Diving deep into World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Within Blizzard, every game has a codename. Diablo was known internally as Hydra. StarCraft II was Medusa. World Of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King didn’t get anything as dramatic. Wrath Of The Lich King was known as WOW Expansion 3. On December 7, Blizzard launches the follow up: WOW Expansion 4, now known to the world as Cataclysm.

Cataclysm is a well-thought-out, well- planned, well-presented disaster. It uses the geologically violent return of a long-awaited dragon to rip apart the continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and rebuild them from scratch. Cities are remodeled, rivers diverted, zones re-quested. And it’s the best thing that could ever happen to the world’s most successful game. Why did Blizzard decide to destroy the world? How did it reach this point? And what does it mean that more than 12 million players are delighted to see their home from home torn apart?

The answer begins with those prosaic codenames, at Blizzard’s plush development campus in Irvine, California. The company relocated to a purpose-built, multi-story, multi-building space in 2008. Already, it appears to have outgrown the space: valets double-stack the cars in the car park, desks are jammed into every space possible, and there’s a steady stream of non-industry service visitors who ask the security guards: “What do you make here, anyway?”

Answer: the most successful videogame in the world.

The World Of Warcraft team has been making World Of Warcraft for ten years. While many of the early design leads have moved on to other projects (most noticeable has been the slow drip of talent across to Blizzard’s next-gen MMOG team), the core team has remained in place nearly forever, and it maintains its size and scale. Over the last ten years, Blizzard has been consumed by the production and maintenance of World Of Warcraft – growing beyond measure, pushing all art and development resources possible into expansions and updates. Now, the WOW team is still the biggest Blizzard employs, but has to share the company with many other teams, working on StarCraft, Diablo and the company’s next generation of games.

What the WOW team has is experience. With two full expansions under its belt, it has learnt a lot about making an MMOG. Few developers understand the mechanics, playerbase, technology and art of a game like the WOW team. And few teams have had the same opportunities to test theories and practicalities.

Of the nearly 150 staff on the WOW team, the advocate and project manager is J Allen Brack, the game’s lead producer. Articulate and precise, he’s a veteran of Sony Online Entertainment who joined Blizzard in January 2006, as the WOW team was struggling with two competing headaches: how to build entirely new content for the game’s first expansion, while continuing with live content updates and new patches.

As Brack said in an interview for World Of Warcraft’s five-year anniversary: “The team had a good idea of what they wanted to do; they just didn’t have the best process for how they could go about doing it. The team was inexperienced in working on an expansion and patches at the same time. They only had one mode.” The team that had spent so long building World Of Warcraft was struggling to come to terms with the idea of running a subscription business alongside an ambitious annual expansion release schedule.

Today, the story is very different. The 60-odd developers that launched WOW have grown to a team of 150, practiced in the art of multitasking. Working methods have mutated and evolved, new disciplines and roles created, experiments and assumptions tested against a vast population of players. The WOW of today is a very different game to the WOW of 2005. And the team at Blizzard, a group of people that has created what must surely be the world’s most profitable game, is about to destroy it and start over. Why?

Brack explains that the beginnings of the Cataclysm came out of the early concepts for Wrath Of The Lich King: the Death Knight class. The Death Knight let players level up an entirely new character, with new abilities, a new resource mechanic, and an entirely new style of play. “We were getting towards the end of Wrath Of The Lich King development,” Brack says, “and we didn’t necessarily know how well the new class was going to come out. We knew that we didn’t want to do a new class, but we got really excited about doing two new races – one for the Horde, and one for the Alliance.”

The WOW team had already been down this path in the Burning Crusade expansion, which added the Draenei (bizarre space-goat things with customizable beards) and the Blood Elves (magic-addled elvish dropouts). In Burning Crusade, all-new starting areas were added for the new races, but at level 20 they were kicked out into the old world, to continue down the same well-trodden quest paths.

