summer vacation games online

we will never be slaves but we will be conquerors. what up? good morning, los angeles.how’s everybody doing? thanks again, man.-pleasure, man. it’s so awesome. kinda impressive little gig, you know?-yeah. the quickest wayto the lobby from here? straight down that way.-thanks, man. it’s a hell of a thingto have grown up geek.

i had geeky friends around meand we played d&d and we’d talk shop about comicsand things like that you know, my family was not geeky.my siblings didn’t understand. sweet! thank you.-ok, man. what’s your name?- eugene. what did you think of that? it was awesome.-it was kind of kick-ass yeah, i loved the way it’s being calledthe rise of geek culture.

as a lifelong card-carrying memberof that group i just thinkeveryone else is catching up. but what i do think is great about it is that whateveryou’re passionate about whether you’re a star wars fanor a star trek or a world of warcraft fan or a marvel fan, whatever it is i think what we’ve started to seeis people celebrating things that they believe inand love. literally, tears in my eyes.it brought us back the whole series

it’s all i want to hear. even thelords of war thing, i’m just geeked up. i can’t wait.-yeah. (scream) what was that? yes! we only really ever built gamesto please ourselves. i wanted to work on wow becausei wanted to play in a world like wow. i knew from the age of about 14 this is what i wanted to do with my life. this was back in the daywhen it took one programmer

and you could make a game by yourself,think of games like berserk or asteroids. really simple.that’s kinda where i started. so, while at ucla workingon a computer science degree i knew that i wanted to start blizzardthe day that i graduated. i think our class was around 300 students but there were maybe 10 of us that would finish our two-month projectsin the first week and spend the next, you know,month and a half optimising our code. and i took these guys and startedto show them the vision i had.

instead of being sapped off tothe microsofts and the ibms of the world that we could try and do something,a little different. blizzard has been aroundfor going on 24 years. when we started, a development teamcould be two and a half people. the experiences that we deliverto our players today require hundreds,arguably thousands, of people. one of the things that blizzardhas done well over the years is take types of games that haveonly appealed to a narrow audience and make them more accessible.

they’d done thatwith real-time strategy games. they’d done that with action rpgs. and that’s their particular geniusand they did that with wow taking a type of game that appealed toa narrow audience and making it broader. we dreamed aboutbringing warcraft to life instead of beinga top-down real-time strategy game you would just bea character running around and battling and teaming upwith your friends to fight increasingly difficult bad guys.

that was sort of a dreamthat wasn’t really in reach really until origin came outwith ultima online. i remember installing iton my work computer expecting that i was just goingto take a quick look at it. i ended up staying all night long,playing ultima online and never left my office chairand never slept that night. everquest took ultima onlineand extended it to the next level. the game was that much more immersive.you could play it first person. it’s still content that, for its time,everquest was the best game ever made.

everquest became thismassive inspiration for a lot of us. we loved the game. there were thingsabout everquest, however that were kinda hard-core. you couldn’t help but play it and say,this could be improved if we could spin the content this way. it really in me reawakenedthe desire to make the next great game. at the time,i was on the project called nomad a third-person, real-time strategy,rpg. it was everything. but we couldn’t really develop it.it just was crap.

there’s a lot of passion,blood and sweat that went into it but it didn’t coalesce into somethingthat people got or really got behind because there was no gameat the time that tried to be like. when we make something, we’re gonna planhow that works and how that looks. we’re gonna do a zone layout and this is perfect, we love it,can we start building the world? and we make everything, all the treesand the rocks and the buildings. and we build the whole worldand we look at it and we hate it. and, we’re like, ok,this just didn’t work.

so, we’ll take all of itand we’ll scrap it start over and build a different world.sometimes you need to do that. there were people on the teamthat were definitely hurt or disappointed that nomadwas not going to be any more. everyone understood. we weren’t gettingthe traction we wanted with that game and we played everquest, ultima onlinewe thought, we could do that. why don’t we make one of these?why don’t we make a game that we love? ultimately, it was allen adhamwho stepped in and said, “hey, we’ve got to rethinkthe direction that were going

we should be going more towardsworld of warcraft and less nomad”. as we were working on world of warcraft,i archived cool moments from the game. here is an old map of eastern kingdoms. so it shows, something up herecalled the dragon isles raid which was actually in productionthat doesn’t exist. the players will also notice thatwhen world of warcraft first shipped the game only went to a level cap of 60and you’ll see zones like eastern plaguelands heregoing 60 to 70. we had a zone called eerie peaks,which later got renamed to hinterlands.

this is stormwind, the first day thatit ever existed in world of warcraft. there’s no statues around it,the road doesn’t exist and in this screenshot,you can see the statues were getting builtby the art department and when something comesinto world of warcraft if it doesn’t have a texture on it it shows up as completely green. so, we had these giant green statuesfor some days, sitting in stormwind city. this was the moment thatwe placed onyxia in the world.

