Video Gaming Tips

It’s essentially where we monitor the heartbeat world wide of our games. This one in particular is seeking to look at various security threats world wide. Every once in a while you’ll see this light up significantly which is a pretty large attack. This screen here shows all of the logins world wide for games that we have.
Each pop that you see on the screen is somebody logging in to play the game. And then, these two screens, we are monitoring streaming feeds. It’s an indication, if we have problems from the players’ point of view. We push the boundaries of the technology as far as we can. We try not to tell the developers “no” unless physics gets in the way. You know, so far, to date we can only push light so fast.
We have to say no at that point but otherwise we try and figure out a way that we can make the vision come to life. After we had launched the service in 2004 we were in panic catch-up mode, in a very reactive mode. We were patching we knew we wanted to deliver cool content to players but we couldn’t seem to get our feet beneath us. We spent all of our time just trying to get things under control that would save us about twelve months after launch before we were like: “I guess we should make an expansion with this game.” WoW experienced such explosive growth in its first year and two years. And the question was: could Blizzard sustain their momentum boku casinos in Canada?
Would the first expansion, Burning Crusade be able to reach the level of quality that they’d established in Vanilla WoW? Where do we go next? Warcraft had always been in the interactive space of video games.
Kind of like compared to, Tolkien or other fantasy settings that we had grown up playing games within Dungeons and Dragons, things like that. And, man, I had a fire in my gut desperately wanting to prove that we were not the same old thing. Our world could stand up and take you to places that you would not expect. We developed the story whereby the player walks through this ancient portal and is transported into this broken, shattered world. It was definitely not the same old thing. And it was funny at the time walking the team through this idea.
Especially the artists. They’re just going: “What the hell?” The guys at Blizzard archive this for me, so now it’s not all bent up in a drawer. Here are some images that were sort of the first. This is a picture of a paladin I had drawn for some friend’s card game that never got used and we ended up using this in Warcraft as our paladin Uther His eyes are covered, he’s blind but he carries the book of honor and virtue.
We didn’t want him blind, he’s supposed to run with other warhammers. So, we took the mask off of the paladin and what I did was I put it on this character here who was my inspiration for Illidan. This was the very first Illidan picture that was done, back in 2000. He had carved out his eyes to have the demonics sense the demons. He used demonic energy against the demons back when Illidan was kind of a good guy.
You are not prepared. Burning Crusade was a huge success they were able to maintain the quality they’d established in Vanilla WoW and even raised the bar. When I look back into that first expansion I believe it did exactly what I hoped it would do.
It just reset people's expectations. Our players began to understand that we weren’t in this to sleepwalk through some classic plain wrap fantasy thing. That we were definitely looking at it like artists and challenging ourselves and then they kind of take this journey where anything was possible. In the years of Burning Crusade you started to see the adoption in Asia and in Europe that made WoW not just an American phenomenon but a global one. The beautiful about WoW is that it crosses cultures very well.
In China, for example, internet cafes are so popular. It’s always been a one-child policy. Kids don’t have siblings but they need to go to a place where they can get that social interaction. It’s an experience.
You sit down and you play games with your friends and everybody is, you know, screaming and playing. It’s really a social experience. I’m not sure we realized we would have the global reach that we ended up with. When we released the game in Europe people said that market didn’t exist because it blew up ten times. I really like hardcore raiding. I played druids… didn’t fit me.
Paladin, perfect. I made a guild and I’m still in contact with loads of them. There were loads of people from the UK and Europe. In the end, the beauty of a game like WoW is that you connect everyone together so you are, kind of, diminishing, the culture differences between people.
What became the fascinating lesson to us was how similar players were regardless of where they were globally. Once they were living in Azeroth they were just citizens of Warcraft. The most memorable moment playing WoW came when I was playing a gnome warlock. I was headed into Ironforge for the very first time.
The first time I went through the gates of Orgrimmar. I was walking up the path, guarded by dwarves on either side entering this doorway that was carved into the side of a mountain. When I walked through those gates, the drums kicked in, the music changed and I saw an entire city to explore, I knew I was hooked.
