IG: Right, that's a good point. And as you release expansions like Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, you're able to get tons of player feedback. What are some of the things you're looking to improve or incorporate now?
RP: There's just a laundry list, and it's even before the game releases. It's how we design our games; it's very iterative. It's always about playing it ourselves, looking at how other people play, learning from that... the list is almost too long. One concrete example is looking at WoW, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and how we approach quest design. We've gotten better and better at that and how to pace it, the types of mechanics to put in, how to balance it... and all that's just done through iteration. You can really see the evolution of those things. When WoW first came out, I believe it was the first MMO where you were always questing... one of the big things we did was having quest-driven gameplay all the way from level 1 to level 60. People loved that, and the best compliments we got when Burning Crusade came out were about how we quested the zones and the variety and interest level of the quests, which made it hard to play in the old world. And Wrath of the Lich King has kind of done that again. So just through the expansions you really see the evolution of our quest design.
IG: I think one of the great things about the whole WoW phenomenon is that it's one of the few games that's really gotten mainstream attention (South Park, Stephen Colbert, etc.) and risen the profile of MMOs in general. Nintendo gets a lot of credit for broadening the gaming audience, but I think Blizzard with WoW has gotten people to play MMOs who might never have before.
RP: I think we're as surprised as anybody else by how popular and big WoW has gotten. There's certainly some momentum to it. Once you kind of hit that pop culture bubble, then the momentum just kind of keeps going. As I think we've seen with WoW it has become prevalent enough... It really is amazing how many people I talk to who don't play games but they've heard of WoW. They aren't necessarily playing it, but it seems everyone knows somebody who's playing it.
IG: Considering that there are people coming into the experience with WoW who maybe aren't hardcore gamers, do you have to design to make it more friendly?
RP: I think that's the danger – changing your game to be something it's not. I mean, that's one of the things that happened with Star Wars Galaxies. They did their big changeover and it alienated the people already in the game and was not successful in bringing in new people. I think you can do things by degrees, and I do think it's fair to say that people entering WoW today for the first time are more casual than the people entering WoW four years ago. So there are things you can do and you can always work on the accessibility – make it easier to understand and to start playing and to get into the social breadth of the game. What you don't want to do is do some big reboot on the startup process that's almost like a different game.
IG: Whenever I meet with other MMO developers/publishers and bring up WoW, they always insist that they don't try to compete with WoW because it's just at another level and it would be foolish to try to duplicate it. From your vast MMO knowledge, what advice would you give to other game makers trying to attract players to the MMO space?
RP: You have to first and foremost make a great game. So often I see with MMOs that they try to make a great social community, but they don't focus enough on the game... I think that's changed and they do focus more on the game now, but it really depends on what you want to do. If you want to make a game that's literally very much WoW-like, where there's a big immersive world and quest content and all that, then it's an uphill climb because you're not competing just with WoW as we shipped it, but you're also competing with all the content, patches and expansions. When we first came out, we looked at Everquest, and we kind of said the same things to ourselves: “We're competing with Everquest plus all the expansions.” So you have to be prepared for that and be able to make a pretty large product. With a lot of these games coming out, they have these spikes. They'll spike and do quite well and post big numbers for the first couple months, because what happens is all these WoW players do want a new MMO experience and they get excited, but they exhaust the content so fast that typically they come back to WoW. So if you want to make a game like that, you better deliver a lot of content. The second way to go is to deliver a different type of gameplay experience – go with a different genre or IP or something like that where you're not being compared to WoW. Take something like a PlanetSide – it's just not similar enough.
