Dawn of Cataclysm: the transformation of Azeroth

Overnight, Deathwing, the dragon responsible for the devastation which has afflicted Azeroth during the past couple of weeks, finally stirred from his slumber. With his awakening came new playable races, quests, high-level zones and rewards; World Of Warcraft will never be the same again. We took lead systems designer, Greg Street, and game designer, Dave Kosak, aside at the expansion's midnight launch event to ask them about the challenge of rebuilding Azeroth, how they cater to an ever shifting audience and why WOW has such enduring appeal.

How have players been reacting to the preparatory patches?

Greg Street: Oh, awesome, it’s been fantastic to see the feedback. I think players weren’t expecting how much content there was going to be in the big Shattering patch, or how many quests and items and everything had changed in the 1-60 experience.

Dave Kosak: It’s been really fun for me because with the old world, people had an attachment to some of these places, a kind of emotional resonance, so when you go in and destroy it it’s so meaningful to them. When they’re going round and visiting what has happened, it’s very powerful for them. And you can see that in the forums and the responses. I love reading that and seeing how that affects people.

Are people getting more attached to World Of Warcraft the longer they play, or are players dropping off?

strong>GS: Even though we have 12 million subscribers still, we know players have moved on and new players have come in. We think Cataclysm is a great opportunity to make old players really curious to see what the changes are. We’re really hoping to get some returning players back to the game.

DK: WOW has had an interesting flight pattern that I don’t think you see with a lot of other PC games in that people will play for a couple years, then they’ll take some time off, and then they’ll maybe come back to it again, and then take more time off. And that’s fine, it’s cool to see that it’s good enough that people are coming back, and this expansion in particular there are a lot of changes that will encourage people to come back and check it out.

Was that part of the design direction for Cataclysm, to bring people back by remaking the older areas?
DK: We knew it was a benefit of doing that. We had learned a lot about how to create content in the last six years. And so the original game – it came out in 2004 but it was designed a few years before that – it felt really dated. It was built with a totally different philosophy and a different outlook in a totally different market from today’s, so we really wanted to apply everything we had learned from questing in Northrend and Outland and bring it to the old world, so that when you start a new character you’re getting the créme de la créme, the full experience of the best the game can offer. That was a big part of it – we wanted new players coming in to have a really good experience. And the fact that other players who roll a lot of alts would also be able to benefit from all this content – that was a bonus. It was like, we could do this and we knew it would appeal to everybody.

Are there any stats on the number of players rolling new characters to experience the new start quests?

GS: Gosh, that would be a great number to know, I’m sure that statistic is fantastic. Anecdotally we know a lot of people are, if you read the forums and fansites.

DK: Stand in one of the new zones and watch the traffic go by, and it’s a pretty impressive parade. There’s a lot of level 80 players that are just running around on their mounts to see it, and then there’s a whole load of new classes – a bunch of undead hunters or Tauren paladins will swing by.

How much work did it take to remake the zones compared to building them in the first place?

GS: I’m sure in some cases it took longer to rebuild them than it did originally, just because we’re so much more sophisticated now – we have better tools, our trees have more than four polygons. It takes a while to build them out like that. I think in some cases we would have been better just starting over rather than trying to fix the old ones.

How long did it usually take?

DK: Stormwind took months and months and months, but that was kind of an extreme – cities are very hard to do, particularly that one. I’d say that to do a zone would take a few weeks to a couple of months for a zone like Darkshore, whereas a zone like Un'Goro Crater would only have taken a few days to go in, and then a week or two for a quest designer to polish up.

What was exceptional about Stormwind?

DK: The original Stormwind that shipped with the game used a lot of visual tricks because we knew you were at ground level. For instance, the Stormwind cathedral that you can see from so many parts of the city? There was like a fake cathedral façade floating in the air. Depending on where you were you would see the cathedral, but there were loads of fake cathedrals floating in the sky. And obviously once you can fly that becomes so transparent. So there was a lot of work to clean that up, and to make sure that the walls had all their sides and everything else. We just wanted the city to look really, really epic, especially from the air. It’s significantly changed – there is a huge graveyard now and some lakes and some really cool stuff all around the city. It was quite an ordeal.

