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World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Interview <p><strong>BURNING QUESTIONS</strong></p> <p><strong>SCI FI TALKS TO ITZIT BEN BASSAT AND JON LECRAFT OF BLIZZARD</strong></p> <p> World of Warcraft (WoW to its friends) is less a computer game, more a phenomenon. Launched two years ago, it now boasts over eight million players worldwide, each paying a monthly fee to battle monsters, explore a huge fantasy world, and grow in power with their friends at their side. It has infiltrated popular culture to an unprecedented degree, and best of all... it's really fun.</p> <p> The Burning Crusade is the first full expansion for the game, and introduces a colossal amount of exciting new content for an ever-eager fanbase. Two brand new races, a new profession, a new level cap, flying mounts... Heaps. Just before the midnight launch at London's huge HMV, we spoke to Itzik Ben Bassat - who wields the impressive title of 'VP Business Development and International' - and Jon LeCraft, lead games designer. Here's what they had to say...</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: When World of Warcraft first started out, did you ever imagine it could be quite the success it's become? </strong></p> <p> Itzik Ben Bassat: I think that we realised it was going to be good. We played the game ourselves, you know, through the alpha and beta testing (pre-release versions of the game - Ed), and we knew we had something good. You could hear things in the office like, "It's going to hit the world like a nuclear bomb!". People were very excited about it. </p> <p> What I don't think we understood is the magnitude of its success, and how much it would penetrate mass market. That was a good surprise for us, and I think it was a combination of a few factors that existed in the world at the same time, such as the growth of bandwidth, combined with our game philosophy. Our philosophy is 'easy to play and hard to master', which was great for more casual gamers, because they can get into the world in a very easy way.</p> <p> We also made a lot of other game design decisions that made the game a success. For example, that grinding (gaming term for dull, repetitive behaviour in order to progress) would not be a key factor of the game. So you can level up to 60, but the game doesn't end there - the game opens up at 60. So it's not your only goal to get to 60, like in other games.</p> <p> Other design decisions... For example, the fact that when you start the game, you progress nicely. It doesn't take you ages to progress, and it's very intuitive. Everything is really easy when you start playing. It's really clear what you need to do. I remember that when I first played an online game, I didn't know what to do. It was so complicated. Who did I go to? Wait a second, who do I need to get back to, you know? With World of Warcraft, we made it really easy. Go here, do that. Here is the person that you need to talk with. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Now you admit you underestimated the sheer scale of interest. Do you ever think, perhaps, you might become a victim of your own success? </strong></p> <p> IBB: Well, you know, I just got a new passport, and my old passport was with a picture from four years ago, and someone in the office saw the two passports and goes like, "Oh my God, how old are you here?" And I'm like, "That's four years ago." "No way!" So I think the price was maybe in our personal life. We spent the last few years building this. There were a lot of difficulties, a lot of challenges that we had to deal with, but I think that our commitment to solving every problem and maintaining our Blizzard quality, if it's in the game or in the service level, actually helped us to go through that, and to maintain our identity. I feel we're the same company. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: It strikes us that you've never really had a problem with the quality of the product, it's more that suddenly the whole world wants to play it at once, and how do you do that without it breaking all the time? </strong></p> <p> IBB: Well, I think that you're right. It's a challenge. It was a great challenge when so many people wanted to play the game, so we limited, for example... People don't know this, but we really limited the number of boxes that went to the market. </p> <p> At various times you couldn't find a box because we said, hey, we need two months now to figure out what we're doing and scale it up. So I think the greatest thing about Blizzard is that it's managed by gamers. We make our decisions based on what we think is right for the game and what we, as gamers, want to see in the game, in terms of gaming or operation and, if the service sucks, believe us, we're playing the game. We're the first ones to complain. We're the first ones to want to solve it. So that dedication brings us to try and excel on the service level as well.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: You both play the game as well as work on it, but is it kind of a blessing and a curse that you don't have that much time to play? </strong></p> <p> Jon LeCraft: I mean, during crunch (what they call the final stages of finishing up a game and making it ready for release - Ed), you know, over the last many months of the project, we don't really have a lot of time to play, except maybe a little time on the weekends, and that's always spent in the beta, because we want to be testing out the new content. So our live characters kind of just go on hold, but for the rest of the time we definitely find time. I mean, that's kind of, you know, our number one priority in our free time. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: So it's not too much like taking your work home with you, like: "I can't stand to see another Night Elf ever again"? </strong></p> <p> JL: Oh, no. Uh uh. Most people are... It's ridiculous, sometimes. I mean, even after... I remember we crunched for like a really long time, and they gave us a weekend off, and we came back, and we're like, "Oh, what did you do over the weekend?" "Well, I played WoW." " Oh, me too." *he laughs*</p> <p> IBB: It's not only World of Warcraft, it's just that we're very passionate about our games, you know. At least two or three times a week I'll give a call to our managing director in Korea and tell him, "Hey, you want to play a match of Starcraft on Battle.net?", and, he will kick my arse, because that's what Koreans do. But, yeah, it's just we're very passionate about our games. When you walk around the office, you know, people are there because they want to work for the best online game company in the world, and there is a lot of excitement and positive atmosphere around the office. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: What were the biggest business challenges and the biggest creative challenges in creating this first expansion?. </strong></p> <p> IBB: Wow. </p> <p> (He pauses for thought - well it is a pretty big question - Ed) </p> <p> The biggest one was business and development, because we make development decisions and then the business decisions are kind of patched into the development decision. Business doesn't lead the business, development leads the business, and creativity leads the business. So the biggest challenge was to choose the list of features that will get into the expansion. There are so many other features that we wanted to have in the expansion and we just couldn't do it. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Like, for example? </strong></p> <p> IBB: Like, for example... the next expansion features! </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: (Apologies, we geek out a bit here, so this next bit might not make sense - Ed) Hero classes? Instanced housing? </strong></p> <p> IBB: I want to see hero classes...</p> <p> JL: Yeah. Hero classes were pretty close, but they didn't make it, because that's a very... I mean, we had a version done but we weren't happy with it, and we weren't going to put it in, in a state that we weren't happy with. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: (Here we go again, geeking out... - Ed) So, my theory that you get a dragon around your portrait and become elite, is that going to happen? </strong></p> <p> JL: Ooh.... Er.... No. </p> <p> IBB: But you don't have copyright for that idea! </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: (Sorry about this, looks like the geeking-out period isn't over quite yet! It'll start making sense again very soon. - Ed) Well, I've got another one for you - Feign Death for pets. 'Play Dead.' </strong></p> <p> JL: That's something we've actually talked about. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Nice. We've talked about the strengths of the game, but often the people who are most critical about any product are the people closest to it, like your good selves. What in your opinion are the weaknesses, if any? </strong></p> <p> IBB I think that I would like the hardware out there to be strong enough to carry our software. So, you know, it's a constant battle that we're fighting, finding the hardware. It just doesn't exist, you know. The server side. </p> <p>I'll give you an example. We work with a database company, and when we launched the game, the database started doing things that we didn't expect. So we called that database company, and we said, "Look, guys, our users are suffering here, you need to help us." And they sent an expert. It was a low level expert. He looked into the database and said, "I had no idea that we could do such things with our database." So he called the company and said, "I cannot help them. I've never seen anything like that." So they sent their bigger expert. They had five experts coming and going, until they sent us their number one expert, and he looked into our code and said, "Well, that's very interesting, I didn't know that our database could do that, but if you do this, and this, and that, you can fix it." And he really helped us, but it just shows you the extent of advancement that we have done, in terms of game development, and how difficult it is for us to find the hardware, whether it's servers, or databases, or networks, or whatever it is, that will be able to support the amount of traffic and the progression of our code.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Conversely, what are you the most proud of in the game? It doesn't have to be anything big, it could just be Mr Pinchy. (It would take too long to explain Mr Pinchy, but suffice it to say it's a very rare magical lobster that grants you wishes. Sweet. - Ed) </strong></p> <p> JL: *still laughing* I can't take credit for Mr Pinchy. I know who did that, he's had many clever ideas like that. Did you find one of those? </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Sadly not. I'm in the beta, but... Not to digress, but I deliberately thought, "Alright, I'm there. I'm in the Hellfire Peninsula (the first area you discover in The Burning Crusade - Ed). This is really cool, but my friends aren't in the beta, and I don't want to explore it for the first time without them. Let's go to the blood elves! (one of the two new races introduced in the expansion - Ed)" So I explored content so I could help them out when they started. I didn't want to see Outlands on my own. I wanted to see it with my guild (an in-game association of characters who regularly play together).</strong></p> <p> IBB: That's huge, what you're saying now. That's World of Warcraft.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Back on track (finally - Ed). Favourite moment, Jon? </strong></p> <p> JL: I mean, other than finishing... I mean, that was huge. That was just such a tremendous feeling of relief and excitement and pride. But, yeah, I can't really put my finger on any one thing, and part of the reason for that is that everybody works on everything. I would never take credit for any particular part of the game, because we get so much input from everyone on the team that I would feel like I wouldn't be giving credit where credit's due.