transcript: 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 way
to the lobby from here? Straight down that way.
-Thanks, man. It’s a hell of a thing
to have grown up geek. I had geeky friends around me
and we played D&D and we’d talk shop about comics
and 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 called
the rise of geek culture. As a lifelong card-carrying member
of that group I just think
everyone else is catching up. But what I do think is great about it is that whatever
you’re passionate about whether you’re a Star Wars fan
or a Star Trek or a World of Warcraft fan or a Marvel fan, whatever it is I think what we’ve started to see
is people celebrating things that they believe in
and love. Literally, tears in my eyes.
It brought us back the whole series It’s all I want to hear. Even the
Lords of War thing, I’m just geeked up. I can’t wait.
-Yeah. (Scream) What was that? Yes! We only really ever built games
to please ourselves. I wanted to work on WoW because
I 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 day
when 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 working
on a computer science degree I knew that I wanted to start Blizzard
the 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 projects
in the first week and spend the next, you know,
month and a half optimising our code. And I took these guys and started
to show them the vision I had. Instead of being sapped off to
the Microsofts and the IBMs of the world that we could try and do something,
a little different. Blizzard has been around
for going on 24 years. When we started, a development team
could be two and a half people. The experiences that we deliver
to our players today require hundreds,
arguably thousands, of people. One of the things that Blizzard
has done well over the years is take types of games that have
only appealed to a narrow audience and make them more accessible. They’d done that
with real-time strategy games. They’d done that with action RPGs. And that’s their particular genius
and they did that with WoW taking a type of game that appealed to
a narrow audience and making it broader. We dreamed about
bringing Warcraft to life instead of being
a top-down real-time strategy game you would just be
a character running around and battling and teaming up
with your friends to fight increasingly difficult bad guys. That was sort of a dream
that wasn’t really in reach really until Origin came out
with Ultima online. I remember installing it
on my work computer expecting that I was just going
to take a quick look at it. I ended up staying all night long,
playing Ultima online and never left my office chair
and never slept that night. EverQuest took Ultima online
and 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 this
massive inspiration for a lot of us. We loved the game. There were things
about 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 reawakened
the 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 something
that people got or really got behind because there was no game
at the time that tried to be like. When we make something, we’re gonna plan
how 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 trees
and the rocks and the buildings. And we build the whole world
and we look at it and we hate it. And, we’re like, OK,
this just didn’t work. So, we’ll take all of it
and we’ll scrap it start over and build a different world.
Sometimes you need to do that. There were people on the team
that were definitely hurt or disappointed that Nomad
was not going to be any more. Everyone understood. We weren’t getting
the traction we wanted with that game and we played EverQuest, Ultima online
we 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 Adham
who stepped in and said, “Hey, we’ve got to rethink
the direction that were going we should be going more towards
World 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 here
called the Dragon Isles raid which was actually in production
that doesn’t exist. The players will also notice that
when World of Warcraft first shipped the game only went to a level cap of 60
and you’ll see zones like Eastern Plaguelands here
going 60 to 70. we had a zone called Eerie Peaks,
which later got renamed to Hinterlands. This is Stormwind, the first day that
it 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 built
by the art department and when something comes
into World of Warcraft if it doesn’t have a texture on it it shows up as completely green. So, we had these giant green statues
for some days, sitting in Stormwind City. This was the moment that
we placed Onyxia in the world. Later we had some really great designers
and artists work on this. As you see, Onyxia looks different
than she does today in World of Warcraft. Roman Kenny would later come in and make
that model look like it is today. Alex Afrasiabi and Chris Metzen
were the primary drivers behind the story of things like Onyxia. When I came into Blizzard, the computer
stuff always was very intimidating to me so I started writing. The boss saw
what I was doing and went “I think this kid
has some potential”. I’ve been working with Chris
for a while. College kids, got a job at Blizzard
and got paid to do art like crazy. I think that was one of the
most exciting times about Blizzard. Kids coming together,
throwing out ideas not knowing the rules, and not knowing
if we were taking a risk. We were so naive and hungry that
it 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 Azeroth
on the wall. It was his way of saying
"guys, this is a map of the world". He just did it. The mythological underpinnings wasn’t
just about bits, bytes and wireframes. It started with words and ideas
and feelings and people. I never dream that we’d build the bones of a world
and hills and trees and rivers. I don’t think anybody had any idea really how many people or how much time
it was going to take to make WoW. People realized, if we are really
going to hit these goals we'll need more people.