later we had some really great designersand artists work on this. as you see, onyxia looks differentthan she does today in world of warcraft. roman kenny would later come in and makethat model look like it is today. alex afrasiabi and chris metzenwere the primary drivers behind the story of things like onyxia. when i came into blizzard, the computerstuff always was very intimidating to me so i started writing. the boss sawwhat i was doing and went “i think this kidhas some potential”. i’ve been working with chrisfor a while.

college kids, got a job at blizzardand got paid to do art like crazy. i think that was one of themost exciting times about blizzard. kids coming together,throwing out ideas not knowing the rules, and not knowingif we were taking a risk. we were so naive and hungry thatit didn’t matter. we’ll just chase it. all of us we played warcraft 1 and 2,but we had questions about the world. we bugged chris so much. he broke out these acrylic paints. we asked ourselves,"what are you painting?".

and he painted a map of azerothon the wall. it was his way of saying"guys, this is a map of the world". he just did it. the mythological underpinnings wasn’tjust about bits, bytes and wireframes. it started with words and ideasand feelings and people. i never dream that we’d build the bones of a worldand hills and trees and rivers. i don’t think anybody had any idea really how many people or how much timeit was going to take to make wow.

people realized, if we are reallygoing to hit these goals we'll need more people.the team started to grow. when i came on board, the teamwas about 60 people which seemed big at the time, i though60 people was a large team. i came from ultima online,where we were about 30. we realized our estimate of doing500 quests just isn’t going to cut it. we’re gonna have to do five times thatfor this game to be awesome. we wanted to get everythinginto the game. there were many nights where many of uswould be here 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m.

the longest we’d ever takenon a game was warcraft 3 which i want to say was 3 years. the wow took about five yearsby the time it went out the door. the weeks and monthswere going by like they were hours. i remember it seemed impossiblethat we would be able to launch the game in a state that felt completeby the end of 2004. the 11th hour before the game shipped,we were getting massive pieces of content like the onyxia raid.we made molten core in one week. the whole time, as we were evendelivering on those pieces of content

we’re thinking this isn’t enough so, it was reallya sort of terrifying experience. we were tired. people were kinda beat up.it had been a long stretch of highway. but we were playing it and testing itand we were going “it’s super fun, we’re super in”. no one knew what it was going to dobut there was a sense that this is fun. hopefully, people are gonna like itand we’ll sell a few. when world of warcraft came out,the lord of the rings movies did as well and taken a first step in bringingfantasy back to the cultural mainstream.

you also had the harry potter movies,also starting around the same time. so, the cultural time was rightfor this product to come along. it was announced that we were duea developer signing at fry's. one of our producers called us and said“you guys won't believe what’s going on”. we got off the freewayand there were police everywhere. crowds of people walking downthe street. it looked like mardi gras. and i thought “did we somehowmistakenly do this on the same night that someonewas having a big event?” as we got closerand turned the corner

i realized, no,actually, this is our thing. what do you mean, they’re here for us? like, a couple of people would show upand get the box to sign. not 6000 or whatever crazy numberthat showed up. some didn’t know what was in the box,it was just sort of a leap of faith. like, i’ve played blizzard games before.warcraft was great, starcraft was great and this game is going to be awesomei just want to meet the people here. it was the most amazing experience. as a passionate blizzard fan myself,i saw a lot of myself in the audience.

right, i saw a community of gamersthat was very much like the developers that were sittingon the opposite side of the table. we were there till 5 or 6 in the morning,signing every single box it came through. that was the easy part. one of the thingsthey felt really strongly about was not to sell more boxes than we couldsupport on the servers we had at the time because they didn’t want to havebad experiences with servers or accounts. and it turns out those boxes we projectedto last for a couple of months sold out within a day or two.

we had planned to have a million userswithin the first 12 months of the game. we had those first million userswithin four months. so, all of the equipment and serversthat we had planned to deploy we had meticulously planned every monthwere going to deploy this many we deployed them all. we just said“put them all up in the first months”. day one we were actuallyshouting for correct numbers because the numbers were so large that we’re thoughtthey were incorrect numbers and that the monitoringwe had in place was bogus.

there was actually a time beforewow launch that we thought we could probably get awaywith supporting world of warcraft with 12 to 20 employees total. and we were a little bitoff the mark there. we went from a company of 500 peopleto at one point we were over 5000 people because of world of warcraft. when i first came onto wow, wowhad shipped about six months before that. there was this buzzand this energy and excitement and trepidation as well.it was like, "ok, now what do we do?".

it was amazing how big success it became.i think that caught everyone off guard. we all thought, hey, this thingcould get a million players here this is special, but when it went upto 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 million world wide it was just unbelievable. we live at an interesting crossroadsright now where the games industryhas grown so fast and so huge but warcraft i think is the daddyof them all. come on, we have to finishthe quest in stone haven. stan, stan.

