall. But then, this business strategy is blowing up in their face, anyway.

I am just glad subscriptions are tanking. It's a sort of unique vindication, for me.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

All of the pet battles, achievements, garrisons, mini-games and daily quests in the world cannot hold a candle to true, meaningful character progression; Character progression that was killed in the name of 'accessibility'.

Accessibility didn't kill the design, inequality does. "It's not about being poor, it's about FEELING poor." The Kara and Sunwell split wasn't a good thing.

Accessibility never meant, "here's your welfare gear". Accessibility is attunements go bye, bye. Accessibility is 3hr waits to get dungeon group isn't hardcore it's stupid, invent a means to cut it down to 30 minutes. Yay! The various methods devs used to slow content consumption which was a detriment to playing the game itself.

[Packing an i5]

This has been Posted and reposted numerous times already.

Summary the Blizzard defense force will say wow is perfect and has only gotten better with age and all the changes they have made.

Normal people will say they are said pardo is gone and the glory days of wow are over.

- - - Updated - - -

What made wow successful... in 2004 MMos were a new concept still. Wow had a good sized budget, it turned out to be an easier version of ever quest.

If an easier version of wow comes out that has better graphics and a ton of stuff to do at end game it Would probably surpass wow. Hasn't happened. All these wow killers ended up not having anything to do at the end game or had strange combat systems.

If Swtor had released in 2004 or rift before they would of been Number 1 for years. Problem is they waited to release after wow and they had almost the exact same gameplay but less end game content.

[Deleted]

Accessibility didn't kill the design, inequality does. "It's not about being poor, it's about FEELING poor." The Kara and Sunwell split wasn't a good thing.

Accessibility never meant, "here's your welfare gear". Accessibility is attunements go bye, bye. Accessibility is 3hr waits to get dungeon group isn't hardcore it's stupid, invent a means to cut it down to 30 minutes. Yay! The various methods devs used to slow content consumption which was a detriment to playing the game itself.

3 hours for dungeons ? Rofl never expericed this during whole vanilla or TBC. yes kara andWunwell split was good thing. Players had tons of fun so yeah it was good thing for the game bad thing for profit. Never had problems doing attuments and only way how devs slower progression was trough gear which was again good thing becouse it made whole game matter and created yourney even for new players. Good to know that you are one of the players what are true reason why this game suck now.