A New Phase for World of Warcraft’s Lead Designer: His Own Startup | Hacker News Reader

A New Phase for World of Warcraft’s Lead Designer: His Own Startup

nytimes.com

61 pointsImpossible42 comments

The day I met Rob was one of the best days of my career. It was my first day working at Blizzard, and I was totally in the dark about what the game I was going to be working on, other than it was the "Next-Gen MMO" project. So imagine the excitement of going to work at Blizzard, plus the anticipation of finding out what this mystery project is that you didn't even find out about during your interviews.

So on the first day, the other programmer starting that day and I sit down with Rob Pardo and he starts pitching the game to us — laying out the vision, the origins and the goals for what we were building, with considerable enthusiasm and imagination. Surely, this was the same pitch that convinced the heads of the studio to approve the project. It was tremendous. I wanted to get to my desk and start working right away so I could bring this vision closer to reality.

In contrast, at most places I've worked before and since, I showed up and found out about the project I was working on by way of some random demo, reading outdated documents or a process of detective work. Having a reveal and actual presentation as part of a threshold event like the first day on the team was really powerful. I felt like I was carrying the fire now. The inspiration from that first day provided us a full tank of gas and directions for the long journey we were going on.

Everyone talks about how crucial it is to hire well, but then we only grudgingly find time for interviews. In the same way, even though we know inspirational leadership is essential for creative work, it's not easy to plan to meet that need in each team member's experience. Even though it's far less in-depth than, say, the multi-week process at Facebook, that one presentation Rob did on my first day at Blizzard meant a huge amount to me, and I'll never forget it.

Thanks for sharing this.

Something that seems to disappoint me about big game studios like Blizzard is the smallish number of games they've made. With a creative staff where probably 100% of them are gamers, I'm sure the number of game ideas is just overflowing within. I wish Blizzard would try making more smaller games to see if it picks up any traction. I think of Blizzard let their game designers spend 20% of their time on their own project they'd find a ton of new revenue generating games. I'm hoping bonfire games has a hit game released to get started with then focus on smaller games after that so we can be entertained in numerous new ways.

You're assuming that they don't allow this kind of tinkering internally. But they actually due, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone were both created as internal passion projects by staff, grew interest inside of the company, polished and released.

Blizzard does focus on quality and feel, and is very open about their willingness to push dates or cancel projects if it doesn't meet their quality standard. Titan didn't work as an MMO, and a lot of that work was reused in Overwatch.

It would be really nice to see them spawn another brand that they can use for more easily publishing things that don't meet "Blizzard" standards.

They already have one! It's called Activision.

I've thought to myself before that an space sim MMO taking place in the Starcraft universe, if done right, would practically print money. But that's always an extremely easy thing for someone to think who is on the outside and not on the hook to develop it.

I try to keep this in mind as the space sim genre is awakening again with E:D, Star Citizen, NMS, etc.

The bottleneck is art, from what I understand. It's not trivial to generate enough skinned, rigged, and animated, good-quality 3D models. Even if you can reuse the bulk of your engine code, or even build off an existing game, as in the case of total conversion mods, the art demands have been getting steeper and steeper over the years.

Looking at really prolific game studios, they tend to be in less art-intensive genres. 8/16-bit RPGs, pixel-art platformers, etc.

And the people that really crank out games on a limited staff and art budget tend to reuse the same engines and assets with minor iterations. Think Spiderweb Software[1], or SSI with the Five Star games[2].

[1] http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_General

I have heard this as well, it suggests the single most impactful thing someone could build today would be a tool to generate game art cost effectively and quickly.

I would certainly throw money at such a tool, but the question then becomes scope. Autodesk has their Character Generator and Adobe bought out Fuse that has a competing product. But there is still nothing for backgrounds, interiors, etc short of modeling software and (if you have money rather than time) purchasing quantities of assets that you then still spend time customizing.

Maybe that's why Hearthstone was such a success, models and art for all the characters already existed!

You have to give it up that team: A lot of people complained about how simple Hearthstone is compared to Magic, but the reality is they did a pretty good job in creating accessible card game that works on multiple platforms.

I certainly have my criticism for the game such as the slow card releases, RNGfiesta, and lack of QOL updates, but ultimately the game is really well put together.

If you have evervplayed MTGO you might see that Magic's complexity doesn't transition super well to digital.