hang on guys, my dad wants something.-stan. what? you’ve been on the computer all weekend.shouldn't you go out and socialize? i am socialising artard. i’m logged on to an mmorpgwith people from all over the world getting xp with my partyusing teamspeak. i’m not a artard. this role-playing game out in 2004returns to the “world” of azeroth where heroes like leeroy jenkinsdo battle.

let’s do this.leeroooooooooooooooooy jenkins. oh, he just ran in. you can say thatthe leeroy jenkins situation was one of the first internet memesof any kind. and actually became a verb. leeroy means to rush headlong intoa situation of danger with no regard to the potential consequences. stick to the play. leeroy, you are just stupid as hell.-at least i’m not chicken.

once you start hitting into pop cultureand for it to resonate with this many people,that’s where you can say “wow, we’ve donesomething pretty amazing here”. i chose the race orc. and i chose thembecause they are big and strong. dwarves, all about, you know, the power.so straightforward. rogue blood elf because,first of all, it’s horde and i relate more to being a misfitwho’s misunderstood. paladin is the guy who’smost of the time saving the day fighting for god and country.i can relate to that.

i’ve always wanted to live in this world.i’ve always wanted to be a hero. i play warrior because i wantto wield a sword and lead the charge. i love gnomes. i think they’rethe technological core of the alliance. i had friends. you’re nervous. they said,“we need you to take axes to the face.” what the hell, man, i’ll do it.that’s who i am. why would you be anything but orc.you’re beautiful. being a warrior is about just fightingwith everything that you have. it’s not world of peacecraft,it’s world of warcraft, baby. i play the human priest.she may be a character but

she brought me out of my shell. i was, what is the least amountof clothes i can wear in this game? so, i obviously becamea blood elf paladin. the reason i picked undeadwas because i wanted the ugliest race. i have a level 90 shaman named dyslexic because i am dyslexic. so dyslexici have to wear two different shoes to tell my left and right. i play human paladinssince i was 12 years old. i don’t see any reasonto change that up now.

justice isn't going to dispense itself. i’ve always been drawn to elves.i like them and the blood elves have this fascinatingstory because they’re survivors. when i started playingi had just suffered a terrible accident. every doctor said thati should either be dead or paralyzed. so i had a neck brace onand i had to lie in a couch. i started and i played a blood elfand questing i found a lady’s necklace. i had to return it to ladysylvanas windrunner, leader of the undead she takes the necklace and throws it downand all of a sudden she starts singing.

the more i got into her story,it changed my perspective. you see how much she sufferedto get her body back. and having lost my body, that was a storythat resonated. it meant a lot to me. and her story helped me heal. so many players of our game talk about it in the same way they would speak of their favorite summer vacationwith their family or meeting their significant otherin their first date and their song, playing on the radiowhen they were falling in love. that sort of thing happens in the gameall the time.

i had one of those moments,like everybody has like: “oh, now we’ve made it.”and that was blizzcon. we put the announcement for blizzconinto the world of warcraft launcher and it sold out in a day. one of my favorite moments,blizzcon had not opened yet and there’s a sea of peopleat the entrance, waiting for the opening. i’m going up the escalatorand as i’m getting to the top, i yell: “for the horde!” and the whole audience lights up.for the horde!

for the horde! for the alliance!-for the alliance! and they just start, you know,raging on each other. how cool is that. it’s overwhelming and humbling to us.we go to these events, like blizzcon. doing it is as important for usas it is for the players and it recharges all of theblizzard team members’ geek batteries. all these people to see world of warcraftand realizing: “this is special.” link auction houses in every major city. this is these people’s lives. some camefrom all over the country and the world

to come together or meet someof these players they met in the game. it was just a blast. and we’ve beendoing it almost every year since. you do have a fan basethat is not only dedicated to this world, but they’re passionateabout it, they’re opinionated about it. falstad wildhammer was going to beon the council of three hammers but it’s not in the game at all.what happened to him? isn’t falstad deadfrom the day of the dragon? he survived and in fact, he was the leader of aerie peakin vanilla wow in wrath of the lich king.

of course. yeah alex, what’s up with that? thanks for pointing that out.we’re gonna get that fixed. thank you. blizzard has taken the time to reallyspeak to their players. they have people on the ground.i get feedback from players in my guild and say: “hey, this doesn’t work here”or “if you go to this section here”. and we’re pretty sure that’s invaluablefor blizzard because we’re able to say: “hey”, you know, as unified front,”this is great, this needs some work”.

wow fans don’t mess around. they take world of warcraft seriously.we say there’s two characters of wow. there’s the player and the world. wow just has that loving communitythat’s always there to support and help. the one thing that keeps me playingand keeps me going back would have to be the people i’ve met.it’s just an awesome place to belong. my son was diagnosed with leukemiaand the community helped us, thank you. my mum’s actually handicapped.she has ms. it was a way for my mum to feel likeshe could really experience the world.