“Doing two new races and building a new level-one-to-20 experience would be great. But then you have the level-20-through-60 experience that players have done many times,” says Brack. “We realised that if we did two new races, we’d have to do an entirely new one-to-60 experience, or create an entirely parallel one-to-60 experience. But we had to do something.”

That something came from some of the old Warcraft lore. Similar discussions were taking place within the story team, trying to figure out what story the expansion should tell. “The story and features have equal weights at the beginning of the process,” Brack explains. “That’s when we started to narrow in on Deathwing [a disgraced and demented dragon which has been licking its wounds underground for decades] as a potential villain.”

The stage was set. The idea of a parallel one-to-60 levelling experience was dropped. Instead, the WOW team would rebuild the entire world.

Development began on a test. The Blizzard team began with an old zone, Darkshore, and began to cut it up and destroy it. If Deathwing was to burst through the world and bring destruction, then the team had best figure out how to show the wreckage. Darkshore was chosen for good reason: the quests there are mostly tedious, with one major quest town to the north, and a seemingly endless hand-in run that has to be repeated multiple times along a road running parallel to the beach. Once seen as moody and atmospheric, it’s devastatingly dull to play through today.

The rebuilt Darkshore was a failure, albeit an interesting one: the team went to town on the destruction, carving great chasms and craters into the land. But it made it near impossible to navigate, with players routinely falling into pits and struggling to get out.

But what worked were the new quests. World Of Warcraft’s quests are maligned, and with good reason. One of your first tasks when starting as a new gnome is to kill troggs, 14 at a time. Then kill boars in batches of 12. And then retrieve six boar ribs for a meal. It’s hardly the stuff to inspire gripping anecdotes, and it’s no wonder that Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has pointed out that 75 per cent of WOW players never make it past level ten.

But how the quest team within WOW builds and designs its quests has radically changed since it worked on the Burning Crusade expansion. Now, there’s far more emphasis on items and actions over straight fauna killing. A simple emphasis on items and context-sensitive widgets in the gameworld means that WOW now has a broad vocabulary. Use dynamite on mammoth to receive mammoth meat. Use flare-gun on town to activate steam-powered helicopter bombing run. What’s more, quests used to be dumped on players, 20 at a time, as they entered a new town. Now, they’ll be given out piecemeal – completing one opens the next, which opens the next.

Players progress through mini-stories, or giant lore moments. They might free a village of sentient seals from attacks by angry Vikings, or equip the undead Forsaken with a new plague for an epic betrayal. And, thanks to ‘phasing’, a way for the designers to display major changes in the world following a questline, players can actually see their effects. In Wrath Of The Lich King, Blizzard nailed phasing: when a pivotal battle plays out in a cutscene, the players are confronted with the destruction wrought. All of that new technology and design learning had to be integrated, otherwise the old zones would become a laughing stock.

The new zones in Cataclysm are a fascinating balance. Play through the new gnome starting area, Dun Morogh, and you’ll see real progress. Gnomes now begin by escaping from their irradiated city, Gnomeregan. Then they start pushing back the trogg forces that still remain – by blowing up a mechanized army, by sneaking into their old towns or by riding into battle with overpowered leaders. The changes in pace, delivery and tone are dramatic. The new early WOW zones are funnier, cleverer, and more engaging.

But they’re not as ravaged as you’d expect. In Dun Morogh, there isn’t an inkling of Deathwing’s ascent. Instead, a few towns have moved, and new zones have opened up. But there aren’t great cracks in the ground, or vast volcanoes. It’s calmer, more serene.

As Brack puts it: “We’re not changing the things that matter. The signature quests are still there. The things you didn’t enjoy, the times when you’re asked to kill 12 gnolls – we think there’s going to be far fewer of those. That’s the goal. Take the things that you don’t remember out, and replace it with something better. Keep the things you really had fun with, the signature quests.”

The old zones’ revamp is just part of the story. Veterans will quickly head to the new zones, which add a further five feathers on to WOW’s level cap. The new zones are deliberately, hilariously gimmicky. Vashj’ir is set almost entirely underwater, with a few subterranean caves, and a sunken city. The new phasing tech is used heavily: players enter the zone via a giant octopus which strikes down the ship they’re travelling on. The first quest hub is the upturned carcass of the boat, containing a pocket of air.

