Looking Back... World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft has proved a massive success for Blizzard Entertainment, since launch the MMORPG capturing the hearts and minds of millions of players who live a life of adventure in the developer's ever-evolving online world. But where did it all begin, and what are Blizzard's own favourite WoW moments and parts of the game? We caught up with producer Shane Dabiri and game designer Jeffrey Kaplan to find out.

1) ORIGINS
Dabiri: The original idea came about six years ago: a lot of us were playing MMOs, so we just thought, why not make one? The debate at the time was over what kind of MMO it would be and what world we would put it in. We have all these great universes that we based our RTS games around, and Diablo (which was already an RPG), so we decided to just tap into what we already had. People had already experienced the RTS side, they'd fought these battles - but they hadn't actually been able to explore these worlds.

2) WHY NOT STARCRAFT OR DIABLO?
Dabiri: At the time, we were all very much into fantasy-type MMOs and we'd only just finished doing StarCraft: Brood War - so we had this real excitement about the Warcraft universe because we hadn't touched it in a while. There's so much history behind it, there've been books about it, we've even done paper-and-pencil role-playing games - it's a universe that really has a dear place in our hearts and that's why it was the route that we decided to take."

3) BUILDING THE WORLD
Kaplan: Most of the concepts in the creation of Azeroth came from our creative director Chris Metzen - he's the keeper of lore around Blizzard and he started designing maps based on previous maps and lands. We started figuring out the landmass, figuring out the different areas and asked ourselves questions about the places, the races and the story. Then we moved onto concept art and getting everybody excited about it. We looked at it as if we were building a real, existing place - but it really all started with just one simple idea.

4) THE LORE
Dabiri: If you look at the different RTS games we've made, then you can see we did a ton of lore in those, but there are things that we never touched on - like women in the game, for example. There were a few women characters in the game, but we really didn't have a lot about them, and we didn't have religions in the game or the origins of the races either. So we replicated a lot of what you saw in the RTS game, although there was a whole world that wasn't there - it was up to our imaginations to come up with new things to do for say, the Titans or Ogrimmar - a lot of this stuff had been talked about, but we'd never worked out exactly what they looked like and where they came from.

Kaplan: It's definitely a set universe, but it's a universe that we've created so if we need to bend it, we don't have to go and ask permission from a license holder. We can do whatever we want with it, as long as we keep true to the spirit of the world. If we need to change things around, we'll do it.

5) THE UNEXPECTED
Dabiri: There's a recent example of the unexpected: the plague. We'd implemented a new dungeon which included a spell effect called 'Corrupted Blood'. It was a spell that did damage to you, and if you came near other players, the spell effect passed on to them. The idea was that this spell existed only in this dungeon, but there was a bug and it got out. Players went back into towns and were spreading it to other players. We quickly resolved the issue, but what surprised us was that on the game's forums, players were like: "Wow, what a fantastic world event! The day the plague wiped out Ironforge!" We got calls from the CDC - the Centre for Disease Control - saying: "Hey, what's all this about the disease in your game? We want to look at the simulation data - it might help us in a real-world situation." We kept saying: "No, no, no, it's just a bug! We fixed it, it's just a game!

Kaplan: It showed us that players have a tendency to live in this world and see things that happen as part of it. We had some angry customers calling us saying they just died, but it did give us some ideas for some possible real future events.

6) EASTER EGGS WHEN IT ISN'T EASTER
Dabiri: One of our designers wanted to do some secret content, so there's a lot of stuff in our game that players have to discover - and when they find it, they think it's awesome. Like the first time you see the sea giants and they bend over and fart and the bubbles come out. Plus, a lot of the emotes for players were thought of because when you're fighting a monster, you don't want it to just stand there. So, every now and then it'll do something crazy, like a skeleton will take his head off and toss it in the air. It's so that players have a few things to discover above and beyond the regular levelling up.

7) CUSTOMERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT
Dabiri: Right now, World Of Warcraft is exactly what we wanted it to be when we shipped, and even to this day we're just evolving it even more. We always listen to the customer feedback though, so a lot of the systems that are in place now are based on player demand - like the necessity for more PvP in the game, which is why we added Battlegrounds and the honour system. With the latest dungeon that we released, Zul'Gurub, we had a lot of players who said they didn't have time to go into a 40-man raid and spend hours playing. With Zul'Gurub, we wanted to bridge the gap between doing a 40-man raid and doing a five-man dungeon. There's this idea of casual level 60s, somebody who only has an hour or two to play, so we wanted to give something to this type of player so they could progress within the game. A lot of the reputation-based quests in the game are based on feedback from players who wanted content they could do themselves.

8) FAVOURED RACES AND PROFESSIONS
Kaplan: I love my gnome, my gnome is awesome. And I love my undead character as well. I play all of the races, but the one I've most recently played tends to be my favourite.

Dabiri: I play a priest. It's interesting - we've had psychologists call and ask us to tell them how many people play as these different classes, and to ask those players if there's a certain personality they tend towards as a hunter or a warrior. So I thought, yeah, I sort of have the personality traits a priest would have - I like to help people, I want to be the guy that makes sure everybody stays alive, and as a producer on the team that's sort of what I do anyway - I help people out. It was interesting to make that parallel.

9) LEEROY
Dabiri: Leeroy was awesome! After we'd seen the movie, all you could hear that day from office to office was: "LEEROOOOY!" At one point, we even considered putting the ghost of Leeroy Jenkins in Blackrock Spire. That's the sort of stuff that's just endlessly entertaining, we just love it.

10) FAVOURITE MOMENTS
Dabiri: There's this quest that you do right at the entrance to Dun Moragh with these Dwarven riflemen at a shooting range. They start shooting at the targets and shooting at each other, and one of them shouts out, "Now I got my boomstick!" or something like that. I hadn't realized the sound team had put that in yet, and when I was doing the quest I heard that and thought it was hilarious. It just shows that there are so many little areas in the game with so many intricate details.

We spent the last five years building this stuff in, and that's one thing I think is lacking in many games: the attention to detail. You can tell that every zone was tenderly painted, every rock and tree individually placed, you go into a building and see books, and pots and pans - somebody visualised and placed all of these things. The quests follow the same route too - you may have noticed the little parodies we include like peoples' names and references to previous games: players really dig that. They pick up on those, and there are an endless amount of them in the game. It's what makes this game really special; it's deep and far more than just levelling up, finding items and increasing your abilities. It has a lot of cool and funny elements to it. It's almost like watching an episodic TV show and you're waiting to see what happens next, waiting to see how we'll surprise you.

PC Zone Staff