The team started to grow. When I came on board, the team
was about 60 people which seemed big At the time, I though
60 people was a large team. I came from Ultima online,
where we were about 30. We realized our estimate of doing
500 quests just isn’t going to cut it. We’re gonna have to do five times that
for this game to be awesome. We wanted to get everything
into the game. There were many nights where many of us
would be here 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. The longest we’d ever taken
on a game was Warcraft 3 which I want to say was 3 years. The WoW took about five years
by the time it went out the door. The weeks and months
were going by like they were hours. I remember it seemed impossible
that we would be able to launch the game in a state that felt complete
by 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 even
delivering on those pieces of content we’re thinking this isn’t enough So, it was really
a 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 it
and we were going “it’s super fun, we’re super in”. No one knew what it was going to do
but there was a sense that this is fun. Hopefully, people are gonna like it
and 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 bringing
fantasy back to the cultural mainstream. You also had the Harry Potter movies,
also starting around the same time. So, the cultural time was right
for this product to come along. It was announced that we were due
a 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 freeway
and there were police everywhere. Crowds of people walking down
the street. It looked like Mardi Gras. And I thought “did we somehow
mistakenly do this on the same night that someone
was having a big event?” As we got closer
and 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 up
and get the box to sign. Not 6000 or whatever crazy number
that 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 awesome
I 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 gamers
that was very much like the developers that were sitting
on 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 things
they felt really strongly about was not to sell more boxes than we could
support on the servers we had at the time because they didn’t want to have
bad experiences with servers or accounts. And it turns out those boxes we projected
to last for a couple of months sold out within a day or two. We had planned to have a million users
within the first 12 months of the game. We had those first million users
within four months. So, all of the equipment and servers
that we had planned to deploy we had meticulously planned every month
were going to deploy this many we deployed them all. We just said
“put them all up in the first months”. Day one we were actually
shouting for correct numbers because the numbers were so large that we’re thought
they were incorrect numbers and that the monitoring
we had in place was bogus. There was actually a time before
WoW launch that we thought we could probably get away
with supporting World of Warcraft with 12 to 20 employees total. And we were a little bit
off the mark there. We went from a company of 500 people
to at one point we were over 5000 people because of World of Warcraft. When I first came onto WoW, WoW
had shipped about six months before that. There was this buzz
and 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 thing
could get a million players here this is special, but when it went up
to 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 million world wide it was just unbelievable. We live at an interesting crossroads
right now where the games industry
has grown so fast and so huge but Warcraft I think is the daddy
of them all. Come on, we have to finish
the quest in Stone Haven. <i>Stan, Stan.</i> Hang on guys, my dad wants something.
-<i>Stan</i>. 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 MMORPG
with people from all over the world getting XP with my party
using TeamSpeak. I’m not a artard. This role-playing game out in 2004
returns to the “world” of Azeroth where heroes like Leeroy Jenkins
do battle. Let’s do this.
Leeroooooooooooooooooy Jenkins. Oh, he just ran in. You can say that
the Leeroy Jenkins situation was one of the first Internet memes
of any kind. And actually became a verb. Leeroy means to rush headlong into
a 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 culture
and for it to resonate with this many people,
that’s where you can say “wow, we’ve done
something pretty amazing here”. I chose the race orc. And I chose them
because 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 misfit
who’s misunderstood. Paladin is the guy who’s
most 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 want
to wield a sword and lead the charge. I love gnomes. I think they’re
the 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 fighting
with 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 amount
of clothes I can wear in this game? So, I obviously became
a Blood Elf paladin. The reason I picked undead
was because I wanted the ugliest race. I have a level 90 shaman named Dyslexic because I am dyslexic. So dyslexic
I have to wear two different shoes to tell my left and right. I play human paladins
since I was 12 years old. I don’t see any reason
to 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 fascinating
story because they’re survivors. When I started playing
I had just suffered a terrible accident. Every doctor said that
I should either be dead or paralyzed. So I had a neck brace on
and I had to lie in a couch. I started and I played a blood elf
and questing I found a lady’s necklace. I had to return it to Lady
Sylvanas Windrunner, leader of the undead she takes the necklace and throws it down
and all of a sudden she starts singing. The more I got into her story,
it changed my perspective. You see how much she suffered
to get her body back. And having lost my body, that was a story
that 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 vacation
with their family or meeting their significant other
in their first date and their song, playing on the radio
when they were falling in love. That sort of thing happens in the game
all 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 BlizzCon
into 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 people
at the entrance, waiting for the opening. I’m going up the escalator
and 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 us
as it is for the players and it recharges all of the
Blizzard team members’ geek batteries. All these people to see World of Warcraft
and realizing: “This is special.” Link auction houses in every major city. This is these people’s lives. Some came
from all over the country and the world to come together or meet some
of these players they met in the game. It was just a blast. And we’ve been
doing it almost every year since. You do have a fan base
that is not only dedicated to this world, but they’re passionate
about it, they’re opinionated about it. Falstad Wildhammer was going to be
on the Council of Three Hammers but it’s not in the game at all.
