 Welcome. Welcome everybody. Can you guys hear me? Okay, audio's good. Welcome everybody to Classic Cast. This is Classic Cast number 12, I believe. We're here with Tips Out. We're here with Stay Safe. How you doing? And we're here with our guest, John Statz, who is a 3D level designer, former 3D level designer for Blizzard, for World of Warcraft, specifically working on Vanilla WoW all the way up through Cataclysm, I believe. Is that right, John? Yes. All the way up through Cataclysm. So, yeah, we're here. We're very excited to have John on. John, can you give kind of like an explanation of what really you did for when working on Vanilla WoW? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's good to be on a Twitch program. I haven't been on one. Yeah, but yeah, thanks for having me. I was Blizzard's first 3D level designer. I was hired in 2000, and I was hired to figure out some of their problems that they were having in translating a team that had traditionally only built 2D games into 3D games. And yeah, I was, I worked through Vanilla, built half the dungeons pretty much, and all the expansions through Cataclysm. Boy, yeah, and I guess I'm ostensibly on this show to promote my book, The WoW Diary, which is live right now on Kickstarter. Check it out, just the WoWdiary.com. All right, awesome. So, would you mind real quick moving your mic a little bit closer to your mouth? I have you turned up as loud as possible, and they're saying a little bit. Yeah, scuffed podcast, boys. Just a little bit. John, so if you were hired in 2000, did you work on Warcraft 3 at all? I did a lot of playtesting. They took us off of WoW for a while. They needed a lot of play tests on Warcraft 3. I did a lot of, mostly through the campaigns. I wasn't very good at the multiplayer games, but we did have some, there's one anecdote I have in the book where a newly hired artist, Toph, and I would, we were playing games with a food cap of, I think, 12, which was, or 20 or something. It was a really, really, really low food cap, because people were treating Warcraft 3 like Starcraft, where it was all production. And it was this weird pool between, oh, the way to win is to out-produce the other person, but the fun part was manipulating all the units. And so we did this little test, and we had so much fun that we went and talked to Rob Pardo and I would have him and pitched this idea of really, really reducing the number of, when you decide what units you're going to build, really cut it down. It was kind of like the first MOBA. We were just like, it was, you know, League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm. It was just so reduced. And they did reduce the food cap by like 60. It was like 200 or something. They brought it down way down. But obviously, they didn't go for the MOBA pitch. Well, of course, it did sort of lead into maybe the first MOBA, which was Dota, which was the Warcraft mod, right? The Warcraft 3 mod. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that came later, which was our model for Ultrak Valley. Yeah, that was our grandiose. The idea was, it's kind of funny, when we decided to punt on PvP, Alan kind of picked up everybody's spirits and said, look, when we do PvP, it's going to be so awesome. We're going to, it's going to be like you're in a Warcraft 3 game. This is just one way that we can do it, where you're one of the units in the game, lots of NPCs running around. You're part of this big war. That's kind of like what we want to do. And that kind of resonated, and we were happy that sustained our morale for a little bit when we realized that, okay, if we don't do PvP, eventually it'll be done, but just not for the shipping product. But that was kind of what he recalled and resonated with our first foray into PvP. Well, yeah, because Vanillawile launched for the first four months, there were no battlegrounds. It was only open world PvP, right? Right, right. And for the first few months, we weren't even play testing internally. We were just putting out so many fires at the time. Yeah, I mean, it took us eight months to ship our PvP stuff. I wrote an article on Wowhead about the origins of Worsong Gulch, which was based on one of my old Quake capture the flag mods, which I just started because I was frustrated that a lot of the devs were frustrated with the just the bombacity of Alterac Valley. It was so big and there are so many different things going on. No one could understand it. And frankly, there were so many features necessary to even figure out what was going on, like UI enhancements, just logic to events that just weren't, we couldn't play test them because they weren't written yet. So we just made a tiny little battlefield and said, well, we'll capture the flag works, works that let's let's try to do that. And just a couple artists, one artist and a level designer got the ball rolling. And the game designer said, you know, I bet you quest guys could actually, you know, hack together a real fast way of prototyping to capture the flag. So that was just completely happened organically. That's crazy. So prior to vanilla release, BGs weren't even an idea that you guys had. You had the thought like a couple months in or what? We didn't know if it was going to be real world PvP. We didn't know like battlegrounds as a formal thing wasn't no, no, we didn't we we thought if they might have to be instance, we had no idea how many people would be in. I mean, we didn't do a raid. We didn't have a 40 player raid. We had no idea there was no UI for a raid. When we shipped the know a while, there was not a lot of support. So we had no idea what we were doing. So well, actually, we had lots of ideas. We could only do one of them. So there was never a quorum as far as oh, let's all go this direction because everybody had to do their own thing. So you designed several dungeons, but one of which was Blackrock depths, you did that entirely by yourself, right? Oh, yeah, pretty much all my dungeons were, at least when I build them, then there's a texture artist with concept art, obviously. And then there's a whole scripting team that they look at the lay of the land and they say, oh, you know what, we could do a kiting event here at the razor core. Yeah. So yeah, that yeah. So how many people do you usually have working on a dungeon? Or did you have working on a dungeon in vanilla? Like a total team? Roughly? Well, well, everybody would work on their own dungeons, like pretty much like, as far as like the dungeon team, there's about four level designers, 3D level designers, we were meshing out that the wireframe of the dungeon. And we had three or four texture artists painting textures. And then the level designers would then apply those textures to their geometry. So one guy built a dungeon, pretty much. So you physically designed Blackrock depths prior to even knowing that groups were going to be five man, right? I think I read that in your sample book. Yeah, yeah, pretty much all the dungeons were. We had no idea. Like all the early dungeons, like AQ was my first dungeon, had no concept whatsoever, how many people would be in a raid. I never ever requested, I didn't know. So yeah, we were just hoping that we had seen parties work together in Dark Age of Camelot. And we felt that that I think the party size was eight into Dayak. Yes, it was. It felt a little bit too big. So we, well, maybe we'll settle on five. But we had no idea if they were linear or if they're not. So many questions were unanswered. Wait, so I just caught something. You said that AQ 40 was your first designed raid. So you you built that raid before Blackrock depths, or I think, oh, yeah, Wailing Caverns as well. So you had that year and a half in advance, or two years in advance. Oh, yeah. AQ has done several years, about four years. I mean, Karazhan was started before we shipped Vanilla WoW. A number of times. Actually, the version that you are playing today that is out there now, that was started well before Vanilla WoW shipped. It is getting textured. We had cut down on the size. And the version of Karazhan that we see now isn't even the original version of Karazhan. Yeah, it's like the third time. The first time I built it was in 2000. In the year 2000, I built a throwback. Well, Conan there. I built using BSP technology. We would run the Quake engine. And that's how we would look at our levels in a BSP editor. So they looked awful. They looked like Quake levels. I mean, they looked very dark. Sharp edges, hard edges, no smoothing groups, nothing was smooth. It looked like a first person shooter. And they wanted the worst case scenario. Okay, so how big can we build dungeons? We didn't know. So I was building Karazhan using a BSP editor. And at that time it had a completely different concept. It was a tower with three side towers on it. One tower was a mage wing. One tower was the demon wing. And the other tower was probably like the military wing. But that never compiled. It took 40 minutes just to load. It crashed frequency. I mean, it was painful. And also I'm working well past midnight. Like crazy hours. Easy 90 hours. Yeah, gamer hours. And yeah, if your job was to make games, those were the hours that I was working. So and we couldn't even run it. The editor barely ran it. So we built Karazhan. Never could run it. We abandoned BSP nine months down the tubes. Somebody else builds Karazhan. It's too thin. We didn't know how big to make combat. And this is some of the casualties when you're starting with such a long lead time. Right. Build things and you realize, oh, well, we can't use this. This doesn't fit our gameplay. So we scrapped the entire, it was textured and everything. It was scrapped. And then about the last year on the project, I started it again. I did the layout. And then Aaron Keller, he took my layout and he fleshed out the inside while I was building the outside. And I built a raid wing at the top at the top of Karazhan. There's a like asteroid field type of thing going on. Yeah, like it's another dimension. You're supposed to teleport on that that asteroid out in the center with the spikes on it. Yeah. Like I tried to do an HR Giger type of like weird because it was high concept. And all our high concept stuff kind of fell flat on its face. Emerald dream just looked silly, you know, because I mean floating trees. But it wasn't dreamlike because it wasn't overwhelming. So like a lot of our high concept stuff. So we scrapped that. Right. And speaking of like scrapping things and stuff like that, when you guys, when you guys go into level design, do you have any idea like how many bosses are going to be in the dungeon? What level range it's going to be if it's a raid or a dungeon? Or do they just say, does Chris Metson just come up to you and go, here's my sketch, make this make this place. Oh, God, Chris Chris Metson would never go into sketches. No, he wouldn't get that far. Not even in that that that much detail. He didn't even want to talk about bosses. Like he'd have a couple places where Oh, this guy's definitely the end boss. Karazhan used to be a demon named Malganis. Okay, so yeah, so switcheroo there and he would honestly half the time he would just say, just we'll make something up. We'll use whatever mobs make sense. But we didn't know what level range it was. It was mostly what's the flavor of the dungeon. A general idea of what the level range like the newbie dungeons were supposed to be smaller. The whaling caverns for some reason they kept wanting to make it bigger and bigger. And I was happy I was happy to oblige them because it hadn't been play tested. I had no concept at all. Like how big to make it. Right. So in whaling caverns, you know the jump you have to make where you can fall down. Was that you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was my attempt to see. Is this is this fun at all? And it was easy to test. And what's funny is that when you're in Southern California or even when you're a blizzard employee, you have perfect, perfect connections. Absolutely perfect. And that seems so childishly simple. And I did a little hop thing in black fathom deeps. Like you can kind of hop across the water just just to see if it was for fun because you're trying to think of. Oh, yeah, the stones. Yeah. Yeah. Just to give people something different to do. People still fail that by the way. Absolutely. It's a great challenge in content. MMOs are actually very imprecise with position. They're very, very imprecise. If you multi-box and you're running next to you, you can see that there's different positions for your players. Like you think you're next to a tree on one box. And on the other, no, you're not next to the tree. You're, you're further away. Right. And you can't. Yeah. So, so precise hit detection and, you know, sight lines and stuff. You can't get away with that on an MMO. Right. So whenever you, I kind of want to go back a little bit to Karazhan. Sure. Whenever you, whenever you made, I guess, what was the third iteration of Karazhan, did you know at the time that they were going to change the, that you guys decided to change the rate size or did you just make it and. Now, I think it's, I think they had done ZG. Zolcarub came before Karazhan like that. Yeah. Well, well before Karazhan. And it was a lot of fun. You know, it was, it was 20. So 20 was like, that was a thing. You could