GS: Cities are very hard because on the one hand they’re kind of the social center of the game, so you want to have a lot of players in them so that they feel like a teeming metropolis, but on the other hand, when you have a teeming metropolis that’s the absolute worst thing for the hardware. You have thousands of players in one location, and you have to avoid problems like a popular inn with a small doorway suffering huge congestion, or a vendor sitting out in the middle of nowhere getting covered with mounts when everybody comes in and others can’t click on the guy. So you have to take pains to elevate them or put them behind curtains or something so that players won’t physically block them, even unintentionally. That’s what I meant by “cities are hard” – really high traffic, players spend a lot of their WOW-playing time in the cities. They’re hard to get right.

How has the bar changed for system specs? What’s the balance between fidelity, technical ability and accessibility?

GS: Well, we just make everything as good as we possibly can and then tell people 'upgrade, or you can’t play'. No, not really. It is a challenge because players who get really good computers want to feel like it was worth it – they spent a lot of money on a graphics card, they bought a lot of RAM, and now they really want to show off what their system can do. So we make sure that there are a lot of bells and whistles to show off the game.

The player armor now has tones of particle effects – we have priest armor with water flowing down the shoulders, mage armor with flames coming off it, we’ve added the sun rays that come down through tree branches, realtime shadows, really advanced shaders and changed the water to make it look more like water that ought to be in a videogame release in 2010 as opposed to the 2D water that we used to have. But at the same time, we have 12 million players. We can’t shut down very casual players. We have a lot of non-traditional older people playing the game, and they’re not going to go out and upgrade their graphics card just because we tell them they have to for Cataclysm.

DK: We’ve nudged up the minimum spec I think, but it’s kind of keeping pace with technology. We definitely want to make sure that you can turn off the water and sunrays and everything else and make sure that you can run the game on a low-spec system, because a lot of people do.

GS: One tweak we did that I thought was particularly clever – we have an option now that will de-emphasize the visual effects of everyone but yours. So you always look awesome – when you cast a spell it will always look great – but it may downplay other people’s spells if your system’s chugging a little bit.

Who is WOW for now, compared to when it launched?

GS: I think when we launched we weren’t really sure who our audience was going to be. We thought it would be Everquest players, traditional MMOG players. And we’ve realized now that we skew younger and older and we have a lot of women compared to what games had at the time – it’s a big umbrella, we give players a lot of ways to play the game. We don’t say that the only acceptable way to play WOW high-level is to raid, or to PvP.

We know people use it as a social network to keep in touch with their friends – I have a colleague whose daughter would jump onto WOW on vacation just to chat to her friends, because that’s her chat system for keeping in touch – we have players who like to play the auction house, we have players who want to max out all the trade skills and some who are very focused on achievements. If you offer players lots of different ways to play the game, you can attract lots of different types.

DK: Gaming has changed a lot in the six years since WOW launched. It’s been an interesting ride. And so we try to make sure that it’s as modern a game as we could launch right now.

Do you think WOW is partly responsible for what has changed?

GS: That would be a lot of credit for us to take!

DK: Certainly it’s helped to define the MMOG market, certainly, but a lot of games are constantly changing that envelope. I think we’re just one of many.

How has the rate of player growth been? Has it slowed down at all?

GS: There was a slowdown, but in part that was due to everything that was going on with China. But we’re back online now, it’s going pretty smoothly. I don’t think that the six billion people on earth are all potential WOW players, that’s not the number we’re shooting for, but I think that there’s a lot of places we can still grow. We’ve recently gone into Russia and Latin America, and I think there are other emerging markets like that where the technology and network infrastructure is just getting to the point where they’re ready to play an MMOG.

What do you think is responsible for that cross-cultural appeal?

GS: We put a lot of polish into our games and I think that works. That’s something that gamers around the world appreciate. But I also think we've done a good job of hitting on very iconic things and putting our little twist on them. For instance, we’ve got this dragon, but he’s not just the standard dragon, he’s being torn apart by inner rage, he can’t even contain his hate, so he has to be held together by metal plates. On the one hand you have something that people understand – a dragon – but on the other, it’s our own dragon. We do our best when we take things that area easy for players to relate to, but make them more interesting rather than super-generic.

Does that extend to the gameplay, do you think?

GS: Yeah. We try very hard to make the game easily approachable – we really follow the mantra of easy to learn, hard to master. It would be very frustrating for a player to say, “I’m going to try a battleground, I’ve never done that,” and to go in an have no idea what’s going on. Players like to be challenged, but not to be frustrated.

Also read our interview with World Of Warcraft's co-designer Rob Pardo and our Cataclysm deep dive.