Uldum is WOW versus Egypt, stone cats and pyramids bumping up against the ancient guardians of Blizzard’s MMOG, the Titans. Mount Hyjal has been available in various raids and dungeons before, but here, finally, players get to poke around the site of the cataclysmic battle at the end of Warcraft III. Deepholm is a truly vast underground cavern, Deathwing’s former home. It also contains a truly spectacular image – giant crystals suspended in mid-air, forming a pillar to the cavern’s roof, hundreds of meters above.

The sum total of this development effort: 3,000 new quests, with two thirds of them devoted to ‘old world’ content. Wrath Of The Lich King shipped with just over 1,000.

What’s more, these new quests are testing well. The WOW development team includes a ‘strike team’, comprised of a mix of hardcore and casual gamers, that plays through the game without input from the developers. It meets to give feedback, but WOW developers are not allowed to listen the criticism directly. “We have someone in the room who we can trust to pass on the feedback,” says Brack. “For Wrath Of The Lich King, that was Jay Wilson, the game director on Diablo 3. For Cataclysm, Jeff Kaplan [now working on Blizzard’s next-generation MMOG] ran the teams. Meanwhile, the whole company participates in family and friend beta tests, using an in-game feedback tool. Then we collect feedback from both customer service and the forums.”

Most importantly, the WOW team acts on the feedback. “There’s hundreds of things we’ve changed for every single zone based on the feedback – if only to make things more clear, more obvious,” says Brack.

Meanwhile, WOW’s vast art team is in constant production mode. Leading the art development on World Of Warcraft is Chris Robinson, the game’s former lead character artist. WOW art production is a vast, overarching job, ranging from producing broad concepts and character designs to making widgets and props for the world. And there’s thousands upon thousands of them to be made.

“Oh, god,” laughs Robinson when we ask about the scale. “It’s not just that there’s thousands of unique props… but then there’s the iterations. We build, say, a goblin aid machine because a quest needs it over here. But then the world team will say: ‘Great – now can you build another one that uses the materials of this zone that doesn’t have bamboo?’”

Streamlining that development has required reshuffles and rethinks. Before Wrath Of The Lich King, the WOW team had multiple art and prop teams – one for dungeons, one for the world. That had to be fixed, and fast. “Props are such a primary part of the game,” says Robinson. “They breathe so much life into the world wherever we put them that they had to have their own team and focus.”

The relationship between art and design in WOW is symbiotic. World designers fall under the design umbrella, and concepts are created as extremely rough paper templates before the artists even begin work. “We can’t say: ‘It would be really, really cool to have miles of rolling hills here’,” explains Robinson. “The designers will say: ‘We need to have three pyramids here, they need to be identifiable, and visible from here, here and here. They need to be here and here for lore reasons, or game design reasons’.”

The art team then creates extremely rough blockouts, to get a feel for the space, before beginning what Robinson calls “paintovers”, putting in color themes and palettes, making the space begin to work. “We discover what’s working and what’s not: ‘We really like these two pyramids, but the view of this third one is blocked by the patch of trees.’ We’ll work with design at that point,” he says. “‘Can we move anything around to make it work?’”

The back-and-forth between art and design is constant. Robinson: “At the start of each expansion, the key leads for the art and design team will get together and consider the base ideas. Something might be a great design idea, but artistically it could just fall flat. Maybe there’s a new race of dragon men, which by themselves are kinda boring. Maybe there’s a way to say they’ve been subjugated by someone, to give them a bit of a flavor hit.”

It’s a high-pressure management job. “Crunch isn’t too bad, because our production team does a great job of scheduling the process,” says Robinson. “The weird thing about art direction is that players think it’s just about defining the visual style of the game. But we’re at, I think, 56 artists, each of whom are very individualistic. They’re artists. They have very specific needs at times, and can be very emotionally affected by what fans write on fansites, or by internal pressure.”