do a 20 person rate. They decided that there was just some rooms that weren't big enough for 40 people. There's, there's cool stuff going on in the floor. You like the, the, the chess event. I don't think you, you could actually. Yeah. They just, I mean, just, they're, and also there's a lot of narrow passages and stuff that when you're winding, it just, you didn't need 40 people. And so that's that it was just like, let's do a 20 people. You know, it wasn't a lot of ramifications. You know, we'll see what works. That, that, that's kind of how we designed everything. That's, that's the only way, because you can never predict. You can never, ever, ever, ever predict. You can't predict what's, what's the best camera. You can't predict like whether or not we're going to use a mouse. We didn't know whether or not we're going to use a mouse with our, because we didn't know how much bandwidth a mouse took a mouse. When you, when your character faces different directions, you have to broadcast that because if you're a thief and you're attacking somebody and backstabbing them, you have to constantly broadcast the updates to which way players are facing. And that is a huge, a larger demand for bandwidth. And we didn't know whether or not we could support it because we were going to do a MMO that was, you know, a hundred times larger than EverQuests concurrent rates. And EverQuests, their, their, their mouses were way, way, way less efficient than our code. And we didn't know that we could actually make it more efficient. So we, we had backup plans while people might not be able to use a mouse. It might be click to move like Diablo, you know. So that was actually a feature. You could do that. Yeah. Yeah. We added that because the Koreans wanted to play with the cigarette in their hand. Yeah. Seriously. That's, yeah. And if Koreans wanted something, we gave it to them. We thought that would be the main market for World of Warcraft, the popularity of Blizzard in Korea, but not so much. Right. Wow. So why, why did, why was 40 people the status quo for raids back in Medilla? How did you land on that number? We just probably, I honestly don't know. Let's see. I think it might have been the size of my first, the first Enixia's cavern. It didn't look like a cavern for 20 people. You know, it was just eyeballing it. What feels good? Does this feel good? Framerate obviously was a huge thing. That's 40 unique text textures, 40 animations going on. So that that has some bearing. Framerate is a huge factor in deciding like design. Right. That was probably one of the largest groups that we could do. So we probably said, well, let's give it, let's start with the largest, you know, group and see, you know, because that's cooler. Right. So actually, like we touched on that a little bit before the podcast. We were talking about different things and we brought up, you know, comparisons to other games prior to WoW, going for just playability and making the game more accessible to people just as far as like computer specs goes. You know, you talked about frame rate. That was a big point of emphasis for you guys, too, when we made the game. Yeah. I mean, that's all Blizzard games are, they do well because they are targeted to low end systems. That's why Blizzard games sell. There's other factors, but that's why Blizzard games sell. And it's amazing, still amazes me that most of the games don't adopt that business like discipline of just that's the target. Don't try to impress the magazines with the high poly feature that looks real good on a magazine, but doesn't play well. Everybody was trying to promote their product, so they would make games that were well suited for being on the cover of magazines. So and if you look at more recently, I think another like perfect example of that is the success of Fortnite versus like a game like PUBG, right? Where PUBG is like very, it looks great, all this stuff, the graphics are really high end, but then Fortnite's more cartoony and childish, but like everybody can play it and it runs on console. So the availability is higher, the accessibility is higher, so people can play. That is the formula. If you're puzzling how to make a game, that's how you make it. Low end systems, wide audience always wins. Yeah. And ironically enough, it seems like even the low end games, because they're allowed to be more liberal with their style, they don't necessarily have to adopt the realism of like high fidelity games. It almost just looks better. Like even though it's low polygon count, it just looks better, it's more charming, it's more aesthetically pleasing. I think realism and hyper realism ends up looking kind of creepy in a lot of games. Yeah. And you kind of lose, when it's a lower resolution game, your mind fills in the blanks. There's more imagination. Like the monsters in DOOM 1, the very first DOOM are so much more realistic than the 3D versions of DOOM, because those are bound by weird animations and interpolations between combat and all kinds of crazy states. And it's just, it's more visceral, I think, when your mind is filling in the blanks. So, yeah. That's great. That's actually a great point. Never thought about that. I agree. Yeah. Guys, just to kind of clarify, because some people are already asking questions in the chat, we are going to move to Q&A at the end. Like we're at the end of the podcast, we'll go and we'll have a good amount of time doing Q&A to where you guys can ask questions. You guys can tweet at us, you guys can ask questions in the chat, because I know a lot of people have a whole lot of questions. So, I've got a question. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. What is the world of Warcraft Diary? Oh, yes. There we are. I, good question. There you go. I got to, my first job in the gaming industry was Blizzard Entertainment. And I was pretty knowledgeable of, as a fan, I was not a developer. I thought I had an idea of how games were made, because I had made mods for four and a half years, working crazy hours, followed the plan updates of all the first-person shooters. I came to Blizzard, and Blizzard did everything differently. And every theory that I had was 100% wrong. And I was just shocked that as every day went by, every time I tried to put A and B together, there was always 10 factors that I didn't know about, which was why I came up with this theory in the first place. So, it was just being wrong all the time. I was just learning so much. I was unlearning a lot of things, too. So, I thought this was so fascinating that I wanted to write a book. I thought it would just be a great book, because I really wasn't from, I'm from northeast Ohio. There's not a lot of connections between northeast Ohio and the entertainment industry. And even coming from Iowa, at the time I was coming, actually, I actually moved from New York City. I lived in New York for 10 years. And even in New York, there's no connection to computer game development. There's just very, very little of it in the city. And it was an exotic topic, and I wanted to write about it. So, I took notes every month during Vanilla WoW, and put a book together. And that's the WoWDiary.com is where you go to buy it. That's Scott. I think 10 days left? I could be wrong. It might be nine days. I mean, however many days, you smashed your goal for the book, like immediately. Within the first 24 hours, you had sold over $150,000 worth of copies. That's insane. Yeah, that was my nat with the elephant gun type of thing. You lower your projected... You kind of cheese the system a little bit. You lower your goals so that you can say, oh yeah, I funded in the first eight minutes or something ridiculous. But all the Kickstarter experts told me that's the way to do it. So, this was my first one. So, that's the way I did it. There you go. So, how long have you been sort of like seriously putting this book together? A long, long time. Four years taking notes, obviously during Vanilla WoW. Then I burned out on taking notes, and it didn't seem like there was going to be an end. The book ends with shipping Vanilla WoW because it's weird. How do you write a book about a game that's still going on with year after year? So, I left the industry in 2015, 2016, and I decided this would be a good book to write. I rewrote it over and over and over again. I think I did 18 rounds of edits for professional edits. It embraces the principle of concentrated coolness. There is tons and tons and tons of information in the book, in the final version of it. Even when I was talking to Blizzard, the attorneys, they mentioned a couple things that I didn't realize. Oh, I can fit that in the book. And every time I talked to somebody else, an old teammate, I crammed more little details in the book. So, I had to be disciplined and stop talking to people about, because the book was just, it's a lot of pages. You gave us a little bit of a sample, and one of the most intriguing things to me with anything like this really, but specifically with Vanilla WoW is the stuff that you didn't see make it to the ship's product. I think that kind of stuff is so intriguing to me. We're talking about Karazhan again, and I touched on Karazhan. But what was the idea behind the Karazhan Crips? What was the point of that? Okay, so, for the longest time, we were making dungeons. Under the philosophy, there's no such thing as a dungeon too big, and when in doubt, make it bigger. Because we were terrified that people would burn through our content and then quit our game. We were very terrified. So, we created zones we didn't need. We created the micro-dungeons we call them, the non-instance dungeons, the gold mines, the crips, and the caves that in zones that just were not necessary. And the crips around Karazhan were just me jamming on the crypt texture set. I made some cool stuff. They're half built. They're not even remotely polished. None of them would hold up to any standard. But I just started in at one point, Jeff Kaplan said, Karazhan's too big. The library is too big. That could be just a dungeon in and of itself. We're wearing that. Oh, yeah. With instances, because all our philosophy was based on EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, where they weren't private dungeons. You had to compete with content with other. So, you needed huge, huge, huge dungeons. And it just never occurred to us that, oh yeah, with a private dungeon with an instance, they don't have to be that big. You're going to fight everything that's in there. And you would think something like that would dawn on the best mines and the brightest mines of Blizzard. But it just, that thought escaped us. We had just been chasing the rabbit, focused on that little. So, yeah, Karazhan had flooded sections in the instance. We had flooded rooms. We went around with water. Like with the upside down centers? Well, that was outside of Karazhan. That was my big trouble in a little China tribute. And, yeah, we didn't need any of that stuff. It was just crazy. So, yeah, we, Deadwind didn't really get, there weren't any spawns. I think maybe some Ogres in Deadwind. That was it. There's many zones that we didn't, that was just some of them. So, in vanilla WoW, a lot of dungeons are very, very open-ended. Black Rock Devs is the first one that comes to mind. Was that a goal to not have dungeons be hallway, hallway boss, hallway, hallway boss, but rather have you, you can kind of explore through the caverns and stuff like that? Was that intentional? We all had our different, like all the guys built their own way. It was just like, you know, we just, we'd rock and roll. That was my personal way. I didn't like hallways. I don't build hallways a lot in any of my dungeons. I think rooms are far more interesting than hallways. And I built them from old Dungeons and Dragons where it has to be a believable environment. It has to look like the inhabitants live there. They have to have a water source. They have to have thoroughfares. They have to have some sense of, that's, that's the other gate in Black Rock Devs is my, you know, we had a city gate that was a concept that I'm thinking, well, wait a minute. What do you have in front of a gate? You have a road, but where the hell does that road go to? I can't keep going on and on with the road. I have to finish with something. So I just put another gate, a duplicate gate that was closed. So that was my suspension of disbelief that, yeah, the city is actually bigger than what you're going to see. And I did that a lot with BRD. So, yeah, I, that was just my personal goal. Other people, you know, like that wasn't, you know, they built their own way. Right. Did you design Sunken Temple? No, that was Jose. Jose was one of our level designers. He came to us from the art staff. The Sunken Temple, it's oddly enough, that was the, we knew it was the most confusing dungeon because whenever you array a dungeon, I don't like doing an array. What I mean array is when it's radial, okay, when you copy and paste a section, it's kind of disorienting. The player forgets which way they're facing. I tried not to do round rooms or symmetrical rooms. I did some of that in BRD at the end, the final rooms, but, and it's a faster, obviously way faster way to build. But that was, we knew it was a confusing dungeon. So when we were testing out our minimap, we took Bill Petrus, who is our art director, Bill