Blizzard outlines massive effort behind World of Warcraft

Source: GameSpot.com



GameSpot - Austin GDC 2009: Frank Pearce explains what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running.

Who Was There: Blizzard Entertainment cofounder and executive vice president of product development Frank Pearce and production director J. Allen Brack opened Thursday’s schedule of panels with a keynote address titled “The Universe of World of Warcraft.”

What They Talked About: In the GDC Austin schedule, Pearce and Brack’s keynote address is described as offering “an in-depth at the operational complexities of running a large-scale MMO.” While there has been no shortage of people to talk about the difficulties of developing and running MMORPGs, few have experience with anything as “large-scale” as World of Warcraft and its 11-million-strong subscriber base.

The biggest recurring theme of the at-times-technical presentation was “large-scale.” Brack began by explaining the studio’s layout, emphasizing that Blizzard tries to form its structure around the people, and not the other way around.

The programming team is responsible for updating and maintaining 5.5 million lines of code. The team of 51 artists has created 1.5 million unique assets for the game, with a handful of sub-teams dedicated to weapons and armor; environments; animation; props like torches or fence posts; dungeons and large objects like houses; and technical art to polish what everyone else creates. There are 37 designers responsible for creating classes, professions, events, a library of more than 70,000 spells, and a population of nearly 40,000 non-player characters.

Then there’s an entire cinematics department of 123 people that does more than just cutscenes. Pearce said the team acts as reference when merchandising partners want to make replicas, or, say, gaudy 12-foot-tall statues like the one sitting outside Blizzard’s headquarters.

There’s also a QA testing team, which employs 218 people. That group’s job gets tougher as time goes on, Brack said, because the amount of content in the game expands, but the size of the team does not. The original World of Warcraft contained 2,600 quests, with the Burning Crusade expansion adding another 2,700, and Wrath of the Lich King contributing another 2,350 to the game–a total of 7,650 in all. Also adding to the QA team’s woes, Brack said, is that Blizzard promotes from within, taking some of the most talented QA testers out of the pool to work on other parts of the game.

As if there weren’t enough to deal with, Pearce said Blizzard handles the localization of the game in-house. It’s crucial for the game, since World of Warcraft is played in English by fewer than half the game’s players. He added that the team doesn’t do any partial localizations, and adding another language to the game is a commitment to provide ongoing support to that for as long as the game is running.

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