According to Street, when he came onto the project the class only had three moves in its repertoire: the core abilities of Plague Strike, Blood Strike, and Death Strike. Street only had a working understanding of World of Warcraft, Death Knight lore, and a veteran team of class designers. Kevin had been there forever, I think from the very beginning of World of Warcraft. They knew how to build anything in the tool. They had a pretty good idea of what would work and what didn't.
So I would pitch some ideas and they'd be like, 'You know, we tried that and had these problems. Having a little more understanding of what the game engine was capable of and what would be buggy versus what would be easy to build would have saved us a ton of time," says Street.
A few months later, the World of Warcraft team would get another new transplant, a game designer by the name of Ion Hazzikostas, who joined to implement encounters. For WoW fans, that name is rather familiar these days. Hazzikostas is the current game director of World of Warcraft, leading the development of this year's expansion Battle for Azeroth. That was the culmination of the Wrathgate. We needed to fill the entire Undercity with fire, marauding undead, and enemies," Hazzikostas explains.
So it was really just hitting the ground running. I got to Blizzard, learned the tools over the first few days. One week later, I was putting stuff into our beta builds that then I could see discussed on fansites literally three days later.
It blew my mind. That's the first time it felt real to me. And it's just been an awesome trip ever since. But as these two new designers were coming onto World of Warcraft, one veteran was rising into more executive-level work at the studio.
When Allen Adham left Blizzard, Rob Pardo had become the vice president of game design at Blizzard, tasked with overseeing several projects. When Wrath of the Lich King began development, Blizzard finally had enough lead designers that Pardo could move further into management and away from design.
Kaplan's title on Wrath of the Lich King was new in the company, though it was really just a new classification of the work lead designers were already doing within Blizzard.
Lich King really shipped under Jeff Kaplan as game director and that was first time we ever used that title in the company," says Pardo. Everything before then I think was catch up, catch up, figure out how this works, learn, learn, learn. Another step that illustrated the beginnings of modern day Blizzard was Street's willingness to speak directly to players. Prior to his time on the team, the World of Warcraft developers were very quiet, with players just talking to the community team.
But Street wanted to build a connection. At the time, it was like Eyonix, Drysc, and Nethaera. Chilton and Kaplan shared a corner office and I went in one day and I'm like, 'Hey, what do you guys think about me getting a Blue forum account? Street became 'Ghostcrawler,' the mythic Blizzard developer that would talk to the community. The Community Managers for the game were great, but Ghostcrawler had the answers to your questions on hand and he was willing to answer them.
It was something completely new to players. At some point Blizzard made the corporate decision that we're not going to have developers posting on the forums anymore, just Community members. And so I stopped at that point. Fortunately for me, Twitter became a thing around the same time, so I transitioned pretty smoothly from the Blizzard forum account to my own personal Twitter account and kept up the conversation. Today, Blizzard has a very strong social media presence, talking to players on Twitch streams, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and official forum posts.
But back in the day, Ghostcrawler was an oasis to some players and an avatar to hate for others. After his disappearance at the end of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, the formerly heroic Paladin and eponymous Lich King Arthas resurfaces in the icy wasteland of Icecrown, in the continent of Northrend.
The expansion Wrath of the Lich King leaned hard on the culture and mythology of Scandinavia, with many allusions to Vikings and Old Norse myths. Players could tackle the ghosts and undead shades of the Vykrul or help the sea-faring Tuskarr in their fishing villages. The Death Knight was introduced as a Hero class in this expansion, starting at level 55 instead of level 1.
The concentrated design effort of the team went into making sure that the Death Knight was a success. It wasn't just the first new class, it was also a litmus test for future classes. It's going to affect every system in the game. It will cause us to add class specific items, quests, [non-player characters], spells, and abilities. It will also make the game more complex to balance in [player-vs-player], raids, etc. Adding a new class was a massive feature with tons of potentially negative ramifications.
The Death Knight starting area featured a robust story that involved your fledging death knight pillaging a town called the Scarlet Enclave from the floating fortress of the Ebon Hold.
As the death knight army pushes into the town, the world itself changes from a small base camp to an army foothold. Scarlet Armies defend against your attacks, only to be gone in the next quest. In term of storytelling, it allowed Blizzard to push forward the idea that the player's actions mattered. The technology is called "phasing", replacing one version of in-game reality with another.