volunteered. He said, I am the easiest, I am the most easily confused person when it comes to navigation. I'm terrible in first person shooters. I am the guinea pig for this. And so that's, he went into Sunken Temple and he tested the minimap where it actually that, and this was a huge win where you could actually see that the arrow was pointing to where you were moving. And there's a lot of ways you can do minimaps. You can have always the arrow point north and you rotate the dungeon around the arrow, or you can actually have the arrow spinning and the dungeon is fixed on the north, southeast, west orientation. We did it with the ladder half, the ladder way. So, yeah, Bill wasn't confused. So he pronounced the minimap ago. So, and that was our, that was our big deal. But we didn't have overmaps back then, which were, yeah, like, like when you hit the M key and you zoom into the dungeon, we'd actually didn't have that. I think it was shipped. I don't, I don't think there was no dungeon maps. Yeah, there were no dungeon maps. We wouldn't have had that feature if it weren't, if we hadn't had so much problems with Stormwind. Stormwind was the Roach Motel that once you check in, you can't find your way out. And it was hated by the development team for a long time because they just, people didn't want to go, like, protesters didn't want to go in there because then they'd get lost. It's so funny that you mentioned, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, that's, that's just why we had that overmap at all. Yeah, right. I was going to say, it's so funny they mentioned how Stormwind was like that because now in, in WoW and in the current version of the game, Stormwind has kind of become the main hub for the alliance as far as like capital cities go. And I always remember, yeah, I always remember like how it was Iron Forge, you know, and I've put a line through and yeah, just because of like just the shape of it, it being around, it just felt like everything was like kind of equidistant in some, in some form. Yeah. I thought Iron Forge is really well laid out. And the under city even learned from Iron Forge. That was the last one. That was a site of a big debate between Metzen and the level designers who wanted a very concise, we wanted a hub. Chris's vision was this disheveled shambles, sewers that just very dark, not the high, the high gothic goth look that the under city has today. I mean, not anymore. Unfortunately. Yeah, I know it got a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, so yeah, we learned from under city, we learned from Iron Forge and we didn't know which one was going to be the most populated city. We had a sneaking suspicion that the night elf area was not going to be well used. There weren't any raid dungeons up there. Although we were going to do Hyjal, so maybe it was going to, but Hyjal got way delayed. Yeah, we didn't need Hyjal for. Yeah, what was the original plan behind Hyjal? Like, did you, did you guys want to make it a zone or raid or? Yeah, it was like a, it was a raid zone, an exterior raid. But what was there on ship was just like flat, completely untextured, like one proper two as placeholders saying, you know, here's the, here's where you jump in the instits or something. We had not a lot of plans. I mean, we were doing a million things at the same time. So I know inside of Hyjal, because I may have done some tricky things to find my way into it in the 1.12 client. I remember, well, two things. One, I thought it was funny that had the under construction sign at the bottom of the bottom of winter spring. And then also, whenever you get into it, there is a, there's a dragon cave very similar to the Enixia cave. And a lot of people assume that might have been like death wings cave. Like, if you even remember, this might be such a minor detail. No, it's the exterior designers, it's so funny. It's so trivial to place things in the world, like they all just drop some people asked, why, why is there a dark portal in Laqumadon in our very first gameplay movie? You can see it very faded in the background. And it's because it's a cool prop. It wasn't one of the iconic props from Warcraft 3. So we just threw it in Laqumadon. We didn't know which zone it was going to be in. And we, that's where we filmed that movie. And then we just got rid of it. We had no idea where the final part of the black, dark portal was actually going to be. So an exterior level designer can just open up a tab, copy areas, buildings, props, place it there, then forget about it and then move on. It will just be just because they had that in their passport, they'll paste and they'll say, Oh, that's, that's the thing. Okay, I'll go, I'll work on something else now, you know, I'll save and then I'll move on. So there's not a lot of like lore goes in after everything is pretty much built. Like they'll give us a blueprint and then they'll polish the lore and say, Okay, this is what we can pull off. You know, this is a little shoehorn, some story in there. All right, throw a few retcons in there, maybe. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Dips. It's really interesting you say that. I mean, there's so many like small secrets and like kind of untold mysteries about vanilla. There's the portal in Stormwind that was going to like lead to player housing or something like that. Yeah, that's what it was going to be. Yeah. What's like, can you give us like some, some little secrets like or things that just never made it to the game? Like, you know, some content that you would have loved to see in the game or any kind of little Easter eggs that players don't really know the background about? My, it's kind of funny. The feature I always wanted was strong sound support. Coming from a first person shooter community, we had the ability to place sound emitters. And the cool thing with that is that you could like rushing wind. If you're on a ledge, you hear the rushing wind. It's just, it gets the adrenaline going and you don't realize it at the time as a player. I wanted to do that when you get close to the lava. You hear that. But that's not something, that's a feature that our game just didn't have. I wanted, another, I drove the prop guys are probably going, Oh my God, he's going to talk about the water drop. I wanted a water drop that was going to come from an indeterminate location that pops on the ground, makes the drop sound when it happens, because I could place that in all the gold mines, all the, you know, all the caves. Yeah, but it's just that we didn't have the guys, our particle effects system was not very strong. You couldn't, we didn't have a previewer in the editor, like for all our spell effects. Kevin Beardsley was our lead animator. He basically did all the spell, spell effects, practically blind. He had to go through a multiple compile process, and then he would jump in game, type the number of the spell, and then he would see how the spell would look around his character. And anyone who's worked with particle effects, that particle effect could be invisible for a number of reasons. It could be stretched or just wrong. And one little variable could just completely change the look of that. But he did every spell effect for every class in the game that way, because we just didn't have a tool that automated it and made it faster. So the things I wanted were like tools like that. I pitched a whole bunch of bad ideas. It's funny, I used to, Eric Dodds, he and I hit it off really well, since my interview actually on the team. And he was learning, he would, he'd come from QA, he hadn't shipped a game before, and he was learning under Alan Adham's wing, and he would just take all the terrible ideas that I had, and they were truly terrible ideas. I had ideas for like, oh, every stupid thing that you can think from Dungeons and Dragons, like artifacts. I wanted super rare items in the game. It just makes no sense for an MMO. Like, why would you have something that only one person has? Because it's like, it's, there's not a lot of bang for the fuck to support that type of content. So speaking of artifacts, I remember in the original, because a friend of mine had a copy of the original, like whatever strategy guide, and it had a list of like all like, you know, uncommon, rare, epic, whatever, and it did have artifact. Right. So that was an original plan. That was a placeholder, uh, was artifact, that wasn't, was that orange? I think it was gold. I think it was gold. Okay, so artifact was just, we knew there was going to be something over legendary, because we didn't know whether or not we would constantly be going, we thought at one point we'd just go through every color in the rainbow as the players level to 60, 70, 80, 90, you know, we thought we'd just be shifting through all these different colors rather than keeping the green, blue, you know, purple, uh, which is good that they went because you run out of colors eventually. So that we just threw artifact in there as, eh, maybe, you know, we'll come up with something by the time we have to, yeah, but that's kind of how we did everything. Yeah. So speaking of, speaking of legendaries and stuff, there's one legendary talisman of the binding shard that, uh, was accidentally put in the game, and then, uh, who's the guy who got it? It was from nerfed, but, but one player got it. Can you tell us anything about that? I cannot. I don't know anything about that. How did he get that? Well, I guess it was like accidentally in the loot table, yeah, that was just a goof as a bug. Probably just picked on the wrong pull down menu and hit artifact or something. I don't know what the stats were. Yeah, that was just a bug. Right. The, you know, again, kind of going back to, to hydral and stuff that, you know, didn't make it to the game. There's a few zones, kind of like hydral, uh, you know, what eventually became Gilneas. There's an area, uh, I believe it's right under Angoro, which you can see these on the map. One of you open up the map, but you can't actually click on them. Yeah. What were the original plans for these zones? And I guess, like we know one is Gilneas, and then what after cataclysm became Oldham, I guess, is under Angoro. Was that, was that originally going to be Oldham as well? Uh, no, um, we knew that Angoro had ties to the Titans. There was that balcony. That's where the Titans were supposed to watch the experiments on Angoro. Angoro was described as the Petri dish for the world. And that's just the war. We knew that there was something going on with Titans. Uh, that sometimes dovetails. And honestly, that's something that like maybe five, five people on the team know about. Oh, really? Okay. A level designer will go, Oh, if they're Titans down there, let me play around with Titan stuff. They'll drop some Titan stuff, Titan art assets down there, and they'll just play around to just get their mind going. Right. And you know, there's no plan. There's absolutely no plan at all. Like if they come up with something cool, it's kind of like I described it as a jazz band or, or a, or a garage rock band. Lots of people just jamming on ideas. And that was a word that we used to describe, uh, coming up with a cool idea. We would say, Oh, I'm jamming on this idea. And we're, I'm riffing on that color scheme that so and so had for the, uh, the nulls, you know, that, that, that works with me. So I'm just riffing on that. And that is kind of how we all worked, you know, there wasn't a lead, uh, I think the only leads for the team was, uh, John Cash for tech. And, uh, like there was never a formal leads meeting where leads would sit down and decide what was, you know, the game was going to be. Yeah. It was just developers. We'd all go in there and we'd see who's working on what. And if they were coming up with cool ideas, we wanted to know, can we steal that idea and do stuff on, on my area? And that's just kind of how everybody worked. So back in 2000, sorry to backtrack back in 2001, early development, did you guys plan on there being expansions or do you think it was patch after patch? No, no, no, we knew that there were going to be expansions because Diablo had already proven that, you know, you could do that with it, you know, RPG and Baldur's Gate was doing it. Um, no, we had so many ideas that we pushed off and said, Oh, we'll do that on another expansion, you know, and we did not have a clear distinction. Like working on a patch and working on an expansion is exactly the same process, at least for a developer. It's a lot different for the producers because producers are working with PR and ad campaigns and they're talking to the parent company and HQ about, you know, when the game is going to ship, uh, like expansions are still kind of like a, uh, old world, you know, the boxed game model. You know, there's really not no reason to have a boxed expansion anymore. I mean, I don't even know if they sell them as, as boxes. I mean, you just, you download everything. So, uh, yeah, we didn't have, yeah, expansions were, I guess, early on that, that's how we thought we'd make money. Yeah. Right. And the expansions changed a lot. Like over the years, the game is so different now than it was back in 2004. And a lot of things over time have changed, like the original vision for certain things. I know, like, for example, in vanilla Grimbatol, uh, it was there, but it was inaccessible. As Van mentioned, hi, Joel. Um, what was your original plan for Grimbatol and, and kind of, are there things that you've seen that you designed personally that have changed over time from what they originally intended to be? Well, I, I don't know what Grimbatol is now. I mean, it shipped as, uh, that was, that was a mid-range dungeon. Uh, have they done something different with it? I guess it never, it was there on the map, but it was never really accessible. Yeah. We didn't get it done. No, we, oh, oh, okay. So it's supposed to be a mid-range dungeon. Yeah. Okay. Um, maybe I'm, uh, what was, what was the dungeon in the Feralis? What was the name of that? Diarmol. Diarmol. Okay. I'm getting those mixed up. Yeah. Grimbatol. