Mike Morhaime, Rob Pardo, Frank Pierce
Blizzard Entertainment
From Silicon & Synapse 1991, 3 people, through a timeline of changes up to the Activision Blizzard merger in 2008 at 2600+ people.
Through the years, most of the owning entities didn’t know anything about game development. This worked out to be a good thing because they are able to hold off any ideas from above, the last thing they want is someone with no ideas about games to impose them on Blizzard.
Affiliate label publishing model from the Interplay days. As part of Davidson didn’t want to change any of their development but now have access to sales & publishing. Even though they sold the company, still have an illusion of it being their own. When Davidson was sold, there was a good enough track record to keep operating in the same fashion. “Kind of like a cockroach, we keep surviving when everything else changes”.
Pardo: Even as an executive, still rare to see someone from the corporate owners. Don’t do demos, don’t have to get approval, etc.
MM: Experience in working with a lot of different bosses, learning to bridge between Blizzard and the companies.
“Mike has to train his new boss every time he gets a new boss.”
Initially viewed as making a game and then handing it off to a machine. But gradually learned that that machine doesn’t do all the things you might naturally want. French version of Warcraft I used manual-based copy protection, so the localized manual was a big problem – a huge shock that this could get released without anyone noticing. From that point forward Blizzard QA tests all versions of their games, regardless of language.
Ports and Conversions > Original games > Creating online infrastructure > Global release & localization > Client/Server hosted games > Massively Multiplayer > 24/7 customer service.
Progression of greater and greater responsibilities. Build the knowledge base and create an environment to take calculated risks. 130-140 people as the dev team for WoW. How did they get the experience to do WoW? Launched Battle.net in 1996 so hardly anything new. Built on layers of knowledge. A lot of studios wouldn’t do QA, tech support, PR internally but these were important for these layers of functionality. WoW was a franchise with 10 years of history and fanbase. With each game made, got a little more ambitious – very careful about where to innovate and not to do too many things at one time.
All the staff for WoW are Blizzard employees, not outsourced. Core business responsibility. Current focus is to become a leader in customer service.
“Gameplay First”. Lost Vikings: 50 vikings in first iteration, whittled down to 3 (1993). Brian Fargo took it home and gave a huge list of feedback. Didn’t want to take it at first but after digesting it, it was good feedback. First painful iteration but that set the model for every Blizzard game.
First iteration of Starcraft in the Warcraft engine “Orcs in Space”.
Gameplay First: most fun for the most people. Feedback that comes from individuals is sometimes from the point of that specific discipline. So best technology for broad system reqs instead of pushing the latest hardware. Can’t iterate with just storyboards – you have to bite the bullet and implement a lot of stuff first. Can’t just use boxes or boardgames, what is fun in the game is the experience of the game so you can’t make intelligent calls without a lot of that actual art & implementation.
Once you have that feedback, you need to change course – is it a cancel, a reboot, or a course correction? Makes them infamous for never hitting ship dates but requirement for the quality of the gameplay that they are known for.
Not just talented people, but talented people who are passionate about playing the games. Shouldn’t need to force people to play your game – if its fun your devs should want to be playing it. How do you know when the game is ready? Always this moment where people start taking long lunches to play the game and you need to get them back on actually working on it.
“Focus on the game being shipped”. Eye of Sauron. Once the game is on the right track start putting high level resources on it from all across the company. SC2 designers pulled to help with WoW. “Strike teams” – towards the end make cross discipline teams to play levels / zones. Generating huge lists of feedback and things to improve in the game. Then just keep doing this process again and again. Have to know when you are going past the point of diminishing returns. Trying to make great entertainment products, not perfect ones.
Nothing escapes the Eye… with the whole company the little things matter. Helps focus on the first 15 minutes for example.
Thinking Globally: Samurai Panda, Chinese vs Japanese caused problems with the Japanese dressed panda, so had to revise it to be Chinese. Be sensitive to global diversity as they built a global fanbase. Easy to fall into that trap in North America, have to force themselves to stay conscious of those issues. PCs at home vs game rooms. Just being creative at first, but at a certain point you start to vet things. WoW saving settings to your account.
Opening regional offices useful too. 7 offices worldwide now.
Big list of internally cancelled game: Nomad, Raiko, Warcraft Adventures, long list of others (9+). How do you get 100% hit rate? Don’t release the failures. Protect the brand. Like a bank, investment by shipping good games. Don’t sacrifice long term benefits for short term gains by shipping sub-par games. Don’t ship it until it is ready or don’t ship it at all. Hard to make this case with the business projections. Intuitive, but hard to execute in practice. Fortunate to have a good enough track record to have confidence that it will all work out in the long term.
Q: What was the biggest fight? On Warcraft III, naval units in an already ambitious feature list. Lots of debate about it internally, held them back for the expansion. How do Heroes translate onto a naval game? Design decision to keep them out, Pardo vs Adham.
For “All Hands on Deck” time, basically just directly delays all the other schedules, particularly when the company was smaller. Starcraft on hold for several months to help get Diablo out the door. Lead programmer from Starcraft wrote the Diablo installer. But it was a conscious decision to make – delaying products is worth improving quality. SC2 made progress even without a design team, which went to go help WoW. Make those drastic moves when you feel like you have to. As they gain experience easier to develop protective fences.
Q; whats the process for completely new ideas and how do you cancel those new ideas? All these great franchises, so do dev teams make something new or work within those? Dev team driven – Warcraft III team got to decide their fate next. Lots of things put on the table but they decided to go do SC2. A lot of the canceled ideas were new ideas or IPs that never got off the ground. Each cancellation has a different story – most of them never public.