Vanilla WoW Developer Q&A - Submit Questions for John Staats

Recientemente se llevó a cabo un Q&A sobre WoW vanilla a John Staast, estos fueron los puntos más interesantes sacados de dicha entrevista (en inglés)

Raids

• When the team was building Vanilla there wasn't much of a focus on what players would do for the endgame. Once Burning Crusade came along there was a better idea of what endgame should be. (Source)
• The Karazhan crypts were designed as an additional quest area but was never utilized. (Source)
• Karazhan took years to finish. (Source)
• The portals to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair were a band-aid to the annoyance of clearing a dungeon to zone into them. (Source)
• AQ had the most revisions before going live, though Karazhan had so many issues it didn't launch until the first expansion. (Source)
• John believes AQ was conceptualized as an open world dungeon.
• The designers hated designing around Decursive. (Source)
• John found the fan theory that standing too close to each other is what caused Onyxia to deep breath amusing. (Source)

Cities

• Nuking the "useless" night elf quarter in Stormwind was a positive of Cataclysm. (Source)
• Stormwind was going to have gondolas at some point.
• The city arenas (such as the one in Orgrimmar) originally were going to have events, but this never came to pass. (Source)
• The water above Deeprun tram was just to make the ride less boring. They also didn't realize until too late that it went east to west instead of south to north,
  but it wasn't a big enough bug to fix. (Source)
• Old Ironforge wasn't particularly needed and so it was never finished.

Classes and Races

• Blood Elves were based on a STRONG request from a poll of Asian players where many remarked on the Horde side that they and their girlfriends wanted a non-creepy femme race to play (Source)
  -Runemaster, Necromancer, and Death Knight classes were among the original classes that never made it. (Source)
• Hunter was the last class added and barely made it in. (Source)
• Warlocks and Paladins had class mounts just for flavor. Their classes had archetypal steeds. (Source)
• Originally, Druids were meant to be constantly switching forms, during a battle, but the fact that designers put so much mana costs on shape shifting, dissuaded players from doing so.
• There was going to be a huge quest line where Warlock Players needed to perform a global collection effort to rebuild Medivh's spellbook and perform a group ritual to open the Dark Portal while players on the server protected them from enemy attacks. That was cancelled after the Gates of AQ. (Source)
• The Vanish bug was various class abilities added to the Rogue that didn't have the "don't break vanish" flag set. Getting the flags right was something that became part of the routine, but early on it was easy to miss interactions between spell types. (Source)
• The early class weapon quests were a great idea, that ultimately got cut so they could ship Burning Crusade. (Source)

PvP

• The battles in Hillsbrad Foothills were completely unexpected.
  
  Expansions
• Outland was never part of the vanilla WoW plan. The early Hellfire map was most likely someone playing around with assets. (Source)
• Northrend and Outland were "cut" from vanilla as the team knew they would be doing content updates later. (Source)

Emerald Dream

• The Emerald Dream was cut early in development because the trees and flowers didn't fill up the space as one would expect in a dream setting.
• The Emerald Dream had portals around the world to enter it, similar to the one in Twilight Grove. It was one of the last zones on the list, Metzen wasn't sure what he wanted to do with it, so Bo got approval to cut it. (Source)

Dungeon Design

• Dungeon layouts are more precise now to tailor to the average player and make it easier to naviagate, though he preferred exploring less straightforward dungeon layouts. (Source)
• The unused door in Blackrock Depths that is guarded by a molten giant was put there as an excuse to have the road leading to the city. The thought was that what was behind it might eventually be turned into another raid.