What happened to him? Isn’t Falstad dead
from the Day of the Dragon? He survived and in fact, he was the leader of Aerie Peak
in 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 really
speak 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 invaluable
for 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 community
that’s always there to support and help. The one thing that keeps me playing
and 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 leukemia
and the community helped us, thank you. My mum’s actually handicapped.
She has MS. It was a way for my mum to feel like
she 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 know
the South Park episode of WoW? I’m the... yeah. The relationship that I've developed
through WoW was my marriage. One thing led to another and now
we’re married with two children. Meeting my boyfriend Jackson, Bajheera.
- All muscling male, baby. You provided a medium for us
to meet when we were states away. She server-transferred to IRL so that
we could work on establishing a garrison. I met my wife in World of Warcraft. We started playing together more often
and 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 limitations
when you don’t know shit. And that was one of those moments when
I had no idea what I was getting into. The opening of The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj
was really a huge moment in our history. It’s interesting because it isn’t one
that we’ve really repeated yet it has such great kind
of historic value. We wanted to capture a lot of what we had seen
in EverQuest or Ultima Online with these major events
where 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 roots
would 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 people
would 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 engineers
when you have a plan like this. Focusing all of that in one area
turned 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 players
kind 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 something
that 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 where
we host World of Warcraft. The data for characters and the world
is all contained in the data centers. We usually push
a hundred gigabits per second. So you would be able
to download four HD movies per second. There's a high level of security. Whether it’s malicious or accidental we want to make people
stay outside of our areas. This is actually the first time
that we’ve allowed cameras in here. So this is what one of the blades
looks 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 what
creates the world and sends it back out. There’s tens of thousands
of these world wide. These are designed so that the developers
can 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 monitor
the heartbeat world wide of our games. This one in particular is seeking to look
at various security threats world wide. Every once in a while you’ll see
this light up significantly which is a pretty large attack. This screen here shows all of the logins
world wide for games that we have. Each pop that you see on the screen
is somebody logging in to play the game. And then, these two screens, we are monitoring streaming feeds. It’s an indication, if we have problems
from the players’ point of view. We push the boundaries of the technology
as far as we can. We try not to tell the developers “no”
unless physics gets in the way. You know, so far, to date
we can only push light so fast. We have to say no at that point but otherwise we try and figure out a way
that 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 wanted
to deliver cool content to players but we couldn’t seem
to get our feet beneath us. We spent all of our time just trying
to get things under control that would save us about twelve months
after launch before we were like: “I guess we should make
an expansion with this game.” WoW experienced such explosive growth
in 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 quality
that they’d established in Vanilla WoW? Where do we go next? Warcraft had always been
in the interactive space of videogames. Kind of like compared to,
Tolkien or other fantasy settings that we had grown up playing games within
Dungeons and Dragons, things like that. And, man, I had a fire in my gut desperately wanting to prove
that we were not the same old thing. Our world could stand up and take you
to places that you would not expect. We developed the story whereby the player
walks 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 time
walking 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 images
that were sort of the first. This is a picture of a paladin
I had drawn for some friend’s card game
that never got used and we ended up using this in Warcraft
as our paladin Uther His eyes are covered, he’s blind but
he carries the book of honor and virtue. We didn’t want him blind, he’s supposed
to run with other warhammers. So, we took the mask off of the paladin
and what I did was I put it on this character here who was my inspiration for Illidan. This was the very first Illidan picture
that was done, back in 2000. He had carved out his eyes to have
the demonics sense the demons. He used demonic energy against the demons
back when Illidan was kind of a good guy. You are not prepared. Burning Crusade
was a huge success they were able to maintain the quality
they’d established in Vanilla WoW and even raised the bar. When I look back
into that first expansion I believe it did exactly
what I hoped it would do. It just reset people's expectations. Our players began to understand that
we weren’t in this to sleepwalk through some classic plain wrap fantasy thing.