According to Patrick Dawson, the technology is essentially all server trickery. Everything that you see, all of it exists at the same time in the same place. This actually is a big technical challenge, because you can have in one phase there be this tremendous war between the Alliance and the Horde and in another phase it's this peaceful, tranquil area because maybe the war is over," says Dawson. So we're actually really careful about that from a tactical aspect-how we did phasing-because it really was a client visibility issue.
You wouldn't know what was happening in the other phases, but everything was still happening on the server in parallel. Hazzikostas notes that while phasing is interesting technology in terms of storytelling it does have a few issues. Players in other phases can't interact, because they're technically on different instances. If you're on one part of a quest with phasing while I'm on another, we might as well be on different servers. And there is a coherent narrative, that is the backbone of this world.
But also the inherently MMO nature of the experience. We never want to stray too far away from these shared social multiplayer roots. Early on, there's a lot of widespread use of this new technology focused more on the power that gave us without fully understanding the downsides," he explains. In Patch 3. Players could now set which of the three roles they could fill—Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer—when they queued up on the service. The focus was streamlined to just five-man dungeons and Blizzard introduced a rewards system that incentivized players to run at least one random dungeon a day.
The Dungeon Finder also became cross-server, so queueing for a dungeon would connect you with players across your entire battlegroup, which was a rough collection of game servers. For players, this seemed like a solid change, but not a major one. Behind-the-scenes for Blizzard though, this was a major shift in how the game's server had operated until now. The tech team had to rethink how player parties were created and shatter their existing operation procedures.
Still, the team felt it was worth it in order to make things easier on its players. For example, a party was stored originally on what we would call our world simulation process.
That process itself had all the information about the party. Well, when you have people from multiple servers, you can't really do that. You need that party to live somewhere else," Dawson carefully explains to me. And that was a monumental effort. That was crazy. It was it was a pretty big re-architecture of the system to actually spread the work out from making it on a single realm to more of a distributed model.
Another new addition and major quality-of-life change was the addition of Dual Talent Specialization, known in the community as "Dual Spec. Each specialization determined what your abilities and general focus was: the Protection Paladin was a tank, the Retribution Paladin focused on DPS, and the Holy Paladin brought healing to a party.
Up until Wrath, you could switch specializations, but it was a fairly intensive process. You would have to return to a city and pay a fee to reset all of your talents, then you would have to choose your new talents known as "respec" , set all of your new abilities in their proper place on your action bar, and make sure you were wearing the correct gear.
It was fairly tedious, something that wasn't lost among the most avid players on the team. So you would have to quest as Arms and then he would switch to Protection to run dungeons, which is a huge pain. So he and I kind of were thinking about the idea of the dual spec, rather than being locked in," Street says. Rather than being a Protection Warrior with a shield, you were just kind of whatever you needed to be at the time.
It felt far away from the role-playing roots of the game. Which I know players hate to hear because for them, it's a huge convenience feature and it's hard for them to understand sometimes why a designer would have mixed feelings about it.
There were smaller changes as well. Wrath of the Lich King introduced a new vehicle system. It worked somewhat like player mounts, but they were temporary and could be used in various quests and dungeons. You'd ride a siege tank in Wintergrasp or Ulduar, or fly a dragon in The Oculus. It was a way to increase the number of experiences available to a player in World of Warcraft.
So of course, Blizzard's developers went about finding out where else the technology could be used. It doesn't have to be like a actual vehicle does it? A moment was quickly forgotten, but was fun experimentation for me at the time as a learning tool," says Hazzikostas, describing a Doomguard boss that would pick your fellow soldiers up, drain their life, and throw them away. It looked really cool to the player, but it was actually an implementation of the new vehicle system.
Pardo describes this general ethos in Blizzard for seeing where new technology can be repurposed as "ninja-ing things in. Many features and experiences players fondly remember were created by taping bits of the game together and hoping it would it fly. Burning Crusade was successful, but Wrath of the Lich King utterly surpassed it. The game's storytelling improved and it helped to be finishing the story of Warcraft 3's most infamous character.