as a veteran, for myself,the game gives me a second home. i made tons of friends with the game,different friends, speaking of which i'm on camera.i know you’re on camera. i’m in costume. you knowthe south park episode of wow? i’m the... yeah. the relationship that i've developedthrough wow was my marriage. one thing led to another and nowwe’re married with two children. meeting my boyfriend jackson, bajheera.- all muscling male, baby. you provided a medium for usto meet when we were states away.

she server-transferred to irl so thatwe could work on establishing a garrison. i met my wife in world of warcraft. we started playing together more oftenand eventually we started dating and the rest is history. it’s the community,it’s the people that i play with. we have so much fun.these people have become my family. i’ve never seen a game be this powerful. funny. you don’t realize your limitationswhen you don’t know shit. and that was one of those moments wheni had no idea what i was getting into.

the opening of the gates of ahn’qirajwas really a huge moment in our history. it’s interesting because it isn’t onethat we’ve really repeated yet it has such great kindof historic value. we wanted to capture a lot of what we had seenin everquest or ultima online with these major eventswhere one person on the server can be, you know, the hero for a day. the whole sever would come together,or would have to come together to unlock this dungeon in this raid.

the door twisted and rotated the rootswould untangle and it would open. and i had a sense where i said: “this is only going to happen one time,ever, per server”. and i thought that was pretty cool. we didn’t realize how many peoplewould actually show up to this thing. i expected people to show up,i didn’t expect everyone to show up. you should talk to your server engineerswhen you have a plan like this. focusing all of that in one areaturned out to be not a good idea. especially all at once

cause at that point we had cpus maxed,we had databases maxed up. it is an event that lot of playerskind of look back to. they’d say: “this was really cool.”but it’s actually… it was very stupid. every server converged upon silithus,which is the zone that ahn'quiraj was in and proceeded to, basically,repeatedly crash the entire wow server over and over again until people said:“i can’t remain awake. i gotta go.” when we came down below the threshold,they were able to open it. but it was somethingthat we ended up learning from and actively avoid going forward.

this is one of our us data centers.we have seventeen world wide and this is wherewe host world of warcraft. the data for characters and the worldis all contained in the data centers. we usually pusha hundred gigabits per second. so you would be ableto download four hd movies per second. there's a high level of security. whether it’s malicious or accidental we want to make peoplestay outside of our areas. this is actually the first timethat we’ve allowed cameras in here.

so this is what one of the bladeslooks like for world of warcraft. so this particular one is tichondrius,one of our more popular realms. it’s the cpu, it’s the memory, it’s whatcreates the world and sends it back out. there’s tens of thousandsof these world wide. these are designed so that the developerscan take advantage of the game. they have the world servers,instant servers and those make up realms. this is what we call the gknocker,the global network operations center. it’s essentially where we monitorthe heartbeat world wide of our games. this one in particular is seeking to lookat various security threats world wide.

every once in a while you’ll seethis light up significantly which is a pretty large attack. this screen here shows all of the loginsworld wide for games that we have. each pop that you see on the screenis somebody logging in to play the game. and then, these two screens, we are monitoring streaming feeds. it’s an indication, if we have problemsfrom the players’ point of view. we push the boundaries of the technologyas far as we can. we try not to tell the developers “no”unless physics gets in the way.

you know, so far, to datewe can only push light so fast. we have to say no at that point but otherwise we try and figure out a waythat we can make the vision come to life. after we had launched the service in 2004 we were in panic catch-up mode,in a very reactive mode. we were patching we knew we wantedto deliver cool content to players but we couldn’t seemto get our feet beneath us. we spent all of our time just tryingto get things under control that would save us about twelve monthsafter launch before we were like:

“i guess we should makean expansion with this game.” wow experienced such explosive growthin its first year and two years. and the question was:could blizzard sustain their momentum? would the first expansion,burning crusade be able to reach the level of qualitythat they’d established in vanilla wow? where do we go next? warcraft had always beenin the interactive space of videogames. kind of like compared to,tolkien or other fantasy settings that we had grown up playing games withindungeons and dragons, things like that.

and, man, i had a fire in my gut desperately wanting to provethat we were not the same old thing. our world could stand up and take youto places that you would not expect. we developed the story whereby the playerwalks through this ancient portal and is transported into this broken,shattered world. it was definitely not the same old thing. and it was funny at the timewalking the team through this idea. especially the artists.they’re just going: “what the hell?” the guys at blizzard archive this for me,so now it’s not all bent up in a drawer.

here are some imagesthat were sort of the first. this is a picture of a paladini had drawn for some friend’s card gamethat never got used and we ended up using this in warcraftas our paladin uther his eyes are covered, he’s blind buthe carries the book of honor and virtue. we didn’t want him blind, he’s supposedto run with other warhammers. so, we took the mask off of the paladinand what i did was i put it on this character here who was my inspiration for illidan.

