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Blizzard's Secret Sauce - The WoW Diary by John Staats
WotLK
Publié
06/02/2023 à 17:46
par
Rokman
John Staats published The WoW Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of vanilla World of Warcraft back in 2018.
A campaign on BackerKit
is currently in progress, for a second printing of the beloved WoW Diary. We're excited to highlight excerpts written by John Staats during the campaign.
If you find this article interesting, consider backing The WoW Diary --
The WoW Diary on BackerKit
Below is an excerpt from The WoW Diary on Blizzard's Secret Sauce, written by John Staats --
Blizzard’s Secret Sauce
My
previous article about self-publishing
covers conditions content creators need to maximize their potential. If they have enough runway, self-publishing insulates developers from outside forces, giving them the independence and financial motivation to do the job right.
But creative control doesn’t guarantee success. Even if one nullifies external interference, what of the development process itself? Assuming you can work in a bubble, is the road to success merely a matter of following your dream? This essay focuses on the recipe to maximize your product’s progress. What seems to work for computer games seems true for books, board games, or any work in the entertainment industry.
Blizzard looks for three key ingredients before making a computer game—an audience, internal enthusiasm, and room for improvement.
The Right Project
If I were to put my finger on the first person to employ this strategy, I would have to single out Thomas Edison. While I think of this recipe as
Blizzard’s Secret Sauce
, I’d be remiss not to give credit where it’s due. Edison was a demanding employer. Who among us wants to work for a person with the tenacity to try six thousand filaments before settling on a light bulb that lasts twelve thousand hours?
After success with the lightbulb, Edison set the first skunkworks, employing twenty-one engineers at a laboratory he called Menlo Park in 1876. His process amounted to giving his staff ideas or gadgets with instructions to “find a better way.” If an engineer’s work proved fruitful, Edison patented it, taking credit in order to inflate the Edison brand. The mystique of a visionary genius generates free publicity, and I imagine it served Edison’s ego too. The more he convinced financial backers of his genius, the better bargaining chip he had in negotiating contracts.
Before he assigned his workers to an invention, Edison solicited business partners and factories to produce them. Film projectors were of little value if no one wanted to manufacture them. Before he invested his time—and the time of his engineers—he ensured a market for it.
Not knowing there’s a market for a game is a pitfall most publishers fall into—even before committing time and money to a project. Following one’s passion is crucial to staying motivated to work, but blind enthusiasm is a dangerous business strategy. Will people want your product?
You would think this wasn’t a controversial strategy, especially with so much money and experienced business people involved in the decision. Still, many game studios don’t possess the self-discipline to ask themselves if it’s realistic to expect a return on investment from oddball titles.
When WoW was still under wraps, a game called Black and White hit the market. It was more of an activity than a game, a sandbox physics engine where players would raise a giant monster. Players could raise their monsters, good or evil, terrorizing nearby populations or protecting them. It was a high concept god-game celebrated for its innovation and vision. Magazines and game websites gave it awards and wrote extensively about its foresight. Yet, its sales were mediocre, and customers grew bored after a few days. The much-heralded game spawned no sequels, clones, or expansions. The game’s designers proved to the world that it could be done—never asking themselves whether it should.
Considering the market before undertaking an endeavor signifies maturity, not a lack of imagination. Quality consistently outsells originality, yet I think creators aim for the latter because they think it’s an easier road for publicity—and perhaps it is. But hype about visionaries is over-valued.
Innovation makes for memorable talking points and feeds into the public’s perception of a visionary genius. People want to believe there are Promethean geniuses like Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs lighting the way. It’s a simple and romantic view. Why gum up the narrative with the minutiae? Who wants to hear about long work hours, internal failures, collaboration, and incremental progress? That stuff doesn’t sell magazines.
A disciplined developer targets a broad audience. Instead of creating features that demand expensive video cards, Blizzard always aims at low-end computers, making games everyone can play. This strategy isn’t exciting or “innovative,” nor does it energize the press, but it results in better sales—yet few studios embrace this attitude. Making games is unpredictable, complicated, and expensive. If executives want to avoid laying off hardworking devs, it’s incumbent on them to ensure their project will make enough money.
The words “proof of concept” means that a pilot feature is popular enough to be feasible. Investing in a better version of it seems prudent. If it’s fun gameplay to kill and loot monsters in an open world, making a game using this mechanic makes sense. If fantasy games outsell science fiction games, it’s logical to make fantasy games. These were the decisions that drove Blizzard toward WoW.