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's right. Grimbatol was in the wetlands behind the mountain. Okay. That's right. That's right. Okay. Um, yeah. Diar, okay. I was talking about Diarmol. Okay. So Grimbatol was just an area that it was, we didn't need it, so we didn't fully develop it. We knew there were going to be expansions, so we would push it off. What the story was, who lived there obviously, it's an ogre. I assume. Is it, is it ogres? Grimbatol? Um, I think it was it was it was it was it Dwarven City? Dwarven Town. Oh really? Okay. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was taken over by dragons. Yeah. So again, yeah, some of these names that they, tomato, tomato, ogres, it may have been ogres at one point. It just maybe mis, I'm probably just misremembering it. But yeah, they're just, there's so many areas that if you get to it, we get to it. If it's part of the vanilla wow, you know, then cool. If not, we'll push it off to something else. But a lot of these were just names that Metzen liked, like Valgard was our test, the first test city, and it was just a name. There was no ruler behind it. We were just, let's call it something, you know, give it a cool name. So yeah, pretty cool name. So kind of something else that I was thinking about was, I really liked how one, one kind of art style, I guess, in particular that I really liked was the draconic stuff, you know, Blackwing Layer, UBRS. You made Blackrock Spire, right? Yes. All Blackrock Dungeons. Yeah. All of them. Okay. So basically the entire mountain, that was you. Yeah. Yeah. Me with Brian Morcero's excellent texture set. I could do that because he painted like, oh gee, 50, 60 texture, something ridiculous. So I had a lot of material to work with. Yeah. Yeah. I really love all that stuff. And UBRS was personally my favorite dungeon. Did you guys intend for lower and upper to be completed together? Or is that just kind of like what happened where people split it up just because it was so big? Everything just evolved. Upper Blackrock Spire was my first foray into architecture. I'd been doing silithid hives, razor fins, whaling caverns, all organic stuff. I was good at the organic stuff. I guess I grew up, I went through a lot of cave tours when I was on vacation. There's not a lot of caves near Southern California. So not a lot of the other developers got the benefit that my family out here in Ohio had. But no, I love those caves. But I also was a fan of architecture in Upper Blackrock Spire. We didn't know whether or not we could put players next to a ledge or precipice. And so it was kind of a whole home. I think the architecture is very bland because I never could do anything dramatic with it. The very final boss room was before you went above Lower Blackrock Spire. There was no Lower Blackrock Spire. There was no intention for Lower Black Spire. Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan said, John, we need to make dungeons bigger. And what do you think we could do? And I didn't want to work with razor fin because there was a pain in the ass. So I told them that the canopy limited the size for the razor fin dungeons. And they bought that one because it was not a high level dungeon. They didn't push for a larger dungeon. Thank God. And we went with pushing all the Blackrock, Blackrock depths ended with Flame Lash was the final boss. So the Lyceum, the Pour Your Own Golem room, all of that stuff was not supposed to be, that wasn't part of Lower Blackrock Spire. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Because it doesn't make sense that the Throne Room kind of, and I was out of ideas by the time I got to the Throne Room. I was just symmetrical rooms. Yeah, VRD packed up or Blackrock. I had the idea, we had just seen the Lord of the Rings. And so, Moria, I was like, oh, dude, I could do a total Moria, very broken, robled out idea. And then Kaplan and Pardo loved the idea. So it was my idea. And they both resisted it to actually join them because I could kind of double tip on Lower Blackrock Spire by just running a bridge. And I get this awesome view finally in Upper Blackrock Spire, something dramatic in that dungeon, because it's a very bland dungeon. Like, I couldn't build any precipices. And that's, by the time I built Lower Blackrock Spire, we realized, oh, a player who disconnects doesn't keep running, because that was what we were worried about. We were worried about a person who disconnects, continues to run and runs off the ledge, falls in the lava, dies, and now it's a negative experience. Well, luckily, players don't actually do that. That certainly never happened to me. And Jeff was on the team and he would say, well, they're going to be a dumbass and jump off themselves and screw, let them die. And, you know, that was like early on in the project, all the designers like, oh, we can't let them die like that. But we had softened, you know, to accommodate a little bit of patience. Yeah, a little bit of free will take the players off that nice rail and let them run free and kill themselves if they so choose. But I put the dungeons next to each other and they are literally part of the same instance. You can do Upper Blackrock if you could survive the fall somehow, a mage could. But we were worried about some exploit of linking two dungeons together and we couldn't think of an exploit that players could choose the system. So we left it that way. So that's kind of how those two got connected. Did you guys, did you have any like, with the people who designed the different mobs and the bosses and stuff, how much did you work with them directly within UBRS? Um, I usually not a lot. For Vanilla WoW, we didn't, we didn't do a lot of planning. And I think it, it was a, I like it that way. I don't like the big round room where you're going to have a fight there. The round rooms are kind of boring and they're bland and the fights, I think, aren't always the best fights. When, when you're forced to use the geometry that's there, your, your mind, you know, when you can't do anything at all, you know, like, like if you have a big round room, then you got a blank piece of paper. Anything can happen in that boss fight. And I think it's actually limiting. The mind doesn't work. Like when you're, when there's a pit of fire in the center, you're mind, oh, how can that be incorporated into the fight? Okay. We did that with a major domo, executives. I had this, one of the few features of the molten core was I put a coal, like a hit of coal. And oh, yeah, we can use this as, you know, teleport players there and they have to run off there. You know, that's just the one little game mechanic. It's very easy to do. But when you have a big blank room, stuff like that, it just doesn't happen. So there's not a lot of connection between the level designers and the, other than the, the descriptors would come by and say, Oh, this room is so cool. Wait till you see what I did with this room. You know, that's how that's how they would do things. So you would make the room and then you would pass it off to the bosses, to the boss designers and they would have to design the fight around the brain you gave them. Yeah. And often, like when you say pass it off, I would finish it. It would sit there for two years. And then I would realize, Oh, someone's working on X dungeon X. Oh, cool. You know, that's so funny that you say this because, you know, while the original intention may have not been to, you know, we can't let them die like that talking about the bridge and UBRS. Yeah. Yeah. Some just sadistic person decided to make the mobs the dragon can be able to punt you. Oh, yeah. They get charged and punt you. And I don't know how many times I've had my back facing the wrong way and gotten dropped into LBRS. Thankfully, I played a Paladin's like a bubble, but then I would just die to mobs anyway, so I'd be screwed. Yeah. And you know what, they also put those, those stupid elite mobs outside with the slow poison when you're trying to run into. Yeah. Like that was, I was out at Ham's. He thought the elite mobs out in front of dungeons. That was his. He was the only person, like sometimes when the guy who founds the company has an idea, nobody really has the wherewithal to say, Oh, and this is a really awful thing. Nobody likes this. This is, so I think they just wanted to just be extra mean and put a slow when you're trying to run past them up into the instance. So was your guys original intention for it to get into Black Rock Spire? Was your guys original intention to run up the staircase in the back or was it to jump on the chain? No, the jumping. Oh, the upper Black Rock Spire. Yeah, because basically to go to Black Upper Black or is Black Rock Spire in general, the statue, you mean? There's like a statue in the chain on the balcony. Right. Yeah. No, that was by luck. And one, because nobody liked the elite mobs, Jeff asked, Hey, can you make this an easier jump so everybody can make it? We don't have to run by those stupid elite mobs this way, which, you know, I put this whole barricade, like a whole bunch of arrows were like, like those stairs were like, were the elite mobs where I had it looking like there was a last stand that dwarves and and nobody, you know, I guess you see it once or twice. But yeah, I made it easier for the Toren to jump onto the balcony just because the devs just didn't want to have that argue, you know, that discussion with Alan, get rid of these elite mobs, they suck, you know, uh, yeah, that was the band aid that we put on. That was that that jump to the balcony. Did you design the layout in Black Rock Mountain, like with the whole the chains leading into the middle, that little rock piece in the middle? Yes and no, that medicine's vision was the, the, I call it an island being held by chains. Okay. Um, other guys wanted giant statues of dwarves and I kind of, I'm not crazy on the valley. I don't like the valley of heroes so much. I don't like, I don't like how you can change the player model into a statue because the statue doesn't look like a statue. It's not thick, like a statue. It's just too detailed. And I resisted that and then I decided, well, I'm going to incorporate the chains into a statue. Okay. So yes. Okay. So let's do a statue. And then there was originally going to be two concentric rings around one, uh, one layer was going to be upper Black Rock Spire and one layer was going to be, uh, Black Rock depths. Okay. That was the original plan. I didn't like the two concentric rings. It just didn't make sense. Why would, why would I want to have two rings? Let's just do one ring. Um, and I didn't like the idea of a bridge. If we have chains going across that I got rid of the bridge and put the chains, use the chains as a bridge, made them pathable. And I had to get, that's, I had to get the game designers to tell the art director, it's okay. Players will get it. You know, the art director was worried that people wouldn't be able to realize, Oh, I can go across on the chains. Uh, he just doesn't know how he was an, he was not an MMO player. So we had to have that discussion of us convincing the art director to get rid of the bridge because it's way more cool without the bridge. It's way more cool because it feels like you're sneaking into an area that you don't belong. That's the whole hit. And thank God, thank God they were there for me. So seriously, the chains are like the most iconic part of a Black Rock Mountain. And using the chains, a lot of people didn't think we could do chains because they were going to be too high poly, but I was able to figure out how to do chains and do them low poly. I mean, oxes. Right. What about the, so, so the jump, one of you come in from the north side from Thorium Point area? Yeah. When you come from the north side, you can jump down and basically be right at molten core. Yeah. Was that intended or was that an accident? You know what? It's kind of funny. Well, one of the level designers, it was a funny thing, they wanted to flatten out the two zones so that the ring would actually be level. And I said, no way. It's way cooler when it's on the tilt. It just built up the space more and that the Northern entrance was originally a furor. This is in an article coming out. So, spoiler alert, I'm going to have an article on my head about all my dungeons. Furor, this is the last days of the alpha before it went gold. Okay. We're on, we were on art lockdown and that basically means don't make any art changes that are not approved by the producers. Okay. Because they're the ones responsible for it. Furor comes in and