this was the very first illidan picturethat was done, back in 2000. he had carved out his eyes to havethe demonics sense the demons. he used demonic energy against the demonsback when illidan was kind of a good guy. you are not prepared. burning crusadewas a huge success they were able to maintain the qualitythey’d established in vanilla wow and even raised the bar. when i look backinto that first expansion i believe it did exactlywhat i hoped it would do.

it just reset people's expectations. our players began to understand thatwe weren’t in this to sleepwalk through some classic plain wrap fantasy thing.that we were definitely looking at it like artistsand challenging ourselves and then they kind of take this journeywhere anything was possible. in the years of burning crusade you started to see the adoptionin asia and in europe that made wow not just anamerican phenomenon but a global one. the beautiful about wowis that it crosses cultures very well.

in china, for example,internet cafes are so popular. it’s always been a one-child policy.kids don’t have siblings but they need to go to a place wherethey can get that social interaction. it’s an experience. you sit downand you play games with your friends and everybody is, you know,screaming and playing. it’s really a social experience. i’m not sure we realized we would havethe global reach that we ended up with. when we released the game in europe

people said that market didn’t existbecause it blew up ten times. i really like hardcore raiding. i played druids… didn’t fit me.paladin, perfect. i made a guild and i’m stillin contact with loads of them. there were loads of peoplefrom the uk and europe. in the end, the beauty of a game like wowis that you connect everyone together so you are, kind of, diminishing,the culture differences between people. what became the fascinating lesson to us was how similar players were

regardless of where they were globally. once they were living in azeroththey were just citizens of warcraft. the most memorable moment playing wowcame when i was playing a gnome warlock. i was headed into ironforgefor the very first time. the first time i wentthrough the gates of orgrimmar. i was walking up the path,guarded by dwarves on either side entering this doorway that was carvedinto the side of a mountain. when i walked through those gates,the drums kicked in, the music changed and i saw an entire city to explore,i knew i was hooked.

nagrand. it’s just rolling hillsand you can look off into the distance and this giant elephant walked past me,it was the way it feel like a real world that is my favorite thingabout wow. watching the sunrise. any sunrise. the reason is somethingthat we did differently. we have a real-time clock.we call it “time is time”. time is a person’s sense of immersion.it’s subtle but important. in northrend there is an areawhere the forsaken buildings are. it’s in this kind of snowy, moody areaand the light is nice at around 5 pm.

the only time you see a sunrise in wowis if you’re up during sunrise. so they’re rare and unique and beautiful. my most memorable time playing this gamewas in bc when i was rogue and got server first dual warglaives.those were good times. it’s good being a nerd, isn’t it? we decided to have a hot tub party in one of the moonwells in duskwood. the moment at the wrathgatewhere you pick up bolvar’s shield. i almost shed a tear because, afterpicking up the shield, everybody saluted.

i go on the forumsand i make a post saying: “we are raiding heroic halionon monday, october 11th. if you have work, call out sick.if you have plans, cancel them!” and that night, we killed him. my god! the nerds’ screams were amazing. probably my most memorable moment in gamewas our first take down of the lich king. my son, the day you were born the very forests of lordaeronwhispered the name arthas.

beating arthas, aka the lich king. arthas, i think. it’s just legendary. that was like nothingi’d experienced in a videogame. i remember screaming and yellingat my friends on skype so loud that the neighborsstarted banging on the walls. finally getting him downwas the kind of euphoric excitement, celebration that i mean, it’s happenedso rarely in my real life. figuring out the next thingafter burning crusade

was an interesting process. we knew that we'd fight the lich kingand make him a much more prominent figure and our storytellingwanted to have two zones that players funneledinto for alliance and horde and not just the“go through the dark portal” moment. and then we wanted to have skiing. we'll have this snow, these mountains.skiing, that’s gonna be a feature. we still do not have skiing in wow,but that was an idea at one point. what they did in wrath of the lich kingthat they hadn’t done before

was take their storytellingto another level. including in-game cinematics like the wrathgate sequence that brought the players into the storyin a way they hadn’t before. blizzard has beenin the forefront of game cinematics as long as they have existed. blizzard cinematics did inspire megreatly from my very young child age which they hatewhen i say that here because i’m thirteen years younger thanmost of the guys doing this at that time.

and so i was like: “oh, yeah! warcraft 2?i loved playing when i was thirteen”. and they just all go: “aaah!” seeing the fan-art and how they respondto the game that we’ve created and how it inspires them towardstheir own creative outlets inspire us. i remember after the game had been outfor a few weeks or a few months people were video-capturing their footagewhile playing it and editing it creating movies that tookthe storyline to the next level. i think that was interesting,that this entertainment turned into sort of a creative mediumand an outlet for other people.