Though Hearthstone does have its own set of issues like you mentioned, I'm very glad they drew the lines on complexity where they did (notably no user interaction on opponent's turn except for secrets)

What's a glaring problem from a cardgame standpoint and not due to simplification is there is no defined order of action in a turn. You can play cards, attack,trigger effects and then play other cards immediately and the outcome of such actions is not deterministic.

An exact sequence of events can be replicated with the timing of them altered and you'd get different outcomes.

Whole board affecting secondary effects can also have unpredictable interactions with cards in play's triggered abilities.

In MTG parlance, the "stack" is broken in Hearthstone.

I play hearthstone quite a lot and what you are saying is absolutely not true. I'm guessing what you are talking about is that the game let's you play ahead while animations are still running, but the actual effects and results are the same regardless of the animations. It can make it appear that if you play a destroy all effect and then a minion the animation looks like it should destroy it but of course it doesn't since the animation isn't representing the game state.

Unless you are talking about something else and I misunderstand you? Maybe something like the order of deathrattles (they are triggered in order of the cards played, just like the few instances of time-stamp-matters interactions in MTG). Or do you mean how the max minion limit works where "dead" minions are still there during "on damage" effects but not during deathrattles? There is a few nonobvious rules like that, but I'm pretty sure the rules are actually pretty solid and not bugged.

At a concept level they existed, but the artwork was new.

I mean, everyone at Blizzard knows what an "Orc Warrior" should look like. Green skin, muscles, some type of weapon. But someone had to actually create new drawings of it for the game.

This means that the main challenge behind coming up with a new franchise is to come up with a consistent, compelling concept for its various elements.

A large amount of art from the original set was incidentially cropped and reused from the ill-fated WoW TCG.

This is really interesting considering the "starving artist" stereotype.

Is the problem that there are lots of mediocre artists but not many who can actually execute projects? Or that it is hard to parallelize things like this? Or that once you parallelize too much, the amount of value added by a marginal artist is not enough to pay them?

>Is the problem that there are lots of mediocre artists but not many who can actually execute projects?

I think part of it is that standards keep increasing. Compare this demon concept art from Warcraft 2 (1995): http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/c/cb/Daem... to this one from WoW: Legion (2016): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/56/f2/7f/56f27f98a...

There are probably a lot of artists that can execute at the 1995 level who aren't employable in 2016.

It's just a hard problem, especially when you have to try and get a number of different artists to maintain a single style for a project. Disney was struggling with this problem for decades and financially they were hardly breaking even with their studio part of the business because of the cost of generating all the art they needed. Computers lowered the costs and the manpower quite a bit, but then increased the quality expectations.

There's also the problem of working within technical limitations. Even with standard file formats there can be much more involved than just dumping files into a project.

I would imagine artists need to be involved in technical discussion and would need to learn & bug-test custom software for importing and processing assets. It seems like a different skillset to traditional art & design backgrounds.

This might be true on a small scale, but for a large AAA-sized studios economies of scale kick in. I'm not saying it's not expensive, but beyond a certain scale it becomes less prohibitive.

Art costs (measured in man-hours) are one of the more predictable aspects of game development, they scale well and can be outsourced easily.

For a finished game product, absolutely. But for a prototype having access to the in house library of thousands of models, animations etc is a huge step up.

From Warcraft to Starcraft to Diablo to Overwatch and even to Hearthstone, Blizzard has found success in producing very high-quality, very balanced games with amazing replayability. I'm pretty happy with this approach. Plenty of other companies already push out half-baked games and hope they gain traction.

Hearthstone is not what I would call very balanced. High quality? Yes, but it's a frequent complaint amongst the game's enthusiasts (I would include myself in that group) that they do not a good job balancing the game.

That is a consequence of Hearthstone's focus on variety and simplicity (most of the game is powered by integers less than 10.)

Balance is a weird aspect in most Blizzard games (as well as in any truly good game), infact it's the artfully constructed imbalance that makes them truly great.

Starcraft 2 is a great example for deconstructing this design philosophy (while ironically Starcraft 1 is a great example of the complete opposite), Blizzard have intentionally and constantly changed the balance of the game and create new imbalances so the meta would evolve and be fluid by forcing players to adapt, change, and find the imbalances and find ways to deal with them.

The art of most video games is not to create perfect balance but to create multiple subtle imbalances that can be discovered and overcome this in effect what creates the meta of the game and without a living meta games often can become stale and boring.

