How World of Warcraft Was Made | Hacker News Reader

How World of Warcraft Was Made

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80 pointsnodivbyzero27 comments

The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.

So many people I played with were able to enjoy the game because it would run on the $350 eMachines PC they got at Walmart. Accessibly really increased the draw of the game for regular consumers because you could get your friends into it easily.

I ran the game on a beat up dell laptop for several years, 40 man raids and everything. Had to run it on the lowest settings, but was able to get 30 FPS on it.

I remember I played so much that on the left side of the laptop where my palm rested all the paint had worn off of the laptop.

This.

I wonder how different things would have played out if the other AAA titles had lower requirements.

That being said, WOW also focused on other game tools that opened it up to a wider audience that other games who only listened to their "core audience" never would consider.

I think we've seen this with most of Blizzard's games. StarCraft was such a big phenomenon partially because it was able to run on almost any machine during a Korean recession when people were time rich and cash poor and when a large amount of computing was done on non-gaming machines at internet cafes.

And then of course you have Minecraft, PubG, Fortnight, The Sims ect

Yep. I could play, raid, etc. in a fully functional way on an okay-ish laptop. This was a pretty big deal for me.

Indeed. The greater bulk of my play during original game, The Burning Crusade, and even the beginning of Wrath was all on an iMac G5 with a Radeon 9600, not a top end gaming PC. Original and TBC both ran great on it with trouble only starting to creep in with Wrath and its texture resolution bump.

If I remember correctly the game ran somewhat fine on my geforce mx440 (passively cooled).

> "From a pure hardware side, we weren't prepared. From the standpoint of how fast people were getting to max level and are we going to have content in place for them; we weren't prepared. We never really experienced what it's like to be on a game that never ever ends," adds Pardo. "In a lot of ways everything starts the moment you launch, which none of us were really mentally or emotionally ready for the difference, because again a lot of us had shipped games and you go through that final moment where you launch this thing and it's finally out there. Honestly, the first two years of post-WoW development was really this perpetual state of 'Can we just catch up to the popularity of the game?'"

True for so many startups as well, where "max level/endgame" is the arrival of users with needs you didn't anticipate, whose momentum and confidence you rely on to present your brand in the marketplace. For every ounce of stress, though, there's two ounces of excitement, and that's its own fun.

Why & how WoW succeeded, in my opinion:

User Interface Customization using Lua.

Also, I think WoW indirectly taught a lot of developers about Taint checking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking ) - something I still feel extremely bitter about missing from Javascript, replacing it with "Signed Script Policy" in retrospective seems like a bad idea, to the point where people re-invented it after it got removed, but still no community maintained implementation exists:

https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS (The paper for this has 579+3 citations [+3 because there exists a separate citation network due to Google Scholar being, well, Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4323801493645906635]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9547351675563063950. Yet I don't see this kind of feature in any mainline javascript implementation.)

https://github.com/idkwim/jsTaint (Different project, it seems)

I agree about the addons. They effectively outsourced the user experience of the game to the users and their UI was pretty awful back then so it was welcome.

That being said, I always found the Guild Wars 1 user modifiable UI woefully underappreciated along with many other things about the game.

"After leveling for a bit, you'd eventually drop down to gaining half of the experience that you'd normally gain. Players absolutely hated it. So Pardo flipped it around. The early, enhanced leveling was framed as the player gaining bonus experience, while the non-rested state was framed as normal, making players were much happier."

Love it.

I saw so many people drop out or destroy their relationships because of WoW.

I'm lucky the monthly fee was too much for me bacm in the days :/

I first started playing during the public beta and went on to log something like 50 days of play time on my character in the first year the game was out. I was in high school at the time and several of my friends got in much deeper than I did, to the point of failing classes and dropping out of school. I’m ultimately thankful to have been drawn away by girls and beer and whatever other teenage distractions.

To this day I feel the experience of very early WoW was easily the most magical I’ve had with a video game, though. The incredibly vast unexplored world, the total lack of walkthroughs or guides, the excitement of exploration and discovery. Just thinking about it 14 years later makes me want to buy the latest expansion...

I remember, as it was yesterday, my birth as level one Night Elf. I was a veteran PC player already but this... This was catharsis. I remember beautiful and kind of sad island of Teldrassil, wandering around the dark forests at twilight, boldly visiting deep caves full of spiders where no 6 level player have gone before, magical wells, rich lore and true heroes from the past standing in front of me, giving me tasks whole world depended on. All this in the company of epic soundtrack, which I still have and listen to when the wind of nostalgia comes. Only few times in my gaming life I was so immersed in the fictional world - this being one of the best experiences of my life. And even though I've visited plenty of other areas during my play time, on both sides of the conflict, I've always kept Teldrassil closest to my heart. That atmosphere can't be compared to anything else.

You and I share similar memories friend. I look back to WOW with such nostalgia. I became totally obsessed with that game. It was like heroin to my teenage self. A part of me always wants to go back but the game almost ruined my life !

I had the opposite. I met my wife playing WoW, then had a few drinking nights with the guild and one thing lead to another.

Same. Had to move to another continent to be together, but you can learn alot about someone while repeatedly trying to kill an invading demonic horde.

Also met my wife in WoW. Human connections can happen in unexpected places... like the beaches of Tanaris

Change Tanaris for Stranglethorn Vale for me and... :-)

Here here! My wife and I got to know each other doing dungeons and raids on WoW before meeting in person. You learn a lot about people seeing how they work with others to overcome challenges.

I also knew one or two people who got jobs at Blizzard.

Starting as game-masters, becoming admins etc.

I waited years for this game, back when it still was planned as regular RPG, but somehow I never played it.

I was just old enough that i had just finished university when the game went out. My curriculum would have ended up being completely different if that game went out just 4 years earlier. And even then, I never ever installed that game, i only looked at friend playing. That stuff scared me, and one friend almost ruined his life because of it.

Gets me thinking about the term evercrack...

Yup doing molten Core on a 56k modem just won’t cut it, unable to progress further —- delete game!

My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days!

Good times.

Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.

TL;DR This wasn't much of a writeup, more of a nostalgic media-piece.

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