the first machinima experiencethat i saw online that totally took me by surprisewas “return”, done by terran gregory. home the sound of that word had sustained methrough battles beyond all counting. my friend ezracomes to me one day and says: “oh, have you seen that blizzard’sputting on a movie contest for blizzcon?” “that sounds interesting!” for thirty long yearswar, endless war. we created a six-minute movie, “return”,a warcraft motion picture

submitted it not thinkingit would go very far only to findthat we had won that contest. ezra and i drew our resourcesand we flew down to blizzcon. so, we walk right up to chris metzenand we introduce ourselves. and seeing chris metzen’s face light up “you guys made that movie? return? wow. when they startedsending that around the company, everyone was watching it,talking about it.” my friend and i were just sitting there.“we’re supposed to be geeking out on you.

why are you geeking out on us?” that’s when the linesbetween fan and real art started to blend for us.and for them, when they said: “how would you like to comeand do this for us?” and now, my title isproject director for cinematics. we’ve got all six cut scenesto review today. we can go over the velen and the frostmournescenes even though those were close to final. your place is with our people. lok'tar

most players may or may not recognizemajor franchise characters, you know thrall and arthas and king varian. depending on the faction you’re onyou may not have ever interacted with those very popular characters. but the one thing that unitesall players is the land. the world itselfis probably the key character. my favorite wow zonehas got to be nagrand. my favorite zone ever. so many thingsto kill, twelve of this, eight of that. it’s just like a warcrafttwelve days of christmas.

it’s got to be karazhan.-karazhan. winterspring. molten core.-icecrown citadel. australia, where i was filmingsuperman returns the time wow first came out...and we played a lot. i have fond memories of westfallfor sure. stormwind city. i remember walking through those gates.my jaw just fell to the floor. i couldn't believehow big the place was. that moment has stuck with meright through this day.

ironforge. i would always danceon top of the mailbox. gilneas.-frozen throne. hellfire peninsula for sure.-thousand needles. this canyon of endless red rock reminds me of when i was growing upseeing these majestic rock formations. it’s got to be azshara. it’s the feeling, the red leaves,they’re just really beautiful to look at. and i’m talking old school azshara,before deathwing did what he did. the craziest thing about this franchiseis that the world itself

is probably the most key character. that’s crazy, right? it’s very, very cool. so the powerful idea with cataclysm was:what if we imperil the world you know? chris was: “i wanna break everything”.i remember thinking: “dude, like, what? is this the end of warcraft? right?" he’s pitching the ideaand everyone’s like, got this like: “really? the game is doing really good.you wanna break it?” and they said: “we want to havethis big moment, this big event

where the players log out and log back inand the world’s all different.” that was probably the scariest thingi’ve ever heard. we didn’t quite knowthe extent of our madness. then we realized: “holy shit. what arewe gonna do? how are we gonna do this?” my team and i sat down and we didforty-eight hours of analysis of our data and tried to figure outif we could make this effect happen. and we came back with a definite maybe. that was oneof the more complicated things that we’ve donein the history of wow.

incredibly complicatedfrom an engineering perspective from a patch delivery perspective. we figured out a way to delivertwo versions of the world. you’re standing somewhere in kalimdor,you log out you log back inand the world was destroyed. now it’s covered in waterand a different place that it used to be but i’ll never forgetmy first time in there. players seem to really becomeso invested in the time they’ve spent what it means to them,their friendships.

it's interesting to watchthe emotional ways people engage. it’s always that way. all of theseexpansion sets, all of these games. i think with any product like this both the creators and the playersmature and grow together. and you see that in the storiesthat they like to tell to one another. when he was three years old,i put him on wow and he played an undead, remember that?-yeah, i got to level ten or eleven. his favorite part wasmaking the campfire, remember? i don’t rememberhow to make the campfire

we have to go back there. what’s your favorite part, connor,about playing a warlock? so many demons.-that’s what i need to teach my son. the whole family plays,except for my daughter. we haven’t let hersummon demons. we’re waiting on that one.thanks so much, guys. we might do that tomorrow-tomorrow! i think with mists of pandariathey took a slightly different approach where it wasn’t just aboutdefeating one big bad guy.

it was about really exploringa whole new culture. the asian themes, very different.the story-telling was more philosophical. why do we fight? for my kind, the true question is: what is worth fighting for? and maybe that reflected the fact that the people who make these gameswere getting older and more mature. maybe there’sa more sophisticated storytelling that you engageas a person and player.

i was heavy into the martial arts movies china, japan. my daughter was born so i made an asian inspired panda.so there’s a little kid there’s me, big fat guy on the hill. people really started enjoying these guysand they ended up becoming a race. and it’s just a christmas pictureto start with. i might have printed it outand gave it to someone they said:” oh, this woulda cool race to do” we’re like: “it seems weird for warcraft”and they go: “we’ve got april fool.

