
A New Phase for World of Warcraft’s Lead Designer: His Own Startup - Impossible
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/technology/a-new-phase-for-world-of-warcrafts-lead-designer-his-own-start-up.html?_r=3
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zach
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reading outdated documents or a process of detective work.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.

~~~
ddmf
Thanks for sharing this.

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xs
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.

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douche
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/](http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/)

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

~~~
afarrell
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?

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ShardPhoenix
>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...](http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/c/cb/Daemon.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070104151217)
to this one from WoW: Legion (2016): [https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/56/f2/7f/56f27f98a...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/56/f2/7f/56f27f98a802342d922ecd37a011ad9b.jpg)

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

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dyim
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.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
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.

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Shivetya
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?

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rhaps0dy
Apparently yes. But come one, he is credited with the single most successful
video game in history (says the article).

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

