wow Developer Retrospective on Warcraft and WoW

[Starym 3,800]

 

We have a great piece over at IGN, with both current and former Blizzard developers talking about the 25-year history of the Warcraft franchise, as well as the 15-year one of World of Warcraft. There's many stories and tidbits from all of Warcraft, from how the original was almost not made in favor of a point-and click, adventure, to the unique art style of the franchise, WC3 originally being a hero-only game, the way the editors evolved and eventually gave us the MOBA genre, WoW almost having a more realistic art style and a whole lot more!

Starting at the beginning, we get to hear about how exactly the original came to be, and the fact that the development "slot" Warcraft was developed in was actually supposed to be a point-and-click adventure starring the Lost Vikings. This means we have Westwood Studios to thank for Warcraft happening, as the "first ever RTS", as it's commonly called, Dune 2, was in fact the reason Blizzard moved away from an adventure game and Warcraft came to be.

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“We were thinking that the obvious answer was to take the Vikings, shrink them down to be really small, and then have the player direct them where they wanted them to go," Bob recalls, noting that the initial tests were simple scenarios that were very different to the puzzles found in The Lost Vikings. Looking to Dune II, the addition of opponents, the ability to attack, and PvP entered the picture. But when it came down to creating abilities or different types of Vikings, the team hit a wall.

“We realised that just telling our Vikings where to go and attack wasn't as much fun as playing Dune II,” Bob continues, confirming that coming up with Viking powers was a struggle. “The next thing you know, artists were drawing pictures of orcs and goblins and elves and saying that if we weren’t coming up with interesting ideas for what Vikings could do, this might be the answer.”

Then there's also this great quote from Samwise Didier on the original mission statement for the art style of WC1, which would stick with the franchise to this day:

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"We pushed our fantasy world into the realm of superhero comics, blockbuster movies, and heavy metal music. Everything we created was ramped up. Anything ‘Level 1’ needed to look like it was ‘Level 5’. We didn’t go to ‘11’, we went to ‘111’!"

With Reforged coming in two weeks, we also get to hear a little about why WC3 was so hero focused, aka the fact that it was supposed to be an RPS (Role Playing Strategy), where you'd only control your hero and the units you had line of sight to, which would have made it a very different game. Oh, and it also originally had 16(!) playable races!

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“Warcraft III was where everything came together,” Samwise tells me. “The story, art, movies, hell - even the art in the manual, really pushed our game to 111. We came up with the franchise’s biggest characters in Warcraft III: Jaina, Illidan, Thrall and Arthas, and dozens more. Almost every character in World of Warcraft was based and modelled after something we created in Warcraft III and when World of Warcraft came out, it only got better."

"It was originally a hero-controlled game,” Chris says, talking about the earliest moments developing Warcraft III. “You could only control your hero, and the units you had around it were selected only if you had vision of them. It was a very different game. It wasn't working out, but it gave this differentiator for Warcraft III that we wanted, which was something that played very differently than the units-swarming you got from StarCraft. Hero-centric, level up, have items, consume them, go into different buildings and then focus on a few smaller armies. We called it RPS (Role Playing Strategy).”

And finally WoW came around, which also came out of a different project the team was working on (which they don't talk about), as they pivoted to their own MMO after having played lots of Everquest and Ultima Online. The art style was almost very different from the established Warcraft standard as well:

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“Keeping the Warcraft style; we struggled with that for a while,” Samwise admits. “For some reason, with this new point of view, the art team had a tendency to go more realistic with the characters and environments. Our weapons and armour were more proportionate to normal-style weapons, and our colours were becoming dull and muted. Maybe it was the view we were working in.”At that time, most first-person style games were trying to be more realistic," Samwise continues. “That is definitely not want we wanted. We wanted the immersion to feel realistic, but not kill the Warcraft art style that we all loved. We needed to get that superhero vibe back. We just applied our normal philosophy for creating art and tweaked it a bit to fit this new camera view. By pushing the proportions back to normal Warcraft levels, our characters became more dynamic and more heroic. We pushed the weapons and armour to be even bigger and bulkier, and juiced up our palette to keep our colours rich and vibrant. After that, we had the feel of Warcraft back in our art.”

The whole piece is very much worth a read, with many more stories from the devs and details from the games' development. It's a really great way to mark the two big Warcraft anniversaries, so thanks a lot to IGN for making it.

The devs go through the entire Warcraft history and share many stories and details from the games.