Blizzard’s game director on WOW, Том Chilton, reflects on a decsde of MMO dominance and how Blizzard's experiment created a pop culture icon.
How many game developers can say they created something that impacted the world to the point of being a major plot point in not one, but two different comedic shows in the US? That could help inspire an entire web series (that in turn helped launch and popularise the concept of web TV shows), change the way other game developers think about rewarding players and become so synonymous with its genre that it’s basically interchangeable with it.
Make no mistake, World Of Warcraft has been one of the most extraordinary gaming stories of its decadelong life span and as its latest expansion, Warlords Of Draenor, lands we thought we would sit down with its game director Tom Chilton to reflect on the last ten years and what it has all meant to him.
“It’s awesome,” he enthuses. “It’s still makes me beam with pride every time I see World Of Warcraft being mentioned, whether it’s on The Big Bang Theory or whatever, it’s really cool when that stuff happens and a lot of times it’s really funny. In general, we’re very appreciative and lucky that World Of Warcraft has had that place in pop culture. That’s just a happy outcome of having a game that worked out.”
Speaking to Chilton at this auspicious time, it’s interesting to find him express with such humility the way WOW managed to take over the world. Surely there was more to this than things having just “worked out”, as he put it? At a time when developers talk of ten year plans, was Blizzard thinking that far ahead as it began this epic adventure?
“We had a variety of different ideas for what expansions we could create, but we were very much going with the flow and flying by the seat of our pants, because Blizzard had never made an MMO before and it was still very uncertain what was going to happen”, Chilton admitted. “It’s onlymore recently that we’ve been able to start to look up a little bit more and look out into the distance.”
And so begins to emerge a picture of World Of Warcraft that is not the polished, corporate behemoth we have come to see it as today, but rather a small team of developers working overtime to establish a new genre. All those years ago, as Blizzard looked to build on the success of its titles, Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, the MMO felt like a field it could really make an impact on. However, it remained a foreign land to the ragtag band of developers from across Blizzard who joined to finish the original game back in 2004.
“I came to Blizzard to work onWarcraft very much as aWarcraft fan from the Warcraft RTS games and there was a lot of influence and a lot of interplay between the RTS teamand the World Of Warcraft team. Back then, when I came on board, the company was small enough for us to all fit on one floor of a smaller building than we have right now”, Chilton explains. “Pretty much the entire design team from Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, the base game and basically all of the design team that was still at Blizzard from Starcraft were working on World Of Warcraft.”
Since then, though, Blizzard hasn’t been sitting on its hands, as Chilton explained earlier, there were always ideas for ways to build this world further, if not a firmplan. Quite apart from the five expansions the game has enjoyed over the last decade, each bringing with it new quests, dungeons and stories to Azeroth and beyond, we’ve also seen the graphics and models of WOW evolve too with each release. We asked Chilton for an insight into how these massive new extensions are put together.
“We always try to think what dungeons would really make sense with the zones that we’re creating”, he explains. “Are there hooks into Warcraft lore we can leverage that feel like they would be really exciting for players to explore and experience? Then we continue to move down the line from there. Once we have a sense of what the dungeon is, what it’s about and who’s in it, then we start thinking about what bosses might be in it. What are some characters that really drive why that dungeon would exist? What are they about? What are their goals? What are their motivations? What are their personalities? What are they like? And then we start to come with the actual mechanics that make sense to go with that boss. At that point we drill down more and more in terms of what the great gameplay experience is on a moment-to-moment basis that really helps to realise that greater fantasy.”
A different approach is needed for the grander gameplay and world enhancements that Blizzard wants to explore, however, as the team is far more reactive to player needs than you might expect. “Interestingly, while we are able to look a head much more effectively now in terms of game content and themes of future expansions, we do that much less so with game features”, Chilton reveals. “With game features, we very much tend to approach them an expansion at a time, because it’s very difficult to understand and predict the way the player base is going to evolve and understand what the needs of the player base are going to be.”
And by player base he was keen to clarify that meant not only current players but also those who may have walked away from WOW in the past or those who’ve never played Warcraft before and who Blizzard wants to bring into the fold. “It’s hard to know how long they are going to be interested in doing daily quests, or dungeons before they want something else. What is that something else going to be and what’s the change of pace going to be? It’s very difficult we find to predict significantly in advance. We have a couple of ideas for marquis features we can do in the future, but it’s difficult to say exactly when those might line up.”
As an example of this, World Of Warcraft has become significantly easier to access and navigate, as a direct response to an ageing audience who want to get into their games faster as well as perhaps some newer, more impatient gamers used to the streamlined lobbies of COD and Halo. “We find that our players want to be able to interact with the game more casually now than they have in the past”, admits Chilton. “So even though they have very nostalgic notions of the hardcore past, that’s not how a lot of the player base wants to play the game or interact with the game anymore. That’s one way in which the audience has changed.
“Also, the audience has now in a lot of ways experienced the core gameplay of World Of Warcraft and there’s an amount of it that they really like and appreciate that feels kind of like home to them, and at the same time they have an appetite for doing some new stuff. So one of the biggest challenges is trying to identify on an expansion-by-expansion basis what the new stuff is and exactly how to focus on that and how to make that a good new experience.”