let’s make this an april fool thing”.we put a bit of history added pictures and: “april fools, the new race in warcraft 3,the pandaren.” and everyone’s like: “oh, that’s so cool!this is gonna be so awesome!” and we’re like: “they actually like it.what do we do now?” mists of pandaria, i think shows how much we can continue to drivethe visual look of our expansions. what’s really been awesome is seeingwhat chris robinson, the art director and what that art teamis able to accomplish.

and they’re just given the timeto craft, you know, art. everything has to be about the idea,so what we’re trying to support here is: “don’t focus on finished,don’t focus on rendering perfectly make sure every pixelis in the right place. focus on this first partand make sure that if the idea is amazing the structure and foundation is amazingwe’ll get to the rendering part.” as a technical director, it’s a lotof collaboration with the arts team. when we were thinking for actuallydoing the pandaren for mists of pandaria, they wanted to make a characterthat is much more alive

and need to emote better, which requiredfacial animation technology. we actually had to buildkind of custom technology to make surethat the actual face shape can change. with the technology you provide you give artists and designers the toolsthey can use to bring the world to life. engine tries to enable creative peopleto do very creative things. our bond is iron, our will unbreakable who will stand against us? every new expansion,we try to push our storyline forward.

we try to offer new types of experiencesthat you never had before. in warlords of draenor we’re saying:“you wanted to build a base in the world? you’re interested in blizzard franchisesback twenty years ago.” now you can have a bit of thatin your world of warcraft also. wouldn’t it be cool if we wentback to draenor before it was outland? what if we were ableto encounter the warlords that we heard about in warcraft 1 and 2and these stories in warcraft 3 but i’ve never played with in wow? a thing i love about warlords of draenoris that it gives us the chance to

kind of go back to a place and an era in the history that no one’s seen. and what comes with that is,all the super nerdy layerings of like: “you’re gonna break the timeline.we can’t go back. it’s like marty and docand the time machine. we’re gonna break it all.what about the space-time continuity?” we had to think through all the fictionand all the consequences of what happens if we screw it all up. so today we open up our first raid bossesfor testing on the beta servers.

one thing that i think is a hallmarkof world of warcraft betas is that players are getting a chanceto be invited into the creative process and to see things not finished. well, midwinter has ten people here so,that’s enough to test. for something like we’re doing right now,where we have the new warlords of draenor it’s a closed beta test,where we send out waves of invites. the two designers here today are jason,who made the butcher fight in highmaul and candace, who worked on gruulin blackrock foundry. are we expecting this,in terms of their positioning?

the first step isputting raidbot soft for testing. we also open a thread, for feedback. it’s just too much for three, i think. we often err on the sideof making things a bit harder because when something is tunedto be more difficult than we want it to we can then see how far people make it. if something is too easy,they just go on and win and we don’t know how much harderwe need to make it to actually get it to the right place.

remind me what that mechanic is...i though you want your ranged to soak it because your melees are usually soakingthis other thing that has the stack... so, they’re doing it wrong. he knocks everybody awayso they’re just running back in. here they go. five bucks they wipe tooverwhelming blows again. everyone seems to be wiping tooverwhelming blows. oh, oh, and tank's down. that took six seconds.

you’re supposed to split the damagefrom that ability, they may not know it. we watch a fraction of players that aretesting the encounter themselves. but we read what thousands of peoplesay about it and share their experiences. what they found frustratingor hard to read or interpret. jason, there’s actually some genuinefeedback posts with a couple of links on the us forum. if you go look at the eu feedback forumyou’ll see some things not necessarily feedback. usually, the consensus from the feedbackis pretty accurate

and inform usin the direction of the fight. we use that to craftand to tailor the experience and to improve it for a better experiencewhen the game goes live. on our end, raid testing continuesstarting mythic testing this week big thing i’m working on personallyis fixing our dungeon tuning. thank you.-we’ve left it for a while. our dungeons, i know, are ridiculouslytoo hard across the board. our normals had been aboutwhere heroics should be. heroics, where challenge should be.and challenges impossible.

basically i feel like game designersare deviant psychologists. we’re trying to manipulate your emotionsand motivate you to do things. but not for some higher calling,just so you have a good time and fun. we also just made a changefor bonus roll tokens you should be aware of. if you do gold, you can do goldfor 500 gold the first time. but then you can also,once you do that once it escalates and you get a second onefor a thousand or a third one for 2000 gold.

we move back to gold,the universal currency. it’s the currency that you getfrom doing anything we can sort the inflation.-no. people ask: “did you hire an economistto figure this out for you?” and we really didn’t. i mean, what we didis we kind of said that: “well, there’s stuff that people wantand a currency that has value it has guaranteed value because of whatyou can buy from the game with it and that currency is tradable,we have an economy.” and it kind of works like that.