The Right Developer
After a studio identifies external enthusiasm for a proposed game, the second question they want to ask themselves concerns internal support. Are you passionate about making this product? After listening to the market, it seems contradictory to follow your vision. It’s not enough to have one without the other. A project must be market-friendly and dev-friendly.
WoW started from devs approaching HQ over their furor for a new game called
Everquest
, a fantasy MMO that ensorcelled half of the staff. Team 1 would have pitched the game were it not for their workload of
Warcraft 3
. Some devs were addicted to its gameplay, calling it
Evercrack
. Employees spent their lunchtimes playing it. It dominated water cooler conversations. Some played during work hours, and a few slept at their desk overnight while logged on. Such passion was impossible to ignore. It was the game most of the company wanted to make.
A passionate staff base makes economic sense. If people are fans, they’ll go the extra distance to polish things themselves. They’ll know and care more about the details and will be more motivated to polish it. Managers won’t have to supervise every nuance if devs are self-motivated.
My book,
The World of Warcraft Diary
, documents how often it wasn’t a big party to work on computer games. There‘s no game yet to play for most of the dev cycle. It’s great to be surrounded by fellow gamers, but after a few years, attrition sets in, and people want to move on to something else. Morale is a factor, and it’s easier to keep people happy and productive if they’re working on something they want to see finished.
If the creative director or an investor is the only fan of the game, it drastically reduces the amount of thought poured into the product. That’s not good. You want employees who are implementing details to be excited about the details. When the decision-makers make the wrong call, you want employees to point out problems as soon as possible. If the staff doesn’t care, corrections become more expensive and time-consuming.
More often than not, gaming devs don’t get to work on the project of their dreams. Half the time, someone in HQ acquires an IP and that’s what the studio works on for the next few years—no matter how corny or unappealing it is to the staff. Other times, publishers foist games onto studios. Not wanting to lay off talented workers, executives accept work-for-hire projects—building games for someone else lets companies keep their staff together.
The Right Staff
Once a studio has a direction, the development cycle begins. But ideas on paper usually don’t pan out when implemented, so it’s important to test things as quickly as possible. Testing often dissolves the most carefully constructed theories, so it’s essential to test the moment-to-moment gameplay first. Designers must ask themselves if the game feels right before spending time and money on features, polish, and art. Development is a discovery process, and testing is essential for finding which way to go.
By taking baby steps, devs minimize the risk of wasting time as they learn about their game. Design, art, and code should be iterative. Teams must redo things to reach perfection.
Finding self-critical employees willing to redo their work without complaining is the hardest part of development. Perfectionists aren’t people who do things correctly—they revise their work until they can’t push the needle anymore. These are rare and valuable workers. The worst employees will get bored with their work, pressing forward only to “get it done” so they can move on to something else. They won’t revisit their work after gaining a little distance. It’s what team 2 looked for in interviews and why they were so slow to staff the team.
The willingness to redo work—iteration— fosters a culture of polish. Once people accept the maxim that nothing is written in stone, employees are more willing to point out mistakes or make suggestions. People are often “too polite” to point out one another’s weaknesses, and it takes effort to cultivate an environment where people aren’t shy about critiquing one another.
Every Voice Matters
and
Learn and Grow
are two of Blizzard’s core values, encapsulating the spirit of iteration—a crucial component of making anything.
The Right Direction
If you have internal and external enthusiasm for a project, you’ll need one more thing before sallying forth—a direction for your product. Blizzard has always done this by finding room for improvement.
Being better—not different—gives customers a reason to buy your product. Devs must ask themselves how their game is better than the competition. Blizzard’s answer circles back to where we began, with Thomas Edison’s process—keeping what works and changing what doesn’t.
Improving features in existing titles helps set up a game’s likelihood for success. Having employees familiar with a genre makes it easier to identify weaknesses. Some employees might focus on interface and art issues, while others improve animation. It’s a team effort. Hoping a single person can list everything is folly. Blizzard traditionally resists team leads with a “vision” for the rest of the team to follow.
Once again, I’m at the point where I’m listing things that sound obvious. When
Everquest
proved MMOs were a big deal, most studios bent over backward to be unique. Instead of making a better
Everquest
, they committed themselves to many strange directions. Most built modern and science fiction worlds, assuming
Everquest
had the fantasy genre sewn up. Even though kill-and-loot gameplay proved a popular gameplay model, many sought other avenues for character progression. Gimmicks served as bulleted points on the game’s feature list, regardless of whether they were fun.
A seasoned creator obsesses about how to do things better. Trying to do things differently for the sake of doing things differently is a wild goose chase.