Those who had enjoyed Warcraft 3 saw Arthas' fall from grace, with the culling of the plagued city of Stratholme, it was his first step to becoming the Lich King. Players could not only face Arthas in the Icecrown Citadel raid, but also see him making his presence felt during questing. As Pardo noted earlier, Wrath was the WoW team hitting its stride to the tune of 12 million subscribers. That was its all-time peak in terms of subscriber numbers. The World of Warcraft team had other plans.
Instead of just adding another continent, the focus of the next expansion was on the original Azeroth.
Flying mounts had been a wonderful feature since Burning Crusade, but you couldn't use them in Vanilla WoW because the terrain wasn't built to accommodate it. In addition, some of the old content was looking a bit rough; the team had grown in size, experience, and resources since WoW's launch. It just looks stupid. There's some weird quests, some broken quests. It just didn't feel like the more epic storytelling moments we were able to do in Lich King.
And so the idea was to go back and fix the old world," says Street about the early genesis of the idea. According to Hazzikostas, the team began by looking at the entire map of Azeroth and color-coding each zone: Green, Yellow, or Red.
Green zones didn't need much in the way of changes. Yellow zones were going to get tweaks in terrain, geometry, and quest lines. Finally, the Red zones were complete teardowns and redoes; everything was razed to the ground to build anew. Street notes that when the team began, it started on Silverpine Forest's level area.
After reworking that zone though, the team was so happy with it that the desire for fixes grew. Everyone wanted a chance to fix the game. The team is a group of perfectionists and so there was a lot of desire to make deeper cuts," says Hazzikostas. And so what started out as a series of surgical projects ended up with probably redoing 70 percent of the world in a very fundamental way. And so that was redoing 60 levels worth of content, redoing 70 percent of the entire [outdoor environments] from , while also making five brand-new zones for leveling players from 80 to 85, and the new dungeons, new raids, and everything else.
That was a tremendous undertaking. The art team was firmly on board, because it was a chance to make things look much better. Technology had improved and Blizzard's environment artists had years of building elaborate structures and zones like Tempest Keep, Icecrown Citadel, Crystalsong Forest, or Storm Peaks. Cataclysm was a way to bring that expertise to bear on past work, and the art team jumped at the chance.
That brought a lot of excitement to it. And as we started to jam more ideas, that kind of gained momentum," says principal artist Jimmy Lo. I think with WoW it turned out as this kind of stylized, timeless art style where it aged very well. It never really got outdated. The Barrens were split in half, with the Horde and Alliance fighting over one half. Thousand Needles, formerly a desert area of jutting spires, became a vast lake with some islands.
Hillsbrad Foothills, a constant war zone on PVP servers, actually fell completely under Horde control. The Dwarven starting area of Dun Morogh received a new city called Tinkertown for starting Gnome players, and the Trolls moved to the Echo Isles of the coast of Durotar. Blizzard cut, chopped, painted, and reimagined its old world. There were some technical challenges with the Cataclysmic changes. The developers were drastically reshaping the world, but players were already living in it.
If a player logged out on top of a mountain in Vanilla or Burning Crusade, they could log back in during Cataclysm to find themselves in a crater.
Dawson addresses the team's fixes to this situation, noting that he left briefly to help the Overwatch team. Players who would be in dramatically different places just woke up in the game's capital cities, ready to explore this new world. Because if you logged out at the top of the Loch Modan dam what does that mean? And so, Deathwing awoke. He was given the task with protecting the firmament of Azeroth itself from outside threats, but ultimately found himself driven mad by the whispers of the Old Gods.
Neltharion died and in his place was the armored tyrant Deathwing. Deathwing's flight sundered the world, justifying the world changes that Blizzard's team had made. The goblins of the Bilgewater Cartel joined the Horde as a playable race, while the lost people of Gilneas returned as the werewolf-like Worgen.
Questing from level 1-to was an entirely new experience, while elder game players got to look forward to new zones added to the fringes of the existing continents of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.
These zones included a redone Mount Hyjal and the underwater zone of Vashj'ir. One zone was Deathwing's home within the elemental plane, known as Deepholm. I worked on it. I was able to do some conceptual paintings for it and paint some textures.