says, we need an art change. Okay. It's like midnight. Okay. I'm working. He's raiding with fires of heaven in the molten core. He has this crazy look in his eyes and he says, dude, I'm a torn. And every time I run down the chains, when I get to the end of the chain that big ring at the end, there used to be collision that was wider than the width of the chain. So, he's running down as a ghost. Okay. He forgets about that extra lip and it bumps him into the lava. Okay. Now, this is a hardcore raiding guild after a wipe, after many wipes, and every time that's that super long run all the way down to the molten core entrance, he forgets by that time, because he's just on autopilot. He's tired, he's exhausted, and he falls down over and over and over and he's the raid leader. Okay. And he's the only, he was like one of the only Toren. So, he was the one prone because they had a larger collision box the Toren did. So, he was the only one doing it. Okay. So, he's looking like a dumbass in front of this rain. That's wiping. It's midnight. He's tired. We're all fatigued. We're crunching on the project. And he comes up with this crazy going, dude, okay. All right. I love you. But this ring is driving me crazy. Okay. It's, you just got to change it. You just got to change it. Okay. I thought it was so funny that, you know, so I made it so that you could climb out of the lava and get into the instance. Oh, prior to that, you couldn't even climb out. No. He had to release to the graveyard, take a huge hit on his, his armor. Okay. And you couldn't repair until you go to cargath. Okay. So, him falling into that hit over and over and over was that painful that I just ninja'd the art change in. He said, yeah, look, if you get in trouble, you can blame me, you know. This could be just between you and I. No one needs to change it. And it's pretty dangerous, I swear to change. Because you're going to, when you do anything, you can introduce a bug. And we went gold. And that was like one of the last art changes in the game before it went gold. But yeah, yeah, that's getting out of the lava was, you can thank Alex off for there you go, dude. Negotiators. There you go. No. So yeah, I personally have had so much fun there as a paladin. I sit on the bottom of that lip and Horde jumped down and I would stun them in the lava and just like sit there and watch them burn to death. My favorite things to do. I love it so much. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Wow. So pretty soon here, guys, we're going to, we're going to move to Q&A here shortly. Do you guys have anything else that you guys want to hit on tips? Stay safe. I do. I have sort of a Classic WoW related question. One of the biggest topics I see about Classic WoW is the possibility of post nexoramus or even just additional mid tier content in Classic WoW, additional content that they could make. So I think there's no better guy to ask than you. How feasible do you think that is? Do you think that's something they would do or should do? What do you think about that? Oh, first of all, I don't know about the no better guy to ask. I mean, I have, it's been seven years since I've been in computer game development, at least with Lizard. So I'm far away from the standards and practices, but geez, I think an MMO has to sustain an audience for a long time to support its own financial weight. I don't know how many times we're going to kill Enixia and, geez, Ragnaros over and over and over. I mean, you got to be able to move on after six months, a year, two years of killing those same two. Like what are the Raiders going to do? Like how many times are they going to restart a new character and go after Ragnaros? Go after Enixia. I would argue they have to. Their hand is forced, but they may have plans of bringing up additional content or I don't know what it could possibly be, but I think that they could. I mean, that's something. I mean, is that what you're going for? I'm personally not for it. In my mind, additional content is TBC. I would just rather have them do a classic TBC. I'm also curious, when they announced classic, were you shocked or did you know in advance? What was your reaction to that? Oh, I definitely didn't know it. I'm way out of the loop. I was pretty shocked. I know how hard it is to ship a WMO. I mean, honestly, I think anybody reading my book to the beginning to the end, by the time you get to the end, you're fatigued as a reader. I'll go ahead and say, you are fatigued. You're going, oh my God, one of these guys just going to ship this game already. Oh my God, this is so awful. Everybody's so depressed. It's a hard, hard game to make. I kept the minutiae and the details in there. It's a hard thing to make an MMO, and if you're going to do it, you've got to hold the audience to support it. I wish there were another way to say it. It's hard to make any MMO, even if they depart from Vanilla WoW or they changed some of the systems. Does that answer your question? I don't think I did. I'm satisfied. But sort of speaking of the difficulty of making an MMO, maybe there's some in the audience. Do you have any advice for getting into game development? Is someone that's done it yourself? Oh, definitely do. I definitely do. I mean, part of the book was bridging the gap between Akron, Ohio and Irvine, California. I mean, no one that I grew up with had any aspiration to, like for me, creativity was going into advertising. That was like, I had to leave Ohio to go to New York City, and that was exotic to me. It's so hard. Here's one of the mysteries, some of the myth about the gaming industry. It is so insanely hard to find a good developer. It's so hard to find someone who really wants to polish their work. I can't repeat myself enough. It's about polishing. It's like, why I spent so much time on the book rewriting it over and over and over. That is what sells. It's polishing a movie, polishing a book, polishing a picture, just being in love with the medium enough to push it as far as you possibly can by yourself. 90% of the people applying to jobs, especially the junior designers, junior artists, junior programmers, they'll work on something. They'll get it done in quotations, Mark, and they'll want to work on something else. Those guys are a dime a dozen. It doesn't cut it for the gaming industry. I thought it was really hard to break into the gaming industry, and it is. It actually is, but once you adopt this mentality of just polishing it, we hired a level designer. Dana Jan had one level. That's all it takes. Don't do a portfolio with this and that and the other thing. Don't show us all the things that you can do. If you can just paint rocks really, really well, you can work anywhere you want. Like seriously? Someone who just has rocks down, they've got a career ahead of them, and obviously they're going to get tired of rocks, but eventually they're going to have rocks and they'll be forced at some point to do particle effects, and then wow, particle effects are kind of cool. I didn't know that was a thing. Then you'll polish particle effects and that'll just dovetail into another job. A lot of people go into the industry trying to do everything, and that's just not the way to do it. The gaming industry, I will say, is very accessible to the artist or the, I came from the art background. Yeah, of meticulous, but willing to redo your work over and over, because that's what you're doing in the industry. If you don't want to do it on your own, if you're in school and you don't want to redo stuff over and over, you're going into the wrong industry because you're going to redo stuff over. Blizzard's games are iterative. They self-publish their games, and so that they can push their deadlines back if they want. That's the number one big secret to Blizzard is that they self-publish their games. That's it. They fund their own games, and so they have the power to say, this sucks. We're not doing this game, or they have the power to say, this is more interesting than we thought. Let's take our game down this road, which is what happened to quests. Quests, we were boring, we thought, and then went, wow, that's kind of interesting. This is very compelling gameplay for the casual player. Wow, wasn't going to have, we were going to have the producers in their spare time make some quests. That was our quest designers, producers in their spare time. That's how important we considered quests in the year 2000. When we got to a playable build, we realized, quests are actually very fertile. Let's expand the budget, hire a bunch of quest designers, and really put them into the fertile area of our MMO. That's what made WoW successful, is that we had the casual player quests. Right. That's one of the things that I thought was so good about vanilla WoW that is very, very understated. A lot of people look back on vanilla and talk about, oh, it's a hardcore game, there's grinding, there's this and that. I remember at the time, well, first off, at the time, whenever WoW came out compared to other MMOs, it was considered like the easy game compared to Evercore, that's true. Yeah, it was the Care Bear game, exactly, that's what I called it. Yeah, we heard that a lot. Yeah. So there's that. And then second off, I do remember that, and this is like a big difference between the game today and vanilla WoW, and I was actually talking about this on stream yesterday, but the game was so much, it was much more casual friendly in the sense that throughout the entire course of the game, you were experiencing the journey, right? You were going through, and it's the world of Warcraft, it's not just about end game rating, it's not just about high end PvP, and you feel like you're a character, you're in Stormwind, you're coming out of Northshire Abbey, you're a human, let's say. I mean, you're this little tiny peasant basically, and you're building your character up, and you're still not like, at the end, you can become very powerful, but you're still like nothing compared to these bosses, and you need 39 other people to join together to take them down, and it's this whole journey that you feel, and it's like a series of small wins, the little progressions, putting in one talent point every level, stuff like that. Yeah, and that was just because it took so, the reason why talents exist at all is because the level up experience was underwhelming for a lot of people, when they were out in the field killing cobalts or something, they would level up, they'd get their health and mana back, and they'd say, oh great, when I get back to Iron Forge, I'll be able to train in my new spells, and then I will be stronger. There's no moment of, ooh, there's no little thing that we wanted. Yeah, the little small win rewards. Yeah, then like, you level up in Dungeons and Dragons, and it's like, you hear a chorus hallelujah, you know. And while it was just like, all right, so I'm a different level, and it was kind of the pain in the ass, because you were in the middle of a quest, and you kind of felt stupid not having your you wanted to find out what your spells were. So it was just kind of this bitter taste in your mouth, like, oh, shit, this sucks. I mean, this is our level up experience really isn't all that awesome. And even the fact that, yeah, well, that's a different thing, but yeah. Yeah, be, go ahead, go ahead. I was just going to say, like, kind of piggybacking on that, like, you know, over time, like you mentioned the Care Bear thing and stuff. But I guess everything is relative, right, like, you know, World of Warcraft, vanilla relative to its predecessors versus relative to its, I guess, sequels, and it's, you know, it's progeny after it. I got a question, you know, specifically towards that, you designed Blackrock Dungeons, John, and we were talking about it earlier, I'm not sure if you noticed the chat, there's a lot of love in the chat for BRD. It's, it's, you know, I think it's a masterpiece, honestly, a lot of people. John's pushing BRD. It is one of the best dungeon experiences I think WoW has ever had, you know, the past 15 years. And over time, it's almost become the antithesis of the dungeon design we see today. It's a lot more sprawling, larger, 15 plus bosses. It's kind of like a big dungeon crawl. Things have obviously changed since then. How do you feel about some of the more streamlined dungeons that came out, like in Cataclysm, even Wrath of the Lich King? You know, was that, was that something to go for against, you know, the more condensed action dungeons? I wasn't, obviously, I don't play the game now. I don't know how streamlined dungeons. I loved Dungeon Finder. I had such a hard time, all of us had a hard time finding a group for doing dungeons. I don't think anybody misses that inconvenience. Maybe I'm wrong out there. Maybe there's a lot of hate, but... Yeah, I loved it, personally. Oh yeah, you like the videos, John? Yeah, I know, because the thing is, I loved it because, you know, for me, it's trade chat, right? Just having an active trade chat. You're melting your chat log right now. We're not agreeing with you. Go ahead, go ahead. No, no. The thing is, I loved it because you, they gave you an opportunity to interact and it gave your server character, gave your server identity, right? So, like, basically, like, I know, like, I would know of people on the server through just talking in