Blizzard definitely is riding the storm of success. The Vivendi Universal owned company transitioned from a small developer founded in 1991 to one of the leading game publishers. Vivendi lists Blizzard as one of its five core publishing companies along side Sierra Interactive, the global conglomerate whose holdings once consisted of companies rumored to number in the triple digits.

While Blizzard showed an interest in expanding its franchise portfolio with new titles such as Ghost, Warcraft remains its strongest property having spawned three distinct versions and numerous expansion packs including the long awaited expansion pack to Warcraft III RTS, the Frozen Throne. While the expansion pack definitely held a lot of people's interest at E3 due to its upcoming release in July, the main buzz at the booth remained World of Warcraft, Blizzard's attempt to plunge into the current pool of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs).

Joining the Fray

Persistent worlds seemed to be the big theme at E3. The two topics dominating the workshop lineup were "Money, anyone in the industry know where to get some in this economy?" and "Hey, you have a MMORPG too?" So learning from the mistakes of the first generation of MMORPGs (Anarchy Online AKA how to burn through 10 million US in a bubble economy) and the successes (Everquest AKA Evercrack), everyone hopes they have come up with the magic formula to supply a steady stream of revenue to their gold chest.

In the world of online gaming, Blizzard possesses a good chance of succeeding. Leveraging the free multiplayer aspect for Warcraft III and its other top franchise, Diablo, Blizzard extended the interest in its games for the expansion packs showing they knew how to use the Internet to their advantage in game distribution. They also learned a few lessons in support and marketing of online games. For WoW, they have built a new network to take on the challenges of a large interactive world. They are set to go beta in Q3 (this Autumn). However, don't expect to have a release anytime shortly after. Blizzard pledged a long beta cycle to ensure the reliability of the system to the final subscribers. I talked to Mark Kern, producer for WoW. "We don't want people paying subscription money for a game with problems." Mark commented, thus hinting he recognized one of the major factors in the downfall of Anarchy Online. Stability sits in every MMORPG publishers mind and tends to be the largest concern.

Most publishers list their " live team" as the area where they are focusing a large amount of money for talent and equipment. For those who don't know, the live team is the top-level tech support responsible for the back end servers and network. Most players will never see or talk to a member of the live team. When most users talk to tech support they either talk to "in game support," tech support technicians who play the game and have the power to fix game play issues such as disappearing items or problems completing quests, or phone support. In game support typically consists of outsourced facilities adept at fixing problems with home network connections and authentication issues. When techs of this nature deal with problems, they are normally one-offs, problems that are common, but specific to the individual such as when someone's personal firewall is interfering with their network connection or when someone forgot their password. A live team deals with the problems that will most likely affect a large number of users, such as a server failure or when the authentication server suddenly starts denying access to everyone whose account begins with the letter "p." Standardly, live teams consist of people with degrees in computer science or networking and tend to have a lot of experience with large clustered environments consisting of hundreds of Linux or NT servers or large databases.

And these people are expensive. Blizzard's concept of beta testing the software with a large number of users is novel. This will afford them the opportunity to load test the network, but also bring their live team up to speed. In addition, they can test new hardware and implement software changes with impunity. After all, what do the beta testers care? They are getting to try the game for free. However, Blizzard already put 7 months of alpha testing and three years of concept design behind the game. Included in the testing are bandwidth considerations. Many Blizzard employees play the game from home, some with AOL dial up connections. Mark mentioned that making sure that the game would be accessible to as wide a technology group as possible topped their list of objectives.

The Pixar Effect and Game Play

The graphics of the game provide Blizzard a distinct advantage. WoW uses Direct X 8 instead of the latest and greatest Direct X 9 technology so that those with aging video cards and laptops will be able to experience the game without loosing too many visual elements or experiencing graphic lag. Thus WoW should be the most consistent graphic experience of the MMORPGs to hit the market in the coming years. Blizzard can do this because the graphics of Warcraft do not attempt to be overly realistic.

Warcraft's 3D models are stylistic and have been described as "cartoon like," a term that causes Mark discomfort. It is obviously a term that competing programmers use to play down Blizzard's success and belittle their technical achievement. But Blizzards sales show that they definitely understand what drives today's game player. And with the current popularity of anime, other game designers might want to take note. One of the benefits of stylistic graphics comes from what I like to call the Pixar effect. In the early days of film animation, most production companies pushed the realm of animation by trying to out tech the other picture. This produced scores of movies with bad plots and animation whose deficiencies would be picked apart as the animation technology progressed. Pixar however used stylized animation and a package called Renderman, an animation suite considered outdated by many in the industry.

However, the limitation and stylization affected audiences in an interesting way. It allowed them to suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the story thus making Toy Story and other Pixar properties still watchable today. Mark recognized this concept. These days, it's the story stupid. Look at the successes of Max Payne and Half Life. While these games did have some cool tech elements, Bullet Time for Max Payne and the AI for Half Life, they used technology to tell and enhance the story and gameplay not as the prime selling point. And Blizzard definitely learned to tell a story in its Warcraft franchise. The amazing cut scenes show Blizzards commitment to storytelling. In addition, the levels, while instructional in game play, play off of each other to provide the player with a world with purpose. Mark says the WoW will continue providing players purpose with its own devices. For example, most MMORPGs reward players by advancing characters based off of combat; thus, players continually fight monsters and each other in order to gain more experience and power. Blizzard decided that characters should have a reason for gaining experience.