It was a very cool collaborative effort to create that whole look. You know, I still remember painting the textures for the gems. Other artists came in and they were looking at what I was doing. What if all the rocks were like floating? Cataclysm was mostly a winner, but there were some rough patches to the experience.
The rework of the old world was grand to see, but the new zones were dotted about Azeroth. They felt connected to the world, but they really didn't feel connected to each other.
Dungeons also became hard again. World of Warcraft has always had an ebb and flow in terms of its dungeon content. Five-man dungeons in classic World of Warcraft were challenging and long. Burning Crusade dungeons were more compact experiences offering some challenges for players, but being rather doable with proper planning. Wrath of the Lich King's dungeons were markedly easier, shifting always from careful crowd control to a faster, more bombastic style of play.
Tanks would grab a room of enemies and the DPS would use its best area-of-effect abilities. There were Heroic Dungeons, max-level versions with harder mechanics first introduced in Burning Crusade, but WoW's designers didn't really like the shift in play style. So Cataclysm shifted back to a harder style of play. We knew that having new dungeons in Cataclysm where players were appropriately-geared would make them much more challenging. I also gave the team the direction: let's go back to 'finishing a dungeon is an accomplishment.
Maybe this is something I want. Very, very difficult. If you used Dungeon Finder to find a group, your success rate was very small. In hindsight, he believes the mistake wasn't in having difficult dungeon content. It was not having something for more casual dungeon runners and questing players, many of whom had joined the game during Wrath of the Lich King.
Many solo quest chains had their endings in dungeons; if you were more of a story-focused player, a difficult dungeon experience could be intensely frustrating. What the game needed was dungeons for more casual players and more hardcore ones.
They had nothing they could do in Cataclysm. They would get to max level and burn out of the game, because there's nothing for them to do," he admits.
These features would offer something easier and harder, catered to players who liked that kind of content. Not every promised addition was delivered. It was meant to be the second leg of a storyline that began in the Throne of the Tides five-man dungeon in Vashj'ir, with a scheduled release in Patch 4. The team even put some work in on the dungeon itself, creating new technology for some of its effects.
I remember we were blue skying that one. There were a lot of high-concept ones, but that was cool because we actually ended up working with engineering.
We wanted this kind of underwater feel and this idea of water being parted where you see a wall of water that was held back by magic. We did a conceptual piece and have a cool engineering department; they're oftentimes inspired by art. So they ended up developing this cool new water shader that we utilize and now have within our tools moving forward," remembers Lo.
Ultimately, the dungeon was cancelled though. According to former Blizzard designer Greg Street, the team just didn't have time to keep working on the dungeon and ship it out without something else suffering. We were really worried it was going to disappoint players," says Street. He acknowledges that players were unhappy with the cancellation, but he chalks that up to heady expectations of what the Abyssal Maw would've been. Street believes it would've turned out closer to the Ruby Sanctum in Wrath of the Lich King; a quick experience with reused content.
After several fairly dark and heavy expansions, putting players up against Illidan, Arthas, and Deathwing, Blizzard wanted to try something more lighthearted. Back in Warcraft 3, the studio introduced the Pandaren, a panda-like race that was more of a joke than anything else. The race offered a new opportunity though, a chance to explore a different look and aesthetic than players had become used to. Getting back to a vibe of exploration and adventure after a series of world-ending threats," Hazzikostas tells me.
We had been looking for an opportunity to fit them into the game at some point and so decided to kind of double down. Once again, Blizzard's art team had a chance to really cut loose and try out new ideas. Pandaria was a whole new continent featuring clear influences from Chinese art, architecture, mythology, and pop culture.
Until WoW Classic was announced, there were hugely popular private servers that illegally emulated World of Warcraft as it existed in But now Blizzard is creating an official version that it plans to support with continual updates. WoW Classic is an almost exact recreation of World of Warcraft as it existed in , just before the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out. That means combat will be much slower and more lethal, quests will be less intuitive and dynamic, and getting around the world will take a hell of a lot longer.
WoW Classic is built using patch 1. The reason for this specific patch, Blizzard has said, is because this patch represents the vanilla version of WoW at its most feature-complete, stable, and well balanced. Blizzard wants to recreate the experience of playing WoW between and by releasing updates in Classic on roughly the same schedule as the original.