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: We heard a rumour that these kinds of expansions are going to be fairly regular. </strong></p> <p> IBB: It's not a rumour. It will come every year. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Something of this size? </strong></p> <p> IBB: Well, yes. You know, first of all we said that we were not going to release an expansion just for the sake of releasing an expansion. If you look at our content patches, you will see that we already released an expansion...</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: If you add it all up? </strong></p> <p> IBB: Yeah. But there were patches that were probably... Other companies would probably have decided "It's big enough to be on a box with a few other features". Our philosophy is great content updated regularly. We're very committed to that, an expansions that have a reasonable amount of exciting features. So, as I said, our list of features is pretty big, and we want to do it every year. We feel that that's a commitment that we want to make to our players.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Whenever a product is this big and this successful, everyone wants to know... what's next? What's the sequel going to be? World of Warcraft 2, World of Starcraft, World of Diablo, whatever it's going to be, we're sure you're aware of the rampant rumours online. </strong></p> <p> IBB: Yeah. Yeah. We are. Well, first of all, we have several games in development. We've said it before; we have several projects going on, but we don't want to do only MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - Ed). We feel like World of Warcraft is a good MMORPG that's going to stay there for a while. We still have a lot of stories to tell, as I said, for WoW. We're an online gaming company. We're not an MMORPG company. We've been doing online games since the mid '90s. Battle.net - which people tend to forget today, because of WoW - used to be, before WoW, the biggest online game service in the world, and it's still pretty big.</p> <p> So I think our next challenge is actually related to Battle.net, and how we take Battle.net from being a narrowband service that we launched in the mid '90s into a full broadband service that provides all the great opportunities that broadband brings with it.</p> <p> We have two other franchises, other than Warcraft, that you mentioned: Diablo and Starcraft. People in the office are equally excited about Starcraft and Diablo as they are about Warcraft, if not more. I'm a big Starcraft fan. And we want to see the next Starcraft and Diablo games coming as well. This is part of something that we want to do, and we said that we have a passion for that. As a Starcraft player, I hoped it wouldn't go a decade before I can play the next Starcraft game. So, you know, we released the old Starcraft in '98, and I definitely hope that it won't be long before I can play the new one.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: WoW is certainly dominating the MMORPG genre at the moment, but there are some big titles coming out soon. A Lord of the Rings one, a Warhammer one, to cite just two. Which, if any, is the greatest threat to you? </strong></p> <p> IBB: I think that, where we're focussing - and where we've always focussed - as a company, is to look at what we do, and to try to do it best. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Does that mean you may react to strengths and weaknesses in their games, to make sure you don't lose people? </strong></p> <p> IBB: If we feel that we're not providing entertainment, we would react to that. Our focus is on providing a quality entertainment experience and we believe that if we focus on that, and if we deliver, then people will stay and we'll let the other people try to reach our level, instead of us trying to figure out what we're doing as a reaction. We're trying to be proactive, to innovate and to lead the market, and we feel like we're doing that pretty well. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: (We make a fairly weak joke here about how 'only' having eight million players is a bit rubbish, really.)</strong></p> <p> IBB: Oh, I think there is opportunity for growth.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Eh?</strong></p> <p> IBB: We all think that there is opportunity for growth, especially when we're going to do more things with the new Battle.net. </p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Wow. OK. Now, if someone reading this isn't playing the game yet, but is interested in theory - why should they choose World of Warcraft? And why now is a good time to start?</strong></p> <p> IBB: Well, any time is a good time to start, simply because we're getting to the point that if you want to have friends, and if you want to hang out with them, you'd better play World of Warcraft. *he laughs* But why? Because I think that it's a new form of entertainment that is going to stay here for a while, and is going to continue developing. World of Warcraft is probably the best opportunity to really experience it in it's early stages, and to grow with it. </p> <p> Online gaming is going to be everything that gaming is about, and World of Warcraft is the first thing that really cracked this mass market barrier. It provides a great opportunity to learn, to engage yourself in epic quests, to socialise with others, and to create. These four things are things that we all want to do. We all want to learn, we all want to engage ourselves in interesting entertainment, we all want to socialise, and we all want to create.</p> <p> <strong>SCI FI: Thank you very much, Itzit Ben Bassat and Jon LeCraft.</strong></p> [download]