Art and quests aren’t the whole story. There’s an entirely separate game within World Of Warcraft that means more to a certain type of player than levelling a character or exploring the world ever could. It’s a game that requires intense cooperation and extremes of coordination. It’s raiding. And in raiding, Blizzard is cementing a new kind of cooperative entertainment. The core idea: get a big group together and beat the tar out of opponents in carefully choreographed, mechanically diverse fights.

Leading the raid development is Scott Mercer, a Blizzard veteran who graduated from the Warcraft and StarCraft teams, and who has a controversial view of how WOW raiding has found success.

“People have jobs. People have families. People have friends,” he says. This is not what you expect to hear from a designer responsible for what many view as one of the most hardcore, time-consuming and high-pressure activities in gaming. WOW certainly didn’t invent raids – they’re a clear carryover from games like EverQuest and Dark Age Of Camelot. And in the early years, WOW raids resembled EverQuest’s: epic, unwieldy groups fighting in vast caverns. But many of the more casual MMOG audience drawn to WOW took one look at 40-player fights like Ragnaros, a giant angry fireball, or the sweary raid leader culture, and went to play elsewhere.

Then something weird happened. Raiding began to change. Raiding became accessible. Almost casual. Raiding adapted to the playerbase. New raids in WOW don’t appear every expansion. They appear on every content patch. Vanilla WOW released with just a handful of 40-man dungeons, bolstered over a constant stream of patches. Each new dungeon didn’t just add new bosses and new loot, it carefully tinkered with the game design. Enrage timers appeared – meaning players had to kill a boss within a certain time limit – therefore preventing fights from stretching on for too long. Raids were first able to be saved while in progress, and then that savegame could be extended week after week, allowing raiders the chance to slow down their progress. New ways of rewarding players began to appear: rather than just picking up items after a boss kill, each player would be rewarded with badges after the victory. If the boss didn’t drop what you needed, you’d still be rewarded for taking part.

Raiding is the equivalent of a carefully choreographed scripted dungeon, and by bundling more players into a group, the designers are more able to showcase new mechanics or new ideas. In the overworld, WOW players simply hit stuff until it falls over. In the dungeons, the bosses test players’ skills, communication and gear.

It’s raiding that demonstrates the World Of Warcraft team’s transition from game developer to software iterator, able to change systems and philosophies in direct reaction to the player’s concerns.

“It’s the greatest gift as a game developer, working in the online space,” says lead producer J Allen Brack. “It’s the idea that we can try something, and if it’s not quite right, that’s OK. We can do it later. It just doesn’t really exist in the traditional games market.”

And the Blizzard team iterated. The amount of organization required from players decreased, 40-player raids were phased out, 25-player raids became the norm in Burning Crusade. Then the required organization dropped again: ten-man raids are the acceptable face of Wrath Of The Lich King raiding.

The fights got weirder, too. It isn’t just about healing damage – it’s about dancing out of firepits, or dragging bosses around the edges of rooms. It was about separating out the four horseman of WOW’s apocalypse, and praying your healers could keep everyone alive, even though the groups were spread across a room. You’d fight a giant spider, having to interrupt doing damage to free your raid-mates from being strung up against the room in webs.

By patch 3.1, Blizzard had raiding nailed. It released Ulduar – the best dungeon to date. Ulduar is a vast prison holding a Cthulhic god named Yogg Saron. To meet him, players must first drive through a gauntlet of a thousand angry dwarves and steampunk helicopters, while piloting siege engines and catapults. They must defeat a giant robot, and his Voltron-suit-wearing master. They must kill a dragon and survive an arena fight while half the raid runs upstairs to fight the ringmaster. One room is a giant conservatory, patrolled by violent trees and a stone goddess. Finally, having rescued multiple prison guardians, they face off against the god itself, in an exhausting encounter that involves hallucinations, elephant men and giant tentacles.

Reminiscing about Ulduar, Mercer nails why the dungeon saw so much traffic. Within the design, the Blizzard team dramatically decreased the difficulty of the dungeon. But on top of that, it layered hard – or ‘heroic’ – modes that would appeal to the dedicated core raiders.

