World of Warcraft is a bloody marvel. Two years on I'm still playing the thing and still enjoying it. The designers must love people like me, those who dip in for a couple of hours a week, maybe more if the mood takes, enjoy some gnome-slaying and don't get too obsessed. I've peeked over the edge - ie the official forums - and seen how bad it can get, with players accusing each other of being "noobs" for "only" playing 6 hours a day. How do you design a game for people like this? So it was interesting to read this new interview with WoW's Vice President of Game Design - aka God to around 8 million WoW players - Rob Pardo. When asked about future plans he explained the difficulty in simply churning out new content.
As a creative person, how long can you make WoW content when you're ready for something else? So not only do we have to find a lot of people who are really talented and who are willing to do this, we have to take some time to think about the team so that they're always challenged.
This makes sense. Blizzard have built their reputation on ready-when-it's-ready quality control so you can understand Pardo's reluctance to force a jaded team to deliver substandard content. But he was less convincing when talking about quests - ie the main way to advance in the game.
We have a team of quest designers and we all sit in a room everyday and jam up ideas. I'll follow up with each individual quest designer. I'll play their quests and iterate through it.
Erm, ok. Now I love this game like a hairy, slightly overweight brother, but what exactly do they do in these daily quest meetings? Sit around and decide how many hydra scales or murloc eyes today's quest will require? By "jam up ideas" does he just mean new ways of wildlife culling and courier delivery or will we finally see more innovative quests in WoW? Here's hoping.