Making a mathematically balanced game is easy, making an imbalanced game that is still interesting is an art form.

This is what sets a few games apart from the rest, games like LoL and Starcraft are a great example of the "imbalanced by design" distilled to an art form.

Hearthstone is also imbalanced by design to both create a fluid meta, as well as to push the progression both the in-game progression and the out of game monetization progression.

> Making a mathematically balanced game is easy, making an imbalanced game that is still interesting is an art form.

That is absolute rot. A simple balanced game. A perfectly balanced complex game with thousands of combinations of disparate variables is incredibly hard - because actually ranking what equality means is in and of itself an incredibly hard problem when abilities are significantly different.

Blizzard approached this problem by homogenization at one point and recognised this is a terrible solution. They now attempt to balance within a structure of variety - largely by responding to the evolution of the meta as players learn new ways to min/max

No popular multiplayer game has very good balance. Even Brood War has units that are mostly useless (e.g. scout). But relative to the rest of the field, yes, Blizzard's games are well balanced.

You're reading too much reddit. It's not representative of the player base in whole. A casual player like myself have no problem with balance and enjoy the game as it is.

A paraphrased quote I faintly remember from one of the original creators of Rogue(which, of course, passed through a number of different hands before it became the game we know today): "It's easy to make a new kind of game, it's much harder to make an existing game better."

It's a deceptively simple piece of wisdom, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the outcomes of the business. AAA-scale development is riddled with stories of brute forced effort on every front - attempts to chase after quality without being able to define it in positive terms, resulting in dozens of retakes on the same concept. Smaller studios, being less encumbered by the usual organizational overheads, are much better prepared to plan and focus themselves exclusively around a single facet of the work and align all the other pieces around that. At the extreme end you get the solo developer, who generally produces something radically imbalanced and unmarketable, but with just a few team members, major issues get smoothed out.

The risk that comes with any team change is that things don't get smoothed out in quite the same way as before - the conversations, timelines, and conventions shift around, so the pieces all get resolved slightly differently with tangible impacts on the result. Rob Pardo working on World of Warcraft, Rob Pardo working on Hearthstone, and Rob Pardo at his new venture all might as well be different designers. What will make the difference is in whether the team coordinates well. For an example of how it can flop, see Flagship Studios[0].

[0] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356

> it's much harder to make an existing game better.

Im not sure who thinks this is "wise", when it's simply not true. The problem is making a game better enough to gain marketshare before the changes are absorbed by the dominant player.

Hearthstone was their attempt at a smaller game. Unfortunately, it quickly skyrocketed in popularity. Poor Blizzard.

It's purely opportunity cost. Blizzard makes a ton of money from it's projects. They will have calculated that the expected dollar return is greater by investing in existing products and occasionally launching new high-budget titles like Overwatch.

Best of luck to Rob! My friends and I learned just as much about teamwork from WoW as we did from playing "real" sports :) . Despite the general sentiment, I genuinely believe a lot of good comes from raid content and team PVP.

I definitely learnt a lot of leadership skills by accident while playing WoW.

Retrospectively, it was really awesome being 15-19 and getting to "play" raid leader. No one knew how old you were, no one knew what you looked like, and honestly no one seemed to care.

Also, in comparison to highschool or university (including sports teams), fucking up in WoW was relatively low risk. People would just move guilds, characters, or realms. Not something you can do in real life, making everyone more relatively risk averse.

It really was equivalently educational for soft skills as highschool was for hard skills.

So wait, he has to hire people to give him an idea of what they will deliver? So his funding was all about who he was and not what he planned to deliver?

Apparently yes. But come one, he is credited with the single most successful video game in history (says the article).

This is how the world works now. The most important thing is marketing/buzz/hype/name-dropping. Once you've got that, then you can begin thinking about what the focus of your business will be and what products or services (if any) your company provides.

Yes, his funding is about who he is. He's a great leader/manager/designer, and his presence is worth quite a lot in free marketing. As far as opportunities to invest in the games industry go, it's a good one.

Also, keep in mind that he's trying to entice the best designers and developers to work for him. He probably has an idea what he'd like to do, and at minimum will be filtering and nurturing ideas to guide the company in the right direction.

It's a special kind of social capital he's built with all his years at Blizzard. In many ways, that is how the world works.

He's trusted to deliver because he's done it before.

Reminds me of when Bill Roper left with a bunch of the old Diablo 2 team to make Hellgate: London.

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