But it’s a balancing act that has proved divisive at times, not least because terms such as ‘casual’ tend to be received with hostility by gamers who consider themselves hardcore fans of WOW. Chilton wanted to make sure his understanding of the phrase was clear to us. “I would definitely want to clarify that accessibility and being able to interact with the game more casually, doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t want a challenge and those too often get confused with each other”, he tells us. “There’s the amount of time you spend and then there’s the degree of challenge andwe’ve actually gone out of our way over the years to servicemore of those different levels of challenge. That’s why we have essentially four different difficulties of raids now. When World Of Warcraft first launched we only had ‘pretty hard’.”
It’s a tough balance to strike, not least in the area of team building, where players gather to take on new quests together. Once upon a time it would have meant organically finding allies in Azeroth and leading them to the mission at hand, but now it can bemore automated. Great for jumping into a game, but perhaps losing some of the social element that helped to make World Of Warcraft such a phenomenon. It is one area where technology has trumped tradition.
“As match making mechanics have progressed over time people have much less of a tolerance for waiting around to get people together for group content, so that’s definitely one of the trickier things for us to balance as we go forward, because we want to achieve a balance of cohesiveness between the groups and social interaction within the groups while also making creating those groups easier”, explains Chilton. “Fortunately the evolution we’ve had in terms of cross-server technology is really helping in that regard. When you think back to World Of Warcraft ten years ago and absolutely nothing was cross server, when we first launched the game we didn’t even have the ability for players to transfer servers; you had to make a completely new character on a different server if you wanted to move.”
But there are those who still pine for the old days, thinking fondly of the long hard slogs through Stranglethorn Vale to Booty Bay, the challenge of the single-difficulty raids and so on. While Chilton understands people looking back ten years and thinking fondly of the early days of WOW, he tends to think such memories are more rose-tinted than people think and that if they really went back, they would realise how much they take new features for granted. “I think what a lot of people do is they confuse the emotional state they were in as a gamer, as it relates to the game at that time, with the actual gameplay of the game. When the game is new to them, everything is new and they’re discovering things for the first time and the rest of the audience is discovering things for the first time, there’s a different sort of energy and drive that players have that makes them a lot more willing to put up with hurdles and crap, essentially, to deal with that stuff and still have an enjoyable time; have a great time. You can’t put people back in that greater frame of reference. You can’t make things the way they used to be in the large-scale sense. So, that’s why we see that. People often want to play that kind of environment but when they do they realise, ‘Oh, wait, no I’ve already been there and done that and it’s not as good as it was when I first played it.’”
One of the biggest changes to World Of Warcraft was the Cataclysm expansion, which figuratively and literally reshaped Azeroth from that point forward. It was a massive moment in the lifetime of the game. The way in which it made changes to the early experience of the game proved controversial, however, and speaking to Chilton now he seemed to have mixed feelings about how successful the move had been.
Why did it happen at all? “We really felt like the quality of the questing experience had improved really dramatically and that was in a lot of ways evidenced by when people were referring their friends to the game what we often heard was, ’if you just get through those first 60 levels, the game gets really good after that.’ That was something we didn’t feel like new players should have to do. We didn’t want them to feel that they had to put up with 60 levels of lower-quality content to get into the more current, better stuff.”
That seems reasonable enough, but he wonders if players were as aware of this disparity as the development team was in the end. “In retrospect I don’t know that the time we spent to do that was worth it for me purely from a ’how much did it benefit the game’ standpoint. Certainly the quality of the questing in those older zones improved significantly and it’s nice that we have that now, but it cost us in terms of the amount of time and effort we spent on the end game at the time and our continuing audience definitely felt that.”
Which brings us neatly to the latest expansion, tying innicely with the tenth anniversary of the game and also acting asabit of a throwback to some classic Warcraft themes. “What we really did think about when we were working on Mists Of Pandaria, we knew it was a kind of departure from a lot of the traditional end-of-the-world Warcraft stuff and more about adventure and exploration of a new place. After that we wanted to get back to some very traditional Warcraft themes. That and the fact it feels like a bit of a throwback is very deliberate, it’s just that lining up with the tenth anniversary is kind of a coincidence.”
After a decade of dominance that has seen its subscribers drop a little from their 12-million-strong high, we couldn’t help but wonder how World Of Warcraft will end. Much as JK Rowling was said to have the final page of Harry Potter written, we asked Chilton if a finale was planned and hidden in a drawer somewhere at Blizzard.
“Well, I can’t say there is. I wish we could in some ways, but then it’s nice to know that World Of Warcraft evolves with its player base, because being an MMO that has players actively participating in the world itself means the players are such a huge part of the story. We kind of need to go where it happens to take us. And we also consider that World Of Warcraft isn’t really a plot-driven game. It’s more of a game about setting and so to have a very specific plot line with a very specific ending is in some ways antithetical to what our game is.”
So, for now at least, there seems to be no end in sight for World Of Warcraft. It’s established itself in the pro-gaming community and there’s greater connectivity around the world today than a decade ago. Here’s to the next ten years.