Game devs must ask if they can push this product to a point where better gameplay is self-evident to the casual customer. Will the product’s level of polish be obvious? These are the standards a studio must strive for in the hit-driven entertainment industry.
Applying this Formula to Tabletop RPGs
With computer game development in my rearview mirror, I focused my efforts on tabletop RPGs and discovered Blizzard’s formula for success translated into things other than computer games. I would think anyone in the entertainment industry could follow the same recipe to improve their chances of success.
After publishing
The WoW Diary
, I iterated on a board game that simplifies RPGs. After decades of playing them, I’ve noticed they’re bogged down with too many rules. Their complexity and slow gameplay limit the pool of players. It makes scheduling a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl difficult.
Instead of starting with features or cool new things that no one has seen, I asked myself, what works in RPGs? Loot, controlling a character, equipment load-outs, individual abilities, and unique battles made the list of things I enjoyed. Then I considered the least enjoyable aspects of RPGs.
In nearly every RPG I’ve played, monsters always seemed to reach players, regardless of player positioning. Since monsters rarely lost opportunities to attack, I asked myself, why bother with it? If I could abstract the concept of positioning, giving wounded players a decision to fall back to the back of the party, I could simplify battlefield mechanics. I came up with a combat engine that doesn’t use rules of engagement, distance, range, speed, and movement.
After testing, I discovered the best thing about removing positioning is it allows players to take their turns simultaneously, eliminating the worst part of tabletop RPGs—waiting for other players and monsters to take their turn.
The result of streamlining this combat engine became something no one had ever seen before. I inadvertently created something different by attempting to improve upon previous designs. Cooperative fights between players and an AI-driven monster sped up combat so much that I added complexity to the monsters and items. Instead of building a dungeon crawler, I’d constructed a tabletop boss fight engine.
This process took three years of testing and prototyping. After many failures, I created a version that created so much tension I had problems with the pacing. Going from one boss fight to the next was too taxing, and I wanted players to have moments of relaxation.
Since I am a self-publisher, I have the liberty to shelve this game until I fix its pacing issue. Sometimes it’s better to put things down and revisit them later with fresh eyes.
Applying this Formula to Novels
Another reason I held off launching my board game was I wanted it based in a compelling setting. To avoid a generic dungeon crawler, I constructed my own fantasy world. While doing so, I also discovered a new fantasy novel genre that I couldn’t put down.
RPG fiction involves stories about gamers getting trapped in futuristic fantasy computer games. The setting is like
TRON
, except inside an MMORPG, and I found them as addictive as video games. I read books overnight, unable to go to sleep or stop myself from thinking about what happens next in the “game.”
The problem with RPG fiction (or litRPG) is that its top-selling authors were from other countries with different sensibilities. Since they were self-published, there weren’t any editors familiar with the Western market to tone down the pulpy scenes. Nationalism, racism, and sexism were rampant, ruining an otherwise enjoyable read about fantasy worlds, monsters, and magic items.
RPG fiction reminded me of Blizzard’s enthusiasm for
Everquest
, a new game with fundamental problems that limited its appeal to the broader market. I began writing my own series, fixing what doesn’t work with RPG fiction and keeping what does.
Instead of scenes with questionable taste, I’m aiming my books at the young adult market, a proven genre for fantasy novels. I’m writing multiple books simultaneously to ensure a consistent narrative and pacing. It allows me to iterate and plant breadcrumbs in earlier books that tie into the deeper story. The extra time lets me revisit my work with fresh eyes. I delete passages that clash with other parts of the narrative and flesh out parts after I’ve chewed on them for a while.
After three years of writing, I can’t believe more authors don’t work this way. I’ve got multiple books written in various stages of completion, and in 2023 I’ll release them for free as web novels. If readers respond to my fantasy world, I’ll base my board game on it.
Few of my approaches would work under the standard publishing model. By signing away my IP and surrendering control, I would have reduced flexibility and freedom to explore the fertile ground I discovered along the way. While I’ve yet to prove myself as a writer or a board game designer, I’ve seen this formula for success work behind the scenes at Blizzard.
Since RPGs and fantasy novels are familiar marketplaces, and I’m confident my fixes will distinguish my work from other products, I’m willing to gamble on myself. Every creative must decide if they have the patience and tenacity to dedicate their time. Are you experienced and honest enough to avoid releasing something before it’s polished? If so, I say, “Go for it.”
If you enjoyed this article, there are many more like it in my book,
The World of Warcraft Diary
, written from the lessons learned while making WoW.
I am crowdfunding the printing of its second edition.
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