Behind the Blue Curtain: Inside Blizzard Headquarters with Wrath of the Lich King

That got a few raised eyebrows out of the people in attendance. The lack of social life for ten million players, engineered through the work of 150 people. Mass Effect had a team that same size for a single-player RPG.

Final Thoughts

If there is indeed any one thing I can fault Blizzard on, it would be their staunch conservatism.

In my interviews with Jeffrey Kaplan and Tom Chilton, the questions, “Have you thought about doing X, Y, or Z?” were invariably answered with some rephrasing of, “Maybe. We don’t want to rush things.”

If this were May 2005, a few months following release, such caution would be well warranted. You don’t add new and untested features to a game relatively untested itself.

But, now we’re coming up on four years and counting. These are intelligent people; I refuse to believe that they are incapable of anticipating how a new addition would affect the game, having four years of experience with it under their belts.

Admittedly, such conservatism has served the company well in the past—StarCraft would never have become the national sport of Korea if they went around changing the rules and adding five new units every month—but, MMO players are among the most fickle and impossible to please people on the face of the Earth.

WoW has so far largely gotten a free pass in this department (board warriors on the official forums notwithstanding) for two primary reasons: It is the first MMO for the majority of its playerbase, and their average user is a casual player.

The last real example of this I can think of would be EverQuest, which was the MMO a good deal of people from the prior generation got their start in.

By four years into EQ’s lifecycle, first MMO or not, there was no shortage of bitter, cynical players… as I’m sure two of WoW’s current designers, Tigole and Furor, can very well attest.

This desire not to strangle the golden goose is understandable, but at the same time it may not remain golden for long if they get complacent, and people begin to decide that perhaps they should begin to look elsewhere for their nightly gaming fix.

The ancient Roman historian Tacitus once said that great empires are not maintained by timidity. Granted, MMOs were ever so slightly before his time, but, the basic sentiment he was expressing remains true today.

In the end, though, all of this is just so much academic hand-wringing.

Seated next to me in the demo room were two reporters from another news site which I shall not name. There was an extended delay while the game servers were rebooted before we were allowed to begin our hands-on period, and they were continually checking their watches and fretting over how much time they had left before they needed to leave to catch a flight.

As the minutes ticked by the two spared no opportunity to grumble over this imposition on their schedules, but finally, one turned to the other and said, “What are we going to do about it? Give Wrath of the Lich King a bad review?”

They both had a good laugh at that, the idea so absurd it was a punch line unto itself.

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