trade chat, right? Absolutely. And that kind of progressed to, like, oh, like, you know, so-and-so is looking for a group. I want to join his group. And then, conversely, it kind of, it put a little bit of accountability to your name, and if somebody sucked or, like, was a ninja looter or something like that, then it's like, oh, it's that guy. I don't want to deal with that guy, you know? No, you're totally right about that. And in fact, that's why we didn't want an auction house. The auction house was forced on us. That was a player add-on that actually, it obeyed the end user licensing agreement, but you needed to have that add-on to be part of the really cool economy where you could actually move merchandise. We wanted that player-to-player, that inconvenient player-to-player interaction of some poor slob making, I don't know, the Pearl staff of what's, you know, who's it, what's it, and standing in the marketplace, spamming over and over and over. The Pearl staff of so-and-so is now available for 34 gold. The Pearl staff of so-and-so is now available for 34 gold. That is gone with the auction house, and that type of person-to-person interaction, auction house completely. So yeah, some people like some conveniences, and where is that line? It's always, and what's hard about an MMO is that it's everything to everyone. You've got hardcore gamers, and you have casual gamers, okay? But you can't support an MMO on the money you make from hardcore gamers, okay? There's not enough. You need the casual gamers to justify, you know, they're going to keep the lights on. And so you've got to have some conveniences, and you've got to, but the downtime is what makes it, that's when people chat, you know? That's when the guildies get together, when you're on a long taxi ride, that's when you're chatting to your guild, and that's adding content and flavor to the game. That's where the social interaction happens. I can't think of a game other than Vanilla WoW that is incentivized, encouraged, fostered community involvement and engagement with other players and teamwork cooperation. I can't think of any other game that does it better than Vanilla WoW. Well yeah, there's certainly other games that do it. We've minimized what we're good at is minimizing the griefing. That's actually where the, that's a successful game. If you could prevent people from consensual PVP was a new idea. We had no idea that that could be, wow, that's actually a thing, you know? Anarchy Online showed it that we could do that. Dark Age of Camot, you go into the frontier, you're consenting to do PVP. Those were ideas that we thought would never, like, we didn't have those concepts, so we weren't planning for any, we were considering no PVP whatsoever, like literally all the top designers in the company at one point said, now we're probably not going to do PVP. There's no way we can prevent people from griefing one another. Oh absolutely, and then when Anarchy Online came out and Dark Age of Camot came out, oh wow, PVP can actually be really, really fun. I was one of the vocalists for PVP because I came from the first person shooter. If you connect to this server, you know, your ass is mine. So that was the mentality for me. So obviously I was more of the hardcore of advocate, but yeah, so a lot of, it's a constantly changing paradigm, constantly. Someone's going to come up with something, whether they're going to draw something from Fortnite or something that has some implication on World of Warcraft and that's going to be the next thing. So one thing that we haven't talked about yet, and we talked about this just briefly before the podcast, and it was talking about basically like when we think, wow, classic is going to come out, looking into the future a little bit. And now you haven't been with a company for a while, you mentioned that, but I guess you mentioned before that you thought it could possibly be, it might not come out until like 2021 even, is what you were thinking. That was my prediction, but I am way out of the no. You guys know more than me. You follow the recent developments, so I'm completely benighted. I have no idea. Yeah, well, because I do know only one thing, how hard it is, how hard it is to make an MMO and how hard to balance it. And this is not an uncritical audience. So they're not going to really something that is not going to measure up to players expectations. And I know Blizzard's you know, finicky adherence to quality. So they're not going to release anything that's not going to be good. So right. And one thing that so and I was talking about this because it came up on my stream, the reason why I bring this up is it came up on my stream a little bit. And because a few people asked about it because they had heard you had said that with the recent like dev water cooler update that came out like a couple months ago, it seemed like they're already like on their third, at least, this was two months ago. They're working towards their third prototype of the game. And that's why I still kind of like I still believe that there could potentially be an alpha or beta or some sort of testing period this year. And we've talked about that before. Certainly we're hopeful for that. Yeah. Oh, boy. Usually. Okay. So I have this funny section called fake it till you make it. Usually computer game companies follow this trajectory where they'll release screenshots and movies and gameplay trailers. And there's this. And what depending on what content is released or discussed, it's a strong indication of how long it will be until that product comes out. Okay. Now that that section was there's a whole bunch of MMOs making crazy, crazy claims of what their MMO you can play dragons. There's 30 some classes or it's an infinitely explorable world or just infinite content. So yeah, until you're showing things or talking about things, unless they're actually talking about features, boy, you know, I'll see it. But you know, also I'm like, I'm stuck in the you know, whatever decade, I'm not a Blizzard guy anymore. I'm not a I don't know most of the devs who are being interviewed now, like they've, you know, my guys have moved on to other projects, other things. So, you know, there's a whole different method, whole different philosophy. And it's probably born on a lot more experience and data with MMOs than what we had when we were making them. So I, I can only judge it by my old eyes. If they're not talking about it, like specifically talking about features that they're confident, then they're probably not confident about which features are going to be in the in the game, or if they're not showing screenshots of what raids are going to be in the game, then they're probably not close to nailing down which raids are going to be in the game, you know, usually. So I don't think it's going to be soon. I'm sticking to my guns and saying after 2020. Yeah, I think, I think specifically, so, so in the watercolor that I just pulled it up to, you know, just for reference. Actually, I got an egg on my face. Oh, here's the features that we're having. Here's the, you know, they do break it down pretty well. They talk about how like, you know, they don't actually show screenshots and stuff, but basically they talk about like, table data, file data, Lua scripts, and basically how stuff is changed, you know, talking about how like the the they're going through and basically reworking how the whole spell system, they're making the spell system match the current retail version of the spell system in terms of the back end that players won't see. Yeah, so they're going through and basically like modernizing the stuff under the hood. And there's, you know, I'm pretty big on, you know, not really changing anything, you know, no changes, of course. But but but are you going to be disappointed? Well, well, I think I think under the hood, I think I think under the hood that's stuff to expect, right? Like the engineering side of it. Well, I mean, do you remember how unbalanced some of the classes were? How useless like some classes were in raids or how like, like it's I played a rep paladin. So I was good. Okay. So, you know, you played that type of paladin. Okay. So, but I mean, there are other like some ropes, no, you know, druids like, I mean, boomkin wasn't do we get rid of boomkins? Right. Well, I think what about the tree? The tree is gone. You know, I mean, that wasn't in a while. I mean, people do forget how limited those classes were. And I think I'm excited to see what they come up with. I really am. But I think a lot of people that are that are classic fans, you know, like myself in particular, like I rated I've completed the entire like, I've done all the raid content as a rep paladin, right? And it's like it definitely falls off and doesn't it doesn't perform, you know, you know, to the same standard as like a fury warrior, for example, a fury warrior or like a combat robe. But I think what people learned over the years, you know, later on after the fact, maybe they they found out like different ways to really optimize their class in ways that weren't necessarily the same, like, you know, weren't necessarily service level, right? You know, whether whether it is like playing a boomkin or playing a rep paladin stuff like that. And I don't know. Sorry, go ahead. Or maybe you provide a value to the raid or your group that isn't just sheer GPS, right? Every spec is very, very unique. Right. Yeah. So I think I think there's a lot of people who do enjoy that. As come, I mean, I play a rep pal, like I said, I know, I know I don't do as much damages as a fury or something. But, you know, it's it's fine in its own right, right? You know, there's there's 40 people in the raid. So it's not. Did you raid in vanilla? I did. Yeah. Okay. I recall some classes just not being able to like, if you're raiding, it's it's usually like a min max type of thing, like the raid is about if it's a challenging raid, you know, there's there's some specs out there that you're not invited, you know, right? When we've got we first of all, you have a roster of 40 people. So the guilds are probably going to be bigger. Oh, man, I am really curious, probably more so than even you guys are just knowing all of the ins and outs of the back end decisions and how things are. I'm really curious to see what they do. So are you going to be personally playing classic WoW? I don't play computer games anymore. Okay, I have a thing with my hands, a neurological thing that that's why I'm moving to tabletop. Yeah, so don't play don't can't make them. So yeah, I got a good question, John, about like the changes, no changes thing, not so much from the feature side. But we talked about this a little bit before we started the podcast. Blizzard has decided to take the current client instead of like taking the old vanilla code and adjusting it to modern hardware, they're kind of going the opposite route, where they're taking the modern client and stripping it away until the game is basically vanilla again. And that's kind of their plan for classic. From a developer standpoint, do you see like any possibly unintended changes happening or any inevitable changes just because of that methodology? Like, are you know, are graphics going to naturally be better? Or, you know, like, are there things that are going to change because they're decided to go through that route? I boy, gosh, I don't know. This is again, fascinating for a different reason. Just when I said boy, boy, you're going to be disappointed. Developers are by definition creative people. They're going to want to do things differently. Creativity is the act of killing the status quo. Going back, working on a game that's following in somebody's footsteps is going to be less enjoyable by a huge margin to, I think for every programmer, designer, and artist, even if maybe they won't be, maybe they don't have an access, maybe they'll just use all the old art assets. But I don't know. I don't know. You wouldn't want to do it. How they would do it. I certainly would not do it. No, I wouldn't do it. I mean, I'm a creative person. Yeah, I would probably go to another company and work on my own thing. Like, that's why it's so hard to be talking about how hard it is to get old blizzard devs into discussions. They've moved on. You fall in love like even as a level designer, once you've built something, you forgot about it. You don't care. Like, if people are having a lot of fun or not a lot of fun, you don't care anymore, because you're so focused on the new thing that you're working on, you lose yourself in it. And that's the joy of making something. That's why we make games. That's why we read books and movies. Yeah, so to have that type of person, have a team of that type of person working on something that has to... I would imagine, like your example, starting with today's code and working back to, I guess, yesterday's art. Yeah, that's basically what it looks like they're wanting to do with the third prototype. That sounds painful to me. Like, you're going to say, oh, wait a minute, we're getting rid of this system. Like, we're going back to the meeting stones. Like, really? Is that what we're doing? Like, this dungeon finder? Because the dungeon finder was actually a big deal. Because when you have cross server people playing in the same dungeon, it's a fundamentally different