Nagrand. It’s just rolling hills and you can look off into the distance and this giant elephant walked past me, it was the way it feel like a real world That is my favorite thing about WoW. Watching the sunrise.
Any sunrise. The reason is something that we did differently. We have a real-time clock. We call it “Time is Time”.
Time is a person’s sense of immersion. It’s subtle but important. In Northrend there is an area where the forsaken buildings are. It’s in this kind of snowy, moody area and the light is nice at around 5 pm.
The only time you see a sunrise in WoW is if you’re up during sunrise. So they’re rare and unique and beautiful. My most memorable time playing this game was in BC when I was rogue and got server first dual warglaives. Those were good times.
It’s good being a nerd, isn’t it? We decided to have a hot tub party in one of the moonwells in Duskwood. The moment at the Wrathgate where you pick up Bolvar’s shield. I almost shed a tear because, after picking up the shield, everybody saluted.
I go on the forums and I make a post saying: “We are raiding heroic Halion on Monday, October 11th. If you have work, call out sick. If you have plans, cancel them!” And that night, we killed him. My god!
The nerds’ screams were amazing. Probably my most memorable moment in game was our first take down of the Lich King. My son, the day you were born the very forests of Lordaeron whispered the name Arthas. Beating Arthas, aka the Lich King. Arthas, I think.
It’s just legendary. That was like nothing I’d experienced in a videogame. I remember screaming and yelling at my friends on Skype so loud that the neighbors started banging on the walls.
Finally getting him down was the kind of euphoric excitement, celebration that I mean, it’s happened so rarely in my real life. Figuring out the next thing after Burning Crusade was an interesting process. We knew that we'd fight the Lich King and make him a much more prominent figure and our storytelling wanted to have two zones that players funneled into for Alliance and Horde and not just the “go through the Dark Portal” moment. And then we wanted to have skiing.
We'll have this snow, these mountains. Skiing, that’s gonna be a feature. We still do not have skiing in WoW, but that was an idea at one point. What they did in Wrath of the Lich King that they hadn’t done before was take their storytelling to another level. Including in-game cinematics like the Wrathgate sequence that brought the players into the story in a way they hadn’t before. Blizzard has been in the forefront of game cinematics as long as they have existed.
Blizzard cinematics did inspire me greatly from my very young child age which they hate when I say that here because I’m thirteen years younger than most of the guys doing this at that time. And so I was like: “Oh, yeah! Warcraft 2?
I loved playing when I was thirteen”. And they just all go: “Aaah!” Seeing the fan-art and how they respond to the game that we’ve created and how it inspires them towards their own creative outlets inspire us. I remember after the game had been out for a few weeks or a few months people were video-capturing their footage while playing it and editing it creating movies that took the storyline to the next level. I think that was interesting, that this entertainment turned into sort of a creative medium and an outlet for other people. The first Machinima experience that I saw online that totally took me by surprise was “Return”, done by Terran Gregory.
Home the sound of that word had sustained me through battles beyond all counting. My friend Ezra comes to me one day and says: “Oh, have you seen that Blizzard’s putting on a movie contest for BlizzCon?” “That sounds interesting!” For thirty long years War, endless war. We created a six-minute movie, “Return”, a Warcraft motion picture submitted it not thinking it would go very far only to find that we had won that contest. Ezra and I drew our resources and we flew down to BlizzCon. So, we walk right up to Chris Metzen and we introduce ourselves.
And seeing Chris Metzen’s face light up “You guys made that movie? Return? Wow. When they started sending that around the company, everyone was watching it, talking about it.” My friend and I were just sitting there. “We’re supposed to be geeking out on you.
Why are you geeking out on us?” That’s when the lines between fan and real art started to blend for us. And for them, when they said: “How would you like to come and do this for us?” And now, my title is Project Director for Cinematics. We’ve got all six cut scenes to review today. We can go over the Velen and the Frostmourne scenes even though those were close to final.