So, they decided that characters would gain experience in the course of developing and supporting their trades. "We call it killing with a purpose," stated Mark. Characters will need to gather goods in order to advance in certain skills or to accomplish tasks. In the course of doing so, they will inevitably run into obstacles that will require combat. One of the current problems everyone seems to be addressing is player vs. player combat. Blizzard decided to specify battle areas such as arenas to resolve the issues of PvP combat. One such place I saw was a very nicely designed gladiatorial arena. The arena will function as a place where characters can pay an entry fee to participate in a tournament. Blizzard plans to enable the ability for others to watch your combat. But other areas will also be available to combat for free. "The combat areas will be a place where you can meet after issuing or accepting a challenge." Players can also choose to decline a challenge.

The More the Merrier?

Competition in persistence world takes other forms mainly from the limited resources available. Competition over quest items and spawning monsters alienates many new or "less competitive" players from the world. Players such as a 30-year-old accountant may be interested in playing a persistent world for a few hours a week, but can never compete for resources against a bloodthirsty power-hungry 12 year old with copious amount of time and a 50th level overlord of doom (complete with a flaming Vorpal Sword of Gratharak).

Instancing solves this problem. When a character obtains a quest and enters the quest area, a unique instance spawns on another server that allows that character and other friendly characters to complete the quest without interference from other parties. Mark says that about fifteen percent of WoW will be instance capable. Blizzard addresses the "twinking" issue (the practice of higher level characters giving lower level characters items beyond their current abilities to obtain) by creating special items that have level requirements and race and class restrictions. One item that will be twinkable will be money. But Blizzard assures me that money will be something that people will want to hold on to suggesting that it will become an important element in skill advancement if anything to pay schools or teachers. If money remains the only twinkable asset, perhaps an unofficial beggar class will arise in the cities.

Speaking of cities, city adventures feature prominently in WoW. Just how much of the city will be adventurable will remain to be seen; however, the human city played sprawled and rose to an impressive size. The world in general provides an expansive landscape. Travel presently consists of foot, swimming, boats, land mounts and gryphons. While teleportation points may be something Blizzard might add in the future, Mark showed me how players could create hot points on the map so that the gryphons could fly on autopilot and cover a large amount of distance.

Now Bobo! Fetch Me the Eye!

Mark also showed me how certain characters could learn the riding skill and could summon a mount which itself could be trained to learn certain skills and increase in levels. Custom mounts will come in different forms, such as a horse or even a wolf. Mark mentioned that animal mounts would have minor restrictions, but most races would be able to choose their mount type, but the cost to certain races to learn the skill necessary to do so would be less for some races and classes than others. Thus to become an orc wolf rider would be cheaper than say a human wolf rider. The concept of the mount extends from WoW adoption of the MMORPG Certain character trades will also be able to train beasts as pets. Any beast can be trained as a pet (Mark mentioned someone at Blizzard who trained a sea crab as a pet, and gained instant fame among the alpha team) and they will advance in level and learn skills also. However, only beast class animals will be trainable (note: a dragon is not considered part of the beast class. Sorry to lay to waste your delusions of grandeur). Like in Warcraft, druids can shift form. Currently they can change to three forms: cat, bear, and crow. Each form imparts special abilities, which can be developed, thus allowing druids to specialize in a form.

Blizzard still hopes to add more to the game. Since WoW takes place three years after the events in the Frozen Throne, they have a lot of material to draw from. While most fans want to know what other races besides the announced human, tauren, dwarves, orc, and night elf races will be included, Blizzard will only comment that they will add races that they have time to add and that make sense. Presently, they are concentrating most of their time fine-tuning the player vs. player balance and trying to implement a real estate system so that players can own houses. My overall impression of the game leads me to believe that out of all the new MMORPGs, WoW actually might be a property that will survive.

The game seems highly playable and has an attractive, easy to absorb interface much like the Warcraft RTS. Unlike the Warcraft RTS, the interface will be customizable. However, subscription pricing, an item that they have not even begun to address and might not until the games release, might be a sticking point. They are definitely entering a saturated market, and are competing against established titles such as Everquest and titles with serious name recognition such as Star Wars Galaxies. However, I think one thing they definitely might be able to exploit would be the accessibility of the world they are creating. Many recognize the Warcraft IP, and the look might even be able to attract the hard to obtain female demographic, an elusive group in the gaming world. So far the Sims has been the only RPG that has obtained any significant number from this demographic. If Blizzard could somehow figure out how to make WoW more social they might be able to extend their sales. However, if they can figure out exactly why the Sims is popular with women, they would have found the RTS publisher Holy Grail, and that may be one quest that is beyond even a 50th level Overlord of Doom.