architecture. Joe Rumsey had to ask, which way do we want to write server back and back and back and we can do it? So, each realm is its own realm, or are there going to be some similarities where players from different realms can play together? We said, oh, let's do the first one. The first one is that that's definitely how we want to do it. Okay. Then the dungeon finder came up. Well, we have to draw from a large enough audience of people who want to play the deadlines. Well, we have to draw from lots of realms. So now we have to rewrite everything and do it that way. So that's kind of how we got the cross realm mixes is rewriting the back end that took, well, I think longer than a year to do. I mean, there's a ton of work, ton of server changes. So, do we stick with that or do we stick with the former one? And again, have to reach a point in some time in the future, say classic WoW ships, everything's fine for a couple of years and everyone's like, okay, classic WoW is good, but I want to find a group for the dungeon. We need this cross realm population, pollination, cross pollination. Oh my gosh, all these decisions. I don't know. I don't know how they're going to do it. It sounds, to me, to my ears it sounds way harder than is commonly known. And it's funny, I think that's part of the reason why it took so long to kind of to do it, to announce classic. It's funny, like a lot of us, right? Like a lot of us are gamers, I'm not in software development. I don't think Stay Safe, Esfand are either. And like a lot of the people out there, we just want classic, you know what I mean? It's the game we love. But when you hear about the challenges and the technical challenges behind the scenes, it starts to make sense why it took Blizzard so long, you know, in the face of what seemed to be like overwhelming popularity, it took them so long to actually come out and say, okay, we're going to do this because it like you said, creative people don't want to work on it. And that's a technical challenge. Yeah. And how do you look? Everyone likes money. But after a while, you don't, you forget how much money you're making and you begin to hate the job that you work on. Okay. You don't want that employer, but I just don't know, you know, I've come in from the entertainment industry. Nobody wants to just, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is just one person's, you know, theory that's just, you know, crackpot, maybe I'm talking too much about John Statz, you know, and how John Statz wants to work. Maybe it's fine with other people. But yeah, I mean, honestly, I could say this, I mean, it's kind of silly to keep bringing up my book that I'm obviously showing. When you read how hard this book, like this book shows you the pain, it is really a hard thing to do to make an MMO, to make any computer game. Grant, I'd love to read the book of Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto. This book could have been written about any game. Just the development process is interesting. So yeah, I'm surprised they announced, I'm surprised they made the announcement. I was really shocked when they actually said, okay, we're going to commit to this. Usually Blizzard will only make that announcement when they're absolutely certain they can do it. And as much as I don't see how they could have done it, the fact that they announced it leads me to believe, oh, they can actually do it. So somebody just dropped call. I must, something I said. Oh, tips, tips accidentally. No. Yeah, you're good. You dropped call for a second. There you go. My bad. Sorry about that. Dude, mucka ass, dude. But yeah, no, and just to kind of take like one line out of the the water cooler update, kind of what they what they said they want to do. They say starting from motto architecture with all its security and stability changes. It means the team's efforts can be focused on pursuing an authentic classic experience. Any differences in behavior between our development builds and patch 1.12 reference can be systematically catalogued and corrected, while still operating under a foundation that stable and secure. So that's kind of why I think that there's there's probably going to be under the hood type of changes like changing the the spell system and stuff where it's like some of the players won't notice. But but in terms of like, okay, it's it's going to be, you know, in the same vein of classic, like people aren't really going to notice any under the hood type stuff. So that's that's what I'm really hoping for. And that's that's what a lot of people, I think, are really hoping to see as well. Was is that patch was aggro still a thing like the threat, the threat meter? Yeah. Okay, big thing. I like that. I really like that. I thought that was a cool mechanic. It was so complicated, players couldn't figure it out. I think that's a great thing. I think that's a great thing. But no, cool. Well, who knows, maybe they're not the, well, yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of funny. We'll wait and see. And then when it releases, we'll have to wait and see what the response is in both the short run and the long run. Maybe I could be hopefully I'm wrong. Hopefully I'm totally. Oh, look, guys, I hope I'm so completely wrong about that. That would be so awesome if they could just just slip the new code into the old art assets and, you know, away you go. That'd be awesome. Yeah, I'd like that. I think we'd all like that. Get as soon as possible. Honestly, from what I took from everything you just said, John, just God bless the classic wild devs. Is that what I'm understanding here? Basically. Oh, yeah, they're ticking ahead for you. Oh, believe me, those guys, there's, those guys are champions. Let's, let's salute them. Yeah. So I, you know, we've been, we've been going for some time now and people are, I think people are getting a little bit anxious. We got some questions coming in on Twitter. Guys, if you guys want to go ahead and send us some questions on Twitter, those of you guys watching as fan TV tips out, baby, and stay safe warlock. If you guys want to go ahead and follow us, tweet at us a hashtag classic cast, and we can start going to some of those questions. We've already got a few coming in. We'll also take some questions from the chat as well. Also, you know, if you guys could please give tips out, baby, and stay safe TV, a follow as well on Twitch. We all we all do stream on Twitch. We all have YouTube channels. All the same, same name, YouTube.com slash S fan TV tips out, baby, and stay safe TV. One question, and this was asked earlier, you know, a little bit in the chat and it was tweeted us to is from a diamond wool 15. This is a really good question for you, John. What is the smiley face under cares and four. So just kind of expand on that. Like, you guys just do funny stuff like that, like, you know, just because you get bored. Well, actually, no, the layouts, the way the zone is done. Because you're working on a zone from the perspective of the God, you okay, your, your, your perspective is you're high above the zone. You kind of lose a sense of perspective. You don't realize how far away the camera is. And that means you don't, you forget how big the zone is. Okay, so you'll have to spray paint these words and boxes and circles to give you a sense of how big things are so that that circle was the footprint of Karazhan. And that was Matt Sanders who was working in a deadwind pass. He was just telling himself, well, this is where Karazhan is going to go. I can safely work on the areas outside that circle and I can polish it with a fair amount of certainty that John isn't going to be a jerk and expand the footprint of his dungeon just because he thinks he's working alone and other people aren't working on stuff around him. Okay, so some accountability tool, basically. Yeah. Okay, there you go. He'll put that there. Okay. So he can say, John, John, look, this is, this is where the footprint is. You got to take that out of there. I've made this nice little area and the smiley face who probably just does just as a goof to himself. You know, it's not, nobody sees that area other than him and the tens of thousands of people who have data mined the bill. This is, oh, just, I just scrolled up on accident. Where'd it go? Well, I mean, we'll go ahead and hit another question from Seth Rinks. This is actually, we actually touched on this earlier, but just to clarify, back in vanilla in Southern Water Spring in the mountains, there was a green dungeon portal with a barred off gate in front of it. Do you have any idea what that was? Was this supposed to be a dungeon behind it? It's very mysterious. So this actually, we talked about this earlier when we're talking about Hyjal. And you said a Hyjal was essentially going to be like an exterior raid zone. That was kind of where the connection from Weather Spring to Hyjal was. Was that, was that where? I actually don't know that because I've never played Hyjal. So the, boy, at that portal. It's where the under construction sign was. Yeah. In Southern Water Spring, if you recall. That's probably what it is. I can't say for sure, I can't. I wish I could. Yeah. Sorry. This one's one for all of us, actually. This is one for all of us. Thoughts on achievements in WoW Classic. And I'll go ahead and start on this. I personally think achievements, you know, no changes, of course, but for real, like, I don't think it's as simple as saying no changes and not having a reasoning explanation behind it. And I actually was not a fan of achievements being put in the game. You know, today, it's kind of one of the main things that people play the game for. They like to get all their achievements and get their achievement points up. But I personally, like I played WoW pretty heavily from vanilla to the end of Burning Crusade and the very start of Rathalish King. And I quit because a lot of my friends quit and I just, I didn't really like it. That was my last expansion too. Yeah. Right. So I quit at the beginning of Rath. And then I came back because, you know, I missed WoW, right? I think a lot of people who grew up playing WoW, WoW is a very big part of their life. And for me, like being a paladin, especially in vanilla, a ret paladin, resonates with me like very personally, you know, and I missed the game. So I came back to it and I start playing WoW again. And I can't get into a single group. I can't get into a single group because I don't have gear score. I don't have achievements. Like I'm trying to do a dungeon, link your achievement or raid, link your achievements for this raid. Well, I haven't done it. How am I supposed to have the achievement? So it was one of those things that it basically, it was like, yeah, noob. Yeah. So I was like gated socially from doing a lot of the content. I ended up quitting again before Cataclysm came out. So that was just one of the things for me that made me really, really dislike, really, really dislike achievements. Achievements definitely influence player behavior. You know, in vanilla WoW, if you were trying to find a group for Zolgorub, you're going to pug Zolgorub, you'd stand on the Iron Forge bridge and there would be a raid leader saying, come poke me, I'm on the bridge, and he would inspect you, go poke him, you would inspect you. And he'd say, sorry, your gear is too terrible, you're not invited. Or maybe if you're lucky enough, you had good enough gear, and then he would bring you to Zolgorub. And now it's just as simple as, okay, link me or head of the curve achievement or link me your achievement or what's your eye level, you know. Right. And so I think that that interaction, the actual genuine player to player, sort of like virtually making eye contact almost, if that makes sense. Yeah. That's great. And achievements sort of take away from that. Yeah, I agree with you in the sense that, well, it's nothing wrong with achievements, it's the fact that it's not just local, the fact that you can, it's the fact that you've turned achievements into a club. It's basically a license, license to do content with everyone who's done this content. Yeah, we had that problem, it was a slight problem with inspecting gear, but yeah, I don't know how to address it other than agree with you, then yeah, it's not a problem with achievements. It's the fact that you are making them visible to other players and how it's being used, not realizing that it can be used that way. It's a form of griefing. It's allowing people, like if that visibility was removed, then achievements are actually the easiest thing to do. Developers love achievements, they actually don't take a lot of time. They're very easy to create. You can create a ton of achievements, so every game is going to have achievements. They're great. Campaign has achievements, yeah, so. Luckily, in the recent, this is like two or three months ago, where they had the water cooler talk, the blue post about Classic WoW, they actually said achievements specifically because they weren't in vanilla WoW, they will not be in Classic, so they've already ruled them out. I'm not worried about it at all. Achievements weren't in vanilla WoW? No, they're out of the wrath. Really? Oh my goodness, I'm misremembering. Okay, wow. Is there any feature, John, that you would like to see in vanilla that was not in vanilla that came later? Is there anything real like, darn, I wish we had these in the days of vanilla? Oh, without a doubt, the Dungeon Finder. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. It's there is a, everything's in degrees, okay? It's either how hard or how easy some things are, some things are too easy, some things are made too hard. Finding a group for a dungeon, for me personally, the way I played in my guild, it was just way too hard. I'd also like to have some of those Dungeons despawned and made easier, but that's me. Like six hours to clear Scolomance is a little bit too long for me. That's me. You mean by despawning less trash or what? Yeah, less trash. Actually, the 1.2 is probably after we despawned all the dungeons. Yeah, when we, it was really hard in the alphas and the betas. But honestly, that is a thing that leaps to mind as the thing that really needs to be, that was the worst feature, I think, in vanilla WoW, is the meeting stones and, well, it didn't ship with the meeting stones. I think that was added. That would be a bandaid to the fact that people couldn't find one another. But who knows? Twitter didn't exist. Facebook, who knows if people are finding dungeons through social media. Well, Discord. Discord is bigger now. Okay, well, there you go. So maybe you don't need the dungeon finder. Yeah, so. Yeah, I think a lot of the classic fans feel that way, where they really like the old, just the old, good old wholesome, go find your friends, sort of play in the game, even if it took a little bit longer. Yeah. I think, so we have a question here. I like this one. This is from AresOfficial. Back in 2004, how far did you plan things to go and how much of it actually happened and what did you scrap? I guess it's, you know, it's very broad. But like, how far ahead did you guys plan, basically, to condense that question down? Not at all. Like, we had ideas of things we could put in the game. And as we got closer and closer to the deadline, say, okay, well, that, we'll leave out of the game. We're nowhere. The stuff that got most work, that went into the game. Okay. Yeah, so, geez, planning. Yeah, that's, I think people think that we planned a lot more. When so many decisions were made because of content availability, because of features taking too long to write, that's what decided what got into the game. It wasn't some, yeah, there's no mountain, no tablet spring brought down on the mountain. It's, it's what you can get out the door. It's, it's an MMO. You'll be happy to have something out the door that doesn't completely stink. So, yeah, for sure. I think we kind of, we kind of touched on this too, I guess, a little bit earlier on, where we were talking about like how Gilneas was on the map and how, you know, some of these other places were on the map, even though they weren't accessible, right? Where you, so you guys would basically just like make stuff, throw it out there. And it's like, figure something out to do with this. Oh, actually, this reminds me of a question I had. And I totally forgot to ask this earlier. So, and I just, you know, this is blaspheme. I didn't get into WoW through Warcraft like so many people did. So many people played Warcraft 3. I played Warcraft 2. I didn't play Warcraft 3. I didn't play Frozen Throne until recently. I went back and played through all of Warcraft 3. I'm going to play Frozen Throne later, so don't worry. It's not untouched. That's all right. But I got into WoW through MMOs and Dark Age of Camelot. What I noticed, it was, it was a very, it really stood out to me in Warcraft 3 was how different the map was, how different Azeroth was. The world map was in Warcraft 3 compared to WoW. So what were the reasons behind that? Was that just basically like from streamlining like the playability or? That is the influence of game design on War. You can only be, well, War has to be, War is always the first thing that changes 99% of the time. Okay. If you have a limitation with frame rate or convenience to players, it's, I would say probably the map is, specifically, the map is mostly influenced by the convenience of going from zone to zone, hubs, available hubs, probably Kargath, at least I was playing on the Horde, probably not the best hub in the world to actually stage all of your raids from two raids, at least I don't know how many other Blackrock raids there have been, but that's probably not the best place to, so yeah, it's, it's honestly, it's foresight, like once the game designers get in, they'll, they'll, they'll point to lore and say, well, this is all high end stuff over here. Why do you, why would we have a newbie zone over, you know, right next to it? It, it kind of separates the newbies away from their mid-level zone. And so they, so you have to massage things and that's, and, and also the flow of zone to zone color was actually one of the, you want to changes to the color palette, you know, you don't want to, or the problem with Kalimdor, it was like desert, desert, oh there's bones and death and gray in this zone, that's more desert, you know, so it's not as tangible as the Azeroth, the Eastern kingdoms were, where we get dwarves and you have Arathi Highlands and silver, it's just these beautiful zones, very iconic zones, the haunted forest, you know, this, or the snowy mountain peaks is something that we all identify with. I don't know how many people can identify with the, you know, the Sahara Desert zone, you know, or the Silithus, so like these are just a little bit, you know, dead. So basically the color palette just defines how the player zone and that changes the map, so that's kind of a plenty of answer so pretty much, if the lore isn't convenient, just retcon it and then change it. Oh, lore is very, very regularly changed over and over, it's what changes the most by far, by far, always changing the most. If we find out that oh we're sending players from this dungeon to that dungeon, oh, but that means we're going to be fighting the same type of monster in both dungeons, do we really want to players fight the same monster in both dungeons and some, you might be faced with metzango, all right, well, we'll put, all right, we'll make one more humanoid like tribal, they'll be slightly intelligent and put more beasts in the other one to vary it up, then that's how they populate a dungeon, you know, it's a completely rewrite at the end when somebody realizes that, oh, yeah, this is the flow, this isn't good. So one thing I read, I don't know if you know about this, but in Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3, with night elves, only druids, only men were druids, only male night elves were druids, so in WoW, they're like, well, I just have men, like, okay, we got to open it up to women. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, you switch it up, that's, yeah. Here's a question from Sculpin93, I'd love to hear this too, John. What was your favorite zone? Ungoro Crater, because dinosaurs. And honestly, I like the jungle zones, I think everybody identifies with green, we're humans, we love green zones. Green is the color we see more shades of than any other color. We are trained to be good at green, so yeah, I'm human, so I love stranglethorn, Ungoro, those are my favorite classic. Nice. So this is a, I'm going to add to this question, because I think it needs another question before he asks it, but this is from Reglairs. He wanted to, well, I'm going to ask my question first, because it'll lead up to this. How much involvement did you have with Nax? I built one of the wings by myself. Dana-Jan built Nax Rammus, he had left, he's an art director right now at Radiant Dawn. He, yeah, he went after WoW shipped, I took it over, and I think I built some of the arachnid, spider wing stuff? Yeah, the spider wing, and I did complete rebuild on, I think the A-bomb wing. Okay. Yeah. So, so did you, you're the one who made us have to play Frogger, the area? No, that would be the quest. The area that was leading up to it, right? Those were the dungeon scriptures, yeah. Okay, so you didn't know what it was for, you just used, you know? Dana had never done like a raid when he built that. Again, the spaces, I think Nax was a little bit too big. We could have actually shrunk Nax down a little bit, but it's kind of hard. Some rooms were actually not, like the dance, oh, what was it? The hide and dance. Yeah, the hide and dance. Safety dance. Yeah, but like that one probably could not have shrunk down too much for a raid of 40 people, but yeah it's, was Nax 40 people? Yeah, that was 40, wasn't it? Yeah, 40, and then they changed it in wrath. Yeah, okay. Anyway, yeah, but that's my take on Nax. Did you know anything about the Ashbringer? This is what Rulers was asking more. No, what was, I actually don't remember the Ashbringer, refresh my memory. The Paladin, like the legendary Paladin weapon, it was like in the game files, but like, I mean, that wouldn't really be what you, you wouldn't really have anything to do with that, so. No, no, that would be long after I stopped caring about the, that's the only thing players care about is the items. They don't care about the dungeons, the textures or, you know. Honestly, the dungeons, I'd say like are some of the most memorable experiences, like everybody remembers their first time and like the Deadmines or Wailing Caverns and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. This is one from Ledgery the Thane. How much did, or did Dark Age of Camelot influence any of WoW's development, or like any ideas that you had with WoW's development and if so, how much? Oh, just a lot. It was very influential. We played that a lot. All the PvP absolutely fully convinced that PvP could be so much fun and it had turned the tide even, you know, even the some of the designers were hardcore standouts. They didn't like, WoW didn't really come out with a lot of PvP servers because they were still reserving that belief that because PvP wasn't that popular in Everclass because it was so painful in Everclass. That's why it wasn't so popular. But yeah, Dark Age absolutely changed our idea of PvP completely. There you go. Great game. So, what did you play? Like, you know, if you got a chance to play in your free time, what did you play? I was, okay, World's First Druid on Live Servers. Really? You were World First. World's First, yeah. There you go. The original Druid. I was the third person when, okay, so, WoW ships, all the team goes to Fry's electronics, which is a local, okay, they were saying, and Fry's is a, it's chaos, okay. It's like the fall of Saigon, really. It's, you get there, you're sandwiched in by a traffic jam around the store, there's nothing to eat, and you have to get there early to get parking at all. So, to be at the midnight signing, you have to get there in the afternoon, okay. So, there's no food in the area. It's almost like this industrial area in Fountain Valley, California, and it was, but it was a big electronics store. That's where we did the signing. I didn't go. I didn't want to go. It didn't sound like a good time to me. I wanted to play. So, myself, I was the third person. This is how I end my book. So, spoiler alert, you know, I was the third person into the development area. There's only three people on the team. There's me, Joe Rumsey, who is our server programmer, and Mark Kern. All of us had the idea of starting the very first character on live server. Joe beat us both. Oh, there you go. Yeah. By the way, Mark Kern has actually been just instrumental in my book campaign, and I just want to give a shout out to him that, you know, Mark, these guys are great. You know, you should talk to these guys. Hey. Yeah. And you know what's funny about Mark Kern? I asked him like, dude, he helped my campaign so much. Like, my first campaign was just terrible, and he picked me up. He said, whap, whap, whap. He smacked me around, said, this is how you do a Kickstarter. And he showed me, you know, how to effectively advertise, how to effectively, you know, because he had learned the pros and cons of advertising. And what he cares about most, if you guys aren't following, you guys are on Twitter now, follow Grums, G R U M M Z Grums. Mark Kern, he is, he's, he's a whirlpool of controversy, and he is just a, he's a good guy to follow. So he's been so helpful to me. And I just want to say, you know, follow Grums on, on Twitter, because it's, it's worth, and he's been pushing classic. Wow. You can thank him for, you know, really getting that pushing that up to the, so if you care at all, he's probably, his ear is definitely lower to the ground than mine. So give him a follow. There you go. There's another, there's a question from tailspinner, he's a fellow druid. He's, he's actually a boomkin player. He asks, do you have any information on the scrapped dragon isle? There were some assets that seemed fitting the concept art on the hidden developer isle. Yeah. Dragon isles was not fitting. It was fitting for dragons, fighting dragons. The areas are way too big. There's caves and caverns that are suited for giant dragon wings to spin around without clipping through the walls. So it is way too big. It's not a joy to run through or to fly through. It's just old God temples. Cool concept. Karla, Karla did a real cool concept. It was on the cover of the World of Warcraft art book that came with the original special edition, but we didