File:2002-08 - WoW - Computer Games Magazine.jpg

Summary

World of Warcraft preview from Computer Games Magazine, August 2002, with Shane Dabiri.

Transcript

[Top: Image of a bog beast]

Better Than the Rest

Blizzard takes on the massively multiplayer genre with World of WarCraft

by Benjamin E. Sones

In many ways, World of WarCraft is a typical Blizzard game. The premise is neither new nor different—a fantasy online role-playing game amidst a sea of fantasy online role-playing games. The developers at Blizzard have never been innovators of radical new ideas; they rarely bother to challenge your expecations, content instead to surpass the ones that you already have. They take tested, familiar concepts and try to make them better: better gameplay, better art, better production values, and a lot of extra polish. They do not make many games, but spend a lot of time on the games that they do make, and consider it time well spent. Most of their fans agree, and they have a short list of wildly popular games to prove it.

With that in mind, its newest venture is exactly what you might expect. A quick glance leaves you thinking, "Blizzard does EverQuest." A longer look and you will add "...but they want to do it better."

So far along, yet so far away

The first thing you notice when you jump into World of WarCraft is that it looks a lot farther along than many of the online games slated to ship before the holidays. "We don't have a release date yet," explains Producer Shane Dabiri, "but it won't be this year." Considering the amount of time that most of Blizzard's games spend in the polishing and bug-fixing phase of development, you could easily extrapolate that it might not be next year, either. The game is playable right now, however, and if the world feels a bit empty, at least it feels that way in person. Star Wars Galaxies (slated to ship before the end of the year) still has little more to show than a tech demo.

The game takes place four years after the events in the soon-to-be-released WarCraft III, and since Blizzard is not about to start handing out spoilers, you will have to wait for that game if you want more specifics. Suffice it to say that the kingdoms of Azeroth are in shambles, and a number of threats both new and old have risen to plague the troubled land. You play as one of a number of familiar races (currently Orcs, Humans, Tauren (Minotaur), and Dwarves) and classes (Warrior, Shaman, Mage). More races and classes are coming, Dabiri promises, but Blizzard plans to leak the details over time as they did with WarCraft III. Currently the troubled land contains only a few complete areas: an immense forest, a small town, a haunted cemetery, an underground mine, a massive rambling monastery, and a few others. Walk too far and you will run into invisible walls where future terrirory will lie... but you will have to walk a long way to find them.

[Top right: Screenshot of a player looting a kobold. Caption: "Looting a minor healing potion off a dead Kobold Vermin."]

[Right: Screenshot of the player in the Golshire blacksmith building, with the paperdoll window open. The cursor hovers over the Neck slot. Caption: "Every man needs a necklace.]

[Center: Image of a murloc.]

It seems there are no seams

While you are walking, you might notice a complete absence of zones or pauses for loading. "The game streams new terrain as you walk," explains Dabiri, "So you will never see a loading screen." He reconsiders, "Actually, there is one place where you will see a loading screen." The monastery looms out of the forest, and Dabiri explains that when they first designed it they made it too large, and the structure took up so much space in the world that it posed a major obstacle for players that wanted to walk around (rather than into) it. They made the exterior of the building smaller, and put the inside of the building in a separate zone that loads when you walk inside. "It's not a problem with underground areas because everything is under the terrain," says Dabiri. "Those are all seamless transitions." A few aboveground areas, like the monastery, are just too big to fit into the world.

The more you play, the more you notice all the little touches that are the hallmark of a Blizzard game. The technical aspects of the game engine are far less impressive than the art, which oozes with a consistent and almost cartoonish visual style—vivid colors, exaggerated forms, and an acute attention to detail. The interface feels finished, and in a genre that seems to thrive on awful, complex interfaces composed of ugly floating palettes, it is like a breath of fresh air. "You can do everything with a mouse, if you want to," Dabiri says, and it is true. Click the left mouse to perform a[...]

Source

WorldofWar.Net:

• Web page
• File link

See also

• Page 2

Licensing