“It let us provide a much broader amount of content to our huge population,” says Mercer. “We have very hardcore raiders who want to be highly challenged, through to players who just want to have friends when they’re raiding, defeating cool bosses, getting cool loot. They want to be challenged, but not taken to the edge.”

The new raids coming to WOW in Cataclysm are direct extensions of that philosophy: smart amalgamations of lore and mechanics. Players are asked to fight a two-headed troll (Cho’Gall), or a golem-powered automated defense system. Or they can fight wind elementals on floating platforms in the clouds.

And the requirements on players are even fewer. Now, ten-man raids drop entirely the same tier of loot as 25-man ones. And once you’ve defeated a boss in one mode, it’s no longer available to fight for a week in the other. Now, WOW players can’t min-max by attempting ten- and 25-man bosses in the same week. The WOW raid team is deliberately lowering the time players can spend raiding.

How is a raid made? Mercer explains that the process begins with a very broad discussion with the design leads on Warcraft. They lay out “who are the villains, and what the high-level story elements we want to hit are. We know we’re going to end with Deathwing, but who are we going to fight along the way? For Blackwing Descent, we had this idea that we could continue Blackwing Lair. What if you went back to Nefarion’s throne room [a previous WOW boss, the final encounter in vanilla WOW’s Blackwing Lair] and discovered a portal behind the throne? We thought we should make it Nefarion’s laboratory. At that point we draw a very basic layout. We know what the final boss for the raid is, but we don’t know what’s going to be in between.”

Those sketches, frequently shown at events like Blizzcon, are as basic as you can imagine – merely a series of labels and squares with boss names. But more learning has gone into their makeup than their wireframes might suggest. Mercer: “We’ve learnt from experience what makes for a good WOW raid. We know how to move players around; we know when to wing [split off the raid into separate areas that can be tackled by players in any order they choose] or not to wing; we know how many bosses make the raid feel fun.”

Then the team sits with Alex Alfrasabi, Warcraft’s lead world designer, and figures out what goes in between.

“We start jamming out ideas for what each boss will be,” says Mercer. “Alex also makes sure that we don’t put inappropriate creatures into the area – at a very basic level, for instance, if we go into a huge lava zone, we don’t want water elementals. Then it’s just a case of brainstorming new ideas.”

The WOW raid team is made up of magpies. Some bosses come from new assets produced by the substantial art team. “We see the model and constantly look for places where it could fit. Or we might have our own idea, and want to build something off the back of it.” Some ideas come from other games, like Trial Of The Champion’s homage to Ikaruga. Others might just be to test new technology, like the vehicle gauntlet at the beginning of Ulduar.

For Cataclysm, three dungeons will be in the game at launch, the idea being that each will occupy a group for an evening. Bastion Of Twilight and Blackwing Descent are straight dungeon runs, while Throne Of The Four Winds is an awe-inspiring temple in the sky, clouds spilling from the base of its spires, where players are bounced from platform to platform.

Development on Cataclysm continues. As we visit, the team has around two weeks to finish off the rest of the game. Content is complete, but there are still mechanics to fix, numbers to tweak. The current forum outrage suggests the numbers that define class balance and damage at the top end of the game are out of whack. The hardcore are up in arms. The balance team is working furiously to fix the maths, but the problems don’t seem to dampen fans’ enthusiasm.

As players and developers gear up for the launch of Cataclysm, a new achievement – ‘Stood in the Fire’– has been added to the game. You earn it by being in a zone that the newly freed Deathwing attacks. If it appears, the sky darkens and the horizon fills with fire. And then the dragon flies overhead. If you’re there, you’re killed instantly. It’s a measure of how excited WOW’s playerbase is by the incoming devastation that players will flock to such an event. And die laughing.

Also read our interview with Cataclysm's lead systems designer Greg Street and game designer Dave Kosak and World Of Warcraft's co-designer Rob Pardo.

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