The idea is that these updates will introduce new dungeons and core features but won't tinker with specifics like item or ability balance—which will stay the same over the course of WoW Classic's life, rooted in patch 1. Blizzard has plans to roll out six phases of updates that will each introduce new raids, dungeons, items and equipment, and PvP features.
These six phases are as follows:. The world events associated with these dungeons and raids, like the Opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, will also happen. So your dreams of being a fabled Scarab Lord can still be realized. What comes after is anyone's guess, but I'm personally hoping Blizzard announces plans to also add The Burning Crusade and the other expansions that followed, similar to EverQuest progression servers. One thing to keep in mind is that while WoW Classic will roll out updates in similar pattern to its original release, all equipment, items, and abilities will mirror their final 1.
For example, the Tier 2 Helm of Wrath won't undergo constant stat revisions like it did between patches 1. Instead, no matter what phase you finally get the helmet, its stats will always be derived from its 1. With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives.
Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours.
It was a good demo. April 26 - World of Warcraft open beta test launches in China under licensee The9, [5] [6] with , players signing up in the first hour of registration [7]. May 11 - The Leeroy Jenkins video becomes popular [8]. August - World of Warcraft reaches 4 million subscribers [9].
September 15 - Corrupted Blood incident [11]. November 16 - World of Warcraft is featured in a question on the game show Jeopardy! November 23 - WoW Insider launches. Sepetember 22 - The game is brought up in an episode of Stargate: Atlantis. November - World of Warcraft reaches 7. This was not quite the case for everyone, as players who had not yet bought the expansion still had the original login until they upgraded. January 16 - The Burning Crusade expansion released.
July 8 - Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition released. T talking about his Night Elf Mohawk. In July 29, a magnitude 5. This login screen debuted in patch 3. It is the second longest-running such screen for the game at, days. As opposed to Burning Crusade , everyone was given this login, if they had the expansion or not. Some players did not care for the dragon roaring from this screen, giving them away to family when they tried to log in discreetly.
January - World of Warcraft reaches 10 million subscribers globally [17]. June 30 - The original key-fob Authenticators first become available in the Blizzard Store.
For the first few months the stocks sell out very quickly. August 5 - Recruit-A-Friend program introduced [19]. September 15 - Wrath of the Lich King release date announced to be November 13, October - The " Additional instances cannot be launched " issue begins on high-population servers. This continues to be an intermittent problem until after the dungeon finder is introduced in patch 3. September - World of Warcraft reaches 11 million subscribers [21]. November - World of Warcraft commercials featuring Ozzy Osbourne.
November 13 - Wrath of the Lich King expansion released. During the countdown to the Battle. While getting an in-game pet has been fairly common since, this was a first to players at the time.
Either by or in - the " Ghostcrawler promised me a pony" saying became popular on the forums and around WoW sites, but it's hard to pinpoint when. Late April - a player is banned for exploiting the game after using a mistakenly-mailed Game Master artifact called [ Martin Fury ] [22]. September 2 - Faction Change service offered. October 12 - Announcement that all World of Warcraft accounts must be merged with Battle. October 27 - Race Change service offered. November 11, 12 - The deadline passes for account mergers with Battle.
In China, bones are covered up as with this Forsaken. This led to the need for a massive graphical overhaul before Wrath of the Lich King could be approved. The Cataclysm Loading Screen debuted in Patch 4. January 5 - The Plagueworks of Icecrown Citadel opens.
June 22 - Patch 3. June 30 - Cataclysm Beta Test begins. July 6 - Blizzard announces their intention to have Real ID names visible when posting on the official forums. July 9 - Due the overwhelming flood of criticism, Blizzard rescinds their plan to put Real ID names on the official forums [28]. Many were curious what the effect would be on the player base, but the implementation of the Real ID system ensured that players playing Starcraft could keep up with their friends in World of Warcraft.
October - Wowpedia fork. October 4 - Cataclysm release date announced to be December 7, [30]. October 7 - World of Warcraft reaches 12 million players [31] for the first time, and the all time record.
Over the next couple weeks, most of the active users follow. November 1 - Elemental Unrest Phase 1 begins.
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