That we were definitely looking at it like artists
and challenging ourselves and then they kind of take this journey
where anything was possible. In the years of Burning Crusade you started to see the adoption
in Asia and in Europe that made WoW not just an
American phenomenon but a global one. The beautiful about WoW
is 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 where
they can get that social interaction. It’s an experience. You sit down
and 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 have
the global reach that we ended up with. When we released the game in Europe people said that market didn’t exist
because 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 still
in contact with loads of them. There were loads of people
from the UK and Europe. In the end, the beauty of a game like WoW
is 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 Azeroth
they were just citizens of Warcraft. The most memorable moment playing WoW
came when I was playing a gnome warlock. I was headed into Ironforge
for the very first time. The first time I went
through the gates of Orgrimmar. I was walking up the path,
guarded by dwarves on either side entering this doorway that was carved
into 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 hills
and 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 thing
about WoW. Watching the sunrise. Any sunrise. The reason is something
that 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 area
where the forsaken buildings are. It’s in this kind of snowy, moody area
and the light is nice at around 5 pm. The only time you see a sunrise in WoW
is if you’re up during sunrise. So they’re rare and unique and beautiful. My most memorable time playing this game
was 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 Wrathgate
where you pick up Bolvar’s shield. I almost shed a tear because, after
picking up the shield, everybody saluted. I go on the forums
and I make a post saying: “We are raiding heroic Halion
on 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 game
was our first take down of the Lich King. My son, the day you were born the very forests of Lordaeron
whispered the name Arthas. Beating Arthas, aka the Lich King. Arthas, I think. It’s just legendary. That was like nothing
I’d experienced in a videogame. I remember screaming and yelling
at my friends on Skype so loud that the neighbors
started banging on the walls. Finally getting him down
was the kind of euphoric excitement, celebration that I mean, it’s happened
so rarely in my real life. Figuring out the next thing
after Burning Crusade was an interesting process. We knew that we'd fight the Lich King
and make him a much more prominent figure and our storytelling
wanted to have two zones that players funneled
into 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 King
that they hadn’t done before was take their storytelling
to another level. Including in-game cinematics like the Wrathgate sequence that brought the players into the story
in a way they hadn’t before. Blizzard has been
in the forefront of game cinematics as long as they have existed. Blizzard cinematics did inspire me
greatly from my very young child age which they hate
when I say that here because I’m thirteen years younger than
most 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 respond
to the game that we’ve created and how it inspires them towards
their own creative outlets inspire us. I remember after the game had been out
for a few weeks or a few months people were video-capturing their footage
while playing it and editing it creating movies that took
the storyline to the next level. I think that was interesting,
that this entertainment turned into sort of a creative medium
and an outlet for other people. The first Machinima experience
that I saw online that totally took me by surprise
was “Return”, done by Terran Gregory. Home the sound of that word had sustained me
through battles beyond all counting. My friend Ezra
comes to me one day and says: “Oh, have you seen that Blizzard’s
putting on a movie contest for BlizzCon?” “That sounds interesting!” For thirty long years
War, endless war. We created a six-minute movie, “Return”,
a Warcraft motion picture submitted it not thinking
it would go very far only to find
that we had won that contest. Ezra and I drew our resources
and we flew down to BlizzCon. So, we walk right up to Chris Metzen
and we introduce ourselves. And seeing Chris Metzen’s face light up “You guys made that movie? Return? Wow. When they started
sending 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 lines
between fan and real art started to blend for us.
And for them, when they said: “How would you like to come
and do this for us?” And now, my title is
Project Director for Cinematics. We’ve got all six cut scenes
to review today. We can go over the Velen and the Frostmourne
scenes even though those were close to final. Your place is with our people. Lok'tar Most players may or may not recognize
major franchise characters, you know Thrall and Arthas and King Varian. Depending on the faction you’re on
you may not have ever interacted with those very popular characters. But the one thing that unites
all players is the land. The world itself
is probably the key character. My favorite WoW zone
has got to be Nagrand. My favorite zone ever. So many things
to kill, twelve of this, eight of that. It’s just like a Warcraft
twelve days of Christmas. It’s got to be Karazhan.