World Design

• The most satisfying design changes was realizing that a room was boring and going back and making it interesting.
• The Undead areas were the last to get added to the original game.
• By speeding up leveling, they found out that it wasn't necessary to have as many zones and dungeons. Most weren't cut, they were saved for later. Grim Batol, Tol Barad, Karazhan are good examples. Some places weren't ideal for Warcraft lore, or well-built (like Dragon Isles) will unlikely see the light of day. (Source)
• The designers had lots of freedom while designing a zone. Metzen gave them the story and a few key PoIs for Durotar and then let them just build it. (Source)
• There were a lot of camps in the zones built early on because there weren't a lot of assets to use. Elwynn ended up with Gnoll camps because tents were the only asset the designers had. (Source)
• Early zones were done by an entirely inexperienced team, with a map of PoIs that Metzen drew years ago as a starting point. (Source)
• The Darkshire roofs were tested to make sure you couldn't get on them, even with mounts. This testing was before epics mounts were around though. (Source)
• Bo built out Duskwood with Darkshire and then expanded outward, adding a cool graveyard. By the time he got over on the other side of Twilight Grove, he remembered Ravenhill and made a "real" graveyard. (Source)
• Duskwood had a ton of lore, while Moonglade and Shimmering Flats had almost none. (Source)
• Silverpine Forest was created several zones in, so Bo had learned a lot by then. It had a similar vibe to Duskwood but a better layout and flow, so it was almost like a Duskwood 2.0. (Source)
• The team was originally going to do something with the Dark Portals, but Metzen kept changing his mind. They ended up with one in the Blasted Lands that wasn't functional. (Source)
• Azjol-Nerub as a zone was supposed to have wall climbing mounts, but this was widely out of scope for the team at the time of Lich King.
• The team wanted the quests and zones to tie in with the dungeons, but there was a ton of content to finish and that got in the way. (Source)
• Shimmering Flats was supposed to be an interesting and fun wasteland. It was finished ahead of schedule. (Source)
• When it came to griefing, the question asked before Blizzard intervened was: Do the players who are being impaired have the ability to fix the situation? (Source)

Tech

• The interior spaces were built in 3DStudioMax and the exterior levels were built with an in house tool called WoWEdit.
• Originally the character animation was done in world coordinates which made them act funny outside the starting zones. They were then changed to local space calculations. (Source)
• The debuff limit on mobs was a tech limitation. (Source)
• Mike Morhaime asked Sam to stop work on the Linux client because they were about to launch the game and didn't have the support resources to handle the Linux client. (Source)
• Lua was extremely fast, extremely flexible, extremely small, had minimal additional modules, so it was easy to secure. Python would have been much harder. (Source)
• WoWEdit has source control built in, as well as permissions based on your job role. (Source)
• Minigames were a desired feature in Vanilla, but the programmers were slammed as it was. (Source)
• WoW shared engine technology with Warcraft 3 very early in development. (Source)
• Eyes of the Beast's main problem was it was disrupted by crossing server boundaries. The tech has improved since it was removed so it could likely return for WoW Classic. (Source)
• There wasn’t a proper way to store arbitrary scripted information on the server for longer than a frame at the time. So you used spells and NPCs to track this stuff for you. So rats would wear a buff for each boss defeated and eventually would tell Major Domo he could spawn Ragnaros. It was cleaned up in the future.

Misc

• Creating content as fast as players consume it isn't a realistic goal. (Source)
• Blizzard had no editing requirements for the book. He got a few things wrong, removed one of the quotes, and added an afterward because they thought the book should have a "what happened to John Staats?" section. (Source)
• If John was still working on the game he would keep the dungeon finder, slow down flying mounts, slow down leveling, ax the teleports, would probably go with class balances that were better than Vanilla WoW, very hybrid class builds.
• John thought flying mounts were too fast. (Source)
• There were AoE stomping infernals that would teleport out of bounds players to GM Island and destroy their hearthstone. GMs would log in, see them, give them a verbal tongue lashing and then teleport them back to civilization. (Source)
• Undead not being able to show bones in China may have been an attempt to slow down WoWs implementation by rival companies. (Source)
• Sam doesn't believe there will ever be a WoW 2 as it is too big an endeavor. (Source)
• Blackrock Depths was built before the Lord of the Rings movies were released but LBRS was a tribute to Moria. (Source)
• The AQ event and corrupted blood incident stand out as the funniest unexpected glitches.
• "Resistance" moments that were challenging spots where you get stuck for a few minutes have somewhat disappeared. Elite quests used to require you to wait around or find a group to complete them, leading to social interaction. (Source)

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