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NYT on World of Warcraft

Posted by Zonk on from the azeroth-is-getting-crowded dept.

The New York Times (registration required) has a piece on Blizzard's World of Warcraft, discussing the game's popularity and high sales. The article also examines the design processes that go into the game, and the artistic outlook of the WoW live team. From the article: "From around a dark, windowless room, nine young men peered into the unfinished virtual interior of Karazhan, a haunted tower set in a forlorn mountain pass that will open later this year. 'As you can see, the architecture is a little ornate, a little Gothicky,' said Aaron Keller, a 29-year-old designer, gesturing to the 3-D model on the computer screen before him. 'We're thinking about turning these arches into horse heads.'

5 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Graphics by Lobishomen · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The incredible thing about the World of Warcraft isn't how beautiful it looks, and it is beautiful. What I find amazing about the game is how fluid and eye catching it is with such low end hardware requirements. They really did an amazing job.

    And to beat the inevitable rush of complaints, the Hardware issues are much improved over release. When speaking about the World of Warcraft everyone seems to have selective memory. There hasn't been a majorly anticipated MMORPG launch in the history of internet gaming that didn't have bottlenecks.

    1. Re:Graphics by Sentry21 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And it should be pointed out that the server hardware problems were because they had planned for 600k users over the next year, and had fully expected to find bugs and bottlenecks in their code over the course of their increasing userbase.

      Suddenly, they had all 600k users in a month, and they had a year of bugs and bottlenecks to fix immediately.

      Honestly, I now see the reason for World Passes. FFXI was flawless (as much as one could expect) during it's NA PS2 launch.

  2. Re:Did I miss the memo? by Moby+Cock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What have they done that they are good again?

    They released World of Warcraft.

  3. Re:Did I miss the memo? by bonzoesc · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Bnetd are your friends? They publish a public server to bypass the copy protection on Blizzard games and they're your friends?"

    The Bnetd people are like your friends that always bail you out of attending your 6-year-old niece's terrible birthday party to instead film a car chase on the interstate and then all go to an action movie with Samuel L. Jackson followed by Steak n' Shake.

    Here's a list of the online gaming communities that are stupider than battle.net:

  4. Beauty is Truth, Truth; Beauty by Dixie+Flatliner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While it would be unfair to say Blizzard's art department doesn't receive enough acclaim, I think they deserve every ounce of good press and more besides, Blizzard is one of the few developpers out there that uses the quality of their art to act as a central element of their game engines. While the game does sport some noteworthy techical specifcations (pixel shaded post-processing, dynamic distance polymorphic (no pun entended) LOD, and some very sharp specular lighting effects) it is far and beyond their unique art style that makes it such a beautiful game. And style needs no hardware requirements, only taste =)