-Karazhan. Winterspring. Molten Core.
-Icecrown Citadel. Australia, where I was filming
Superman Returns the time WoW first came out...
and we played a lot. I have fond memories of Westfall
for sure. Stormwind City. I remember walking through those gates.
My jaw just fell to the floor. I couldn't believe
how big the place was. That moment has stuck with me
right through this day. Ironforge. I would always dance
on 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 up
seeing 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 franchise
is 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 idea
and everyone’s like, got this like: “Really? The game is doing really good.
You wanna break it?” And they said: “We want to have
this big moment, this big event where the players log out and log back in
and the world’s all different.” That was probably the scariest thing
I’ve ever heard. We didn’t quite know
the extent of our madness. Then we realized: “Holy shit. What are
we gonna do? How are we gonna do this?” My team and I sat down and we did
forty-eight hours of analysis of our data and tried to figure out
if we could make this effect happen. And we came back with a definite maybe. That was one
of the more complicated things that we’ve done
in the history of WoW. Incredibly complicated
from an engineering perspective from a patch delivery perspective. We figured out a way to deliver
two versions of the world. You’re standing somewhere in Kalimdor,
you log out you log back in
and the world was destroyed. Now it’s covered in water
and a different place that it used to be but I’ll never forget
my first time in there. Players seem to really become
so invested in the time they’ve spent what it means to them,
their friendships. It's interesting to watch
the emotional ways people engage. It’s always that way. All of these
expansion sets, all of these games. I think with any product like this both the creators and the players
mature and grow together. And you see that in the stories
that 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 was
making the campfire, remember? I don’t remember
how 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 her
summon demons. We’re waiting on that one.
Thanks so much, guys. We might do that tomorrow
-Tomorrow! I think with Mists of Pandaria
they took a slightly different approach where it wasn’t just about
defeating one big bad guy. It was about really exploring
a 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 games
were getting older and more mature. Maybe there’s
a more sophisticated storytelling that you engage
as 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 guys
and they ended up becoming a race. And it’s just a Christmas picture
to start with. I might have printed it out
and gave it to someone they said:” Oh, this would
a 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 drive
the visual look of our expansions. What’s really been awesome is seeing
what Chris Robinson, the Art Director and what that art team
is able to accomplish. And they’re just given the time
to 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 pixel
is in the right place. Focus on this first part
and make sure that if the idea is amazing the structure and foundation is amazing
we’ll get to the rendering part.” As a Technical Director, it’s a lot
of collaboration with the arts team. When we were thinking for actually
doing the Pandaren for Mists of Pandaria, they wanted to make a character
that is much more alive and need to emote better, which required
facial animation technology. We actually had to build
kind of custom technology to make sure
that the actual face shape can change. With the technology you provide you give artists and designers the tools
they can use to bring the world to life. Engine tries to enable creative people
to 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 experiences
that 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 franchises
back twenty years ago.” Now you can have a bit of that
in your World of Warcraft also. Wouldn’t it be cool if we went
back to Draenor before it was Outland? What if we were able
to encounter the warlords that we heard about in Warcraft 1 and 2
and these stories in Warcraft 3 but I’ve never played with in WoW? A thing I love about Warlords of Draenor
is 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 Doc
and the time machine. We’re gonna break it all.
What about the space-time continuity?” We had to think through all the fiction
and all the consequences of what happens if we screw it all up. So today we open up our first raid bosses
for testing on the beta servers. One thing that I think is a hallmark
of World of Warcraft betas is that players are getting a chance
to 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 Gruul
in Blackrock Foundry. Are we expecting this,
in terms of their positioning? The first step is
putting 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 side
of making things a bit harder because when something is tuned
to 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 harder
we 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 soaking
this other thing that has the stack... So, they’re doing it wrong. He knocks everybody away
so they’re just running back in. Here they go. Five bucks they wipe to
overwhelming blows again. Everyone seems to be wiping to
overwhelming blows. Oh, oh, and tank's down. That took six seconds. You’re supposed to split the damage
from that ability, they may not know it. We watch a fraction of players that are
testing the encounter themselves. But we read what thousands of people
say about it and share their experiences. What they found frustrating
or hard to read or interpret. Jason, there’s actually some genuine
feedback posts with a couple of links on the US forum. If you go look at the EU feedback forum
you’ll see some things not necessarily feedback. Usually, the consensus from the feedback
is pretty accurate and inform us
in the direction of the fight. We use that to craft
and to tailor the experience and to improve it for a better experience
when the game goes live. On our end, raid testing continues
starting Mythic testing this week Big thing I’m working on personally
is fixing our dungeon tuning. Thank you.
