Kings of the World 2009-10-24 00:00:00For a game that isn't even available yet, World of Warcraft is remarkably popular. Indeed, when Blizzard decided to open up beta applications to Europe earlier this year, the developer received ten times the number of expected sign-ups.
Perhaps as a result of this, Europe is now a key consideration in Blizzard's strategy for World of Warcraft - Europe will have a full local team in place shortly after the game launches simultaneously in the US and Korea this winter, all the support and infrastructure will be hosted in Europe (the servers are in France), and the game will initially support English, French and German languages, with the possibility of more being added at a later date. During a recent stress test of the game, designed to give Blizzard an idea of how the servers performed under strain, up to 3,000 players were playing concurrently - and the ongoing US beta regularly enjoys 2,000 concurrent players.
Speaking to the assembled hacks on a recent press tour stop in the UK, Blizzard producer Chris Sigaty confirmed that the long-awaited European beta could kick off as soon as this week, and said that in terms of future support, the company would "patch all regions simultaneously," so Europe wouldn't be left lagging behind. There is still the issue of players from the US and Europe being unable to play together, but as this was a design decision Blizzard is considering ways to let the hardcore world-spanning guilds get round this.
Seated comfortably in a rather grand old house somewhere in the leafy English countryside this week - well, outside London in any event - we had a chance to talk to Sigaty, accompanied by Blizzard PR coordinator George Wang, at length about the forthcoming European launch, some of the problems inherent to running a game of this type and how Blizzard plans to deal with them, the benefits of the stress test, and Blizzard's stylistic approach to games in general. Oh, and since Sigaty also acted as producer on Warcraft III, we decided to sneak in a question about what that team's been up to since then. We'll get slapped for that, but it was worth it.Eurogamer:
Do you have a planned European release target at the moment?
Chris Sigaty:
We're saying right now winter. We hope to do it as soon as possible after the initial launch, but we don't even know for sure when we'll launch in the US and we are trying to do a simultaneous launch in two regions currently - the US and Korea - and with all the interest from Europe we actually think that the ramp-up is going to be extremely quick, and the closed beta should start any day. We're not going to run that for anywhere near the length that we ran the US beta, because really a lot of that was getting the balance down and all that - that's not going to be necessary - so we expect the game to go out very shortly after the US does, and we're currently saying we're targeting this winter.Eurogamer:
Is it really up in the air?
Chris Sigaty:
It's not that it's so up in the air, it really has more to do with when we do launch in the US, so we're shooting as hard as possible - everybody's at work, and I don't even know if I should be saying these things [shoots a look and a smile at George], but everybody's working literally seven days a week there and we are trying to get this game out this year if possible.George Wang:
Actually we're hoping it's going to be launched in the US and Korea this year, and the European launch is coming a few months after that.Eurogamer:
So early next year?
Chris Sigaty:
That's what we're shooting for.Eurogamer:
Do you have any idea of the subscription costs at this point?
Chris Sigaty:
That's still totally being discussed. My best guess is that it'll be something similar to other games, but I have no idea - I haven't been involved in those decisions and I know they haven't been made yet.Eurogamer:
Blizzard traditionally has a history of not showing much leniency to cheaters. Is that a policy you plan to uphold with World of WarCraft?
Chris Sigaty:
Absolutely, yeah. It's extremely important to the ideals we're going to try and uphold with our community support and live teams. We fully intend to, in all regions, to take care of griefers, that sort of stuff. And when they're identified, if there are people that are ruining...
Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Quest Problems, Admits to Designing Stranglethorn Quest2009-10-14 00:00:00With a scant 40 minutes to address the gathered masses, former World of Warcraft director Jeffery Kaplan had a lot to cover in his "The Cruise Director of Azeroth" lecture.
The presentation saw an extremely candid Kaplan, now working on Blizzard's next-gen MMO, recognize and address the nine major problems with World of Warcraft.
But before getting into the nitty-gritty details, Kaplan made one thing abundantly clear: the WoW team is aware of the problems, and is actively working to fix them.
1. "The Christmas Tree Effect"
What this means, and this is kind of a weird one, but you show up to a quest hub, and your minimap is lit up like a Christmas tree with quest exclamation marks.
The weird thing is, if you ask our fans, they love this. This is to them a good quest hub... They go in and vacuum up the quests. But we've lost all control to guide them to a really fun experience.
Kaplan noted that this leads to users not reading the quests, not bothering to remember which quest giver gave what, and forgetting the order in which to do the quests.
"It's much better to have a slow, guided experience," he said. "I think if you go to [Lich King zones] Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, you'll always have a ton of quests to do, but you'll never have more than 6 or 7 quests in your quest log."
Kaplan amusingly revealed that some WoW quest designers try to get around the problem by stacking quests onto a single NPC. He showed one NPC that was stuffed with eight quests.
"It should just say 'Do Elwin Forest' at that point," he said, laughing. "'Come back to me at 60.'"
2. Too Long, Didn't Read
Kaplan explained the age-old internet phrase, relating it to WoW quests that are simply too wordy.
"World of Warcraft quest designers are limited to 511 characters," he said. "That's all that will fit into the data entry. And all you programmers know why it's not 512."
Some quest designers ask for more space, Kaplan said, saying, "Why are there only 511 characters? We gotta have more, let's blow that out."
But Kaplan would prefer to see WoW quests go in the other direction.
"I actually wish that the number was smaller. I think it's great to limit people in how much pure text they can force on the player. Because honestly... if you ever want a case study, just watch kids play it, and they're just mashing the button. They don't want to read anything."
3. Medium Envy
Kaplan prepared the crowd for a rant at this point. I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. We're so fortunate and privileged to work in a medium that is not only an art, but a revolutionary interactive form of entertainment. It's unfortunate to see so many games try to be what they're not, including our game at times. Of course we should embrace the concept of story... art, literature...