Warcraft biography

The developer studios-Blizzard Entertainment-at that time was already about 10 years old, and her portfolio included hits such as Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft. It was after the release of the last game in March G. was the first to develop Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, and the second - a certain project that "was unsuccessful." After the closing of the unsuccessful project, the studio decided to send the liberated employees to create her own MMO project.

One of the co -founders of Blizzard Allen Adham, who led the development, made the idea. The tiny microwave oven joined the role of the kitchen next to the sink, littered with dishes. The spots from the meal were trampled in the carpet, ”he wrote. This was due, according to him, with the fact that Blizzard then belonged to the game unit of the Vivendi conglomerate, which did not seek to significantly invest in development.

Separately, Stiatas noted the horizontal structure of decision-making in a team that existed at that time: “It was like a jazz band, where everyone just came up with something together.” At the same time, the ideas in this way often in this way turned out to be unsuccessful and cost a lot of money, Staats admitted. Initially, only 40 people worked on the game, but almost all - 60 hours a week, closer to the release, their number doubled.

Now “hundreds” of employees are working on the project. After Adham leaving the project, the conceptual artist Jimmy Luo joined the team, who helped create the World of Warcraft visual style, which was based on Warcraft 3 style with “bold colors and exaggerated forms”. Already in January, in June, the game was released in China. By September, World of Warcraft has more than 4 million subscribers, of which 1 million in North America and more than 1.5 million in China.

In the city of World of Warcraft, she received four awards, including the “Best Multiplayer Game”, “Best Computer Game” and “Best Role -Minor Game”, and the total number of subscribers reached 5 million people at the end of the year. The released at the beginning of the city was sold about 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours and 3.5 million for the first month. The team of developers, in turn, after the release experienced not so much the joy of the success of the game, how much panic, Pardo admitted.

And we were simply not ready.

In many ways, ”he said. The players really spent a lot of time in Wow. According to the Executive Producer of World of Warcraft Holly Longdale in the YouTube video dedicated to the game, the players spent a planet on Azerot, on which Wow events are unfolding for a total of 1 billion days. The key role is that the developers were able to “keep up” with the popularity of the game, played a team responsible for “raid dungeons” - the most difficult intra -game content that requires dozens of cooperation players to win.

With the “boss” of the very first raid for 20 players - “Hakkar - the freshwater shower” - one of the most interesting events in the history of the game, which occurred in the city of this adversary, could impose on the characters of players the effect of Corrupted Blood, which gradually took their health. According to the developers, the effect, like a virus, could be transmitted between the characters and their riding pets, if they were too close to each other, and only 10 seconds should have lasted.

But due to the error in the code, the effect lasted endlessly-as a result, in a matter of hours under the onslaught of infections, the whole cities fell by non-game characters from it, but they could infect the players. The characters of low -level players died in seconds. A week after the Blizzard incident, servers had to restart. Scientists became interested in what happened by publishing in the city of players are also offered riding pets, intra -game cosmetic objects, boosts of characters, etc.

Activision, which did not have its MMO market projects, closed a deal with Vivendi Games, the new company was called Activision Blizzard. The number of World of Warcraft subscribers reached a record 12 million in the city for the first half of G. in Activision Blizzard announced that they will no longer publish data on the number of subscribers, “since there are other indicators that better reflect the overall efficiency of the Blizzard business.” One of these metrics was the number of monthly MAU users.

However, in its reporting, Activision Blizzard quotes this indicator immediately for all its online projects. According to the company's personnel from the company's presentation on Game Developers Conference GDC, it can be judged that since then the number of paying players in Wow has grown. For a number of assessments, it could be about 7.25 million people for the spring of the city for 20 years for World of Warcraft, ten large paid additions came, the last of them - The War Within - was published at the end of August this year, two more additions were announced.

Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic - the version of the game at the time before the very first addition to the original game in the beginning of the city in October of the city became known in January G.Microsoft called her the largest gaming in the history.