-We’ve left it for a while. Our dungeons, I know, are ridiculously
too hard across the board. Our normals had been about
where heroics should be. Heroics, where challenge should be.
And challenges impossible. Basically I feel like game designers
are deviant psychologists. We’re trying to manipulate your emotions
and 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 change
for bonus roll tokens you should be aware of. If you do gold, you can do gold
for 500 gold the first time. But then you can also,
once you do that once it escalates and you get a second one
for a thousand or a third one for 2000 gold. We move back to gold,
the universal currency. It’s the currency that you get
from doing anything We can sort the inflation.
-No. People ask: “Did you hire an economist
to figure this out for you?” and we really didn’t. I mean, what we did
is we kind of said that: “Well, there’s stuff that people want
and a currency that has value it has guaranteed value because of what
you 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 equation
over this panel of knobs and dials you turn one a bit and has
this butterfly effect in the world. And you can screw up an entire economy
for 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 amount
of world space that kind of exists. It’s huge in terms of
its garrisons’ feature and the amount of technology that has had
to 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 lot
of these garrison layouts are sprawling so we might be cutting back
on some of that stuff as well. The designers came to us with the idea
to create these garrisons both human, alliance
and horde/orc garrisons. And the designers came to us
with the pitch that: “Look, we already have all these things
that 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 gate
we want you to really resonate with this. We're going to integrate the garrisons
into the questing experience. We want to make it part of the story,
to be important and to matter. We’re creating a world
that feels different than what you kind of see
in everyday life. It is handcrafted and I think
that’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 do
that 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 Warcraft
pour so much of themselves into the game. They’re trying to create games
that they want to play. Even though we’ve grown the thing that’s always remained
is that feeling of tribe and that feeling
of creative crackling energy. I’ve done this work my whole,
you know, adult life and what an impossible blessing
it has been. I was nineteen when I walked in the door.
It’s family. I’ve known those guys
since they were kids. Their personalities remain unchanged
because their egos don't get out ahead. We want to create amazing artwork
or content or music or stories or quests. And to think that
this game affected people it’s awesome and humbling. Give them an applause,
even if you’re in the Alliance. We earnestly believe
we’re making something special. I don’t think we’ll ever stop
pushing the boundaries of what we want to do
and what we think is cool. Freaking cool. If people play it we will always
want to support it. We never see a horizon. There’s really not a precedent
that we can look to. I think that we’re charting
new territory. There’s no end to the experience.
It’s the beauty about it. The players have never really finished
playing World of Warcraft. People that probably wanted
to be a part of JRR Tolkien’s universe found themselves able to experience it
in 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 everything
that 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 get
the 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 back
to World of Warcraft is all the magic training I’m receiving
for when I become a real magician and learn how to stamp my enemies out
and crush them like dirt under my boot. And social interaction
and 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 when
I told someone I played WoW was: “You’re a girl.” Jerks. I’m here working late a lot
and my wife, I miss her so I take a little time out
and I have my Tauren she has hers and I meet her by a lake. It’s sunset. We just go fishing
and watch the sunset. And to me, that feels like we’re there. And for a few minutes
I can share that moment with her. One thing I really want to see
in World of Warcraft is an unicorn. I don’t care if it doesn’t exist
in Azeroth right now but come on! We need unicorns
with flying rainbow tails. Think of Nyan Cat. We need like Nyan Corn, right? Right? The things on my wish list
for World of Warcraft’s updates would be to explore the continent
in Southern Draenor where the ogres are native to. You have dragons but you have
no 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’t
well 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 world
I 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 Fish
at Jarod’s Landing. Hmm. Looks like that guy just killed you. What? Why? If this documentary sucks
it's not my fault.
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