i just think of it as this giant equationover this panel of knobs and dials you turn one a bit and hasthis butterfly effect in the world. and you can screw up an entire economyfor a virtual economy for millions. it’s a complicated task.that’s why i work on the art team. this has been a huge expansion. not just physically because of the amountof world space that kind of exists. it’s huge in terms ofits garrisons’ feature and the amount of technology that has hadto be invented in order to deliver that. which one are you gonna show to us first?-i’ve got a few layouts for you today.

here are our large plots.here’s our medium plots. we got a lot of feedback that a lotof these garrison layouts are sprawling so we might be cutting backon some of that stuff as well. the designers came to us with the ideato create these garrisons both human, allianceand horde/orc garrisons. and the designers came to uswith the pitch that: “look, we already have all these thingsthat we can reuse so we won’t be as much of an impact.” and, what would you say?how many buildings have we done?

120 buildings later. when you come through your front gatewe want you to really resonate with this. we're going to integrate the garrisonsinto the questing experience. we want to make it part of the story,to be important and to matter. we’re creating a worldthat feels different than what you kind of seein everyday life. it is handcrafted and i thinkthat’s what helps make wow so special. i am so proud of warlords of draenor. the game looks amazing. it’s so polished.

you look at vanilla and you’re like:“oh, i wish i could redo all of that. all the things we’ve learned. all of the techniques we can now dothat we couldn’t do then.” that’s the part i like, is the pushing.keep pushing the tech, the look. the people who make world of warcraftpour so much of themselves into the game. they’re trying to create gamesthat they want to play. even though we’ve grown the thing that’s always remainedis that feeling of tribe and that feelingof creative crackling energy.

i’ve done this work my whole,you know, adult life and what an impossible blessingit has been. i was nineteen when i walked in the door.it’s family. i’ve known those guyssince they were kids. their personalities remain unchangedbecause their egos don't get out ahead. we want to create amazing artworkor content or music or stories or quests. and to think thatthis game affected people it’s awesome and humbling. give them an applause,even if you’re in the alliance.

we earnestly believewe’re making something special. i don’t think we’ll ever stoppushing the boundaries of what we want to doand what we think is cool. freaking cool. if people play it we will alwayswant to support it. we never see a horizon. there’s really not a precedentthat we can look to. i think that we’re chartingnew territory. there’s no end to the experience.it’s the beauty about it.

the players have never really finishedplaying world of warcraft. people that probably wantedto be a part of jrr tolkien’s universe found themselves able to experience itin world of warcraft. that, is going to pervade as far as:“i don’t want to watch it anymore. i wanna be a part of it. i want to have impact.” all the ideas and the love and everythingthat we had, we gave it. and it was all about: “will they like it? will they come and play with us?”it's goofy stories at the end of the day

but it always struck me as we’ve shared them,when we’ve shared them. it becomes infinitely bigger. hi, i’m christopher guest.i’m the dad of… tom guest’s dad. i’m tom guest,but my character’s name is newthrall. tom is the real player in the family although my wife,jamie lee curtis, has played. i’m not really a player cause i can’t getthe whole up and down, left, right part. when you’re moving people.i need people to, like, stop

and freeze before i kill them.but i’m a big supporter. i think it’s a great game. i’m a really proud mum of a wow player.go horde! what keeps me coming backto world of warcraft is all the magic training i’m receivingfor when i become a real magician and learn how to stamp my enemies outand crush them like dirt under my boot. and social interactionand that feeling of communal spirit. we’re sitting on ten years of wow now.twenty years of warcraft lore altogether and we still cannot cook our own bacon.

we need to cook our own bacon. the funniest reaction i’ve ever got wheni told someone i played wow was: “you’re a girl.” jerks. i’m here working late a lotand my wife, i miss her so i take a little time outand i have my tauren she has hers and i meet her by a lake. it’s sunset. we just go fishingand watch the sunset. and to me, that feels like we’re there.

and for a few minutesi can share that moment with her. one thing i really want to seein world of warcraft is an unicorn. i don’t care if it doesn’t existin azeroth right now but come on! we need unicornswith flying rainbow tails. think of nyan cat. we need like nyan corn, right? right? the things on my wish listfor world of warcraft’s updates would be to explore the continentin southern draenor where the ogres are native to.

you have dragons but you haveno unicorns. you need unicorns. to see the islands in the great sea,like zandalar and kul tiras. unicorns.-murderous unicorns. flying unicorns, unicorns i can ride. or to revisit azjul-nerub as it wasn’twell explored in wrath of the lich king. i do have to admit that i have a secret,kind of shameful wish for wow’s future: unicorns. lots and lots of unicorns. in the outside worldi am a simple geologist. but in here, i am valkorn

defender of the alliance. i’ve braved the fargo deep mine and defeated the blood fishat jarod’s landing. hmm. looks like that guy just killed you. what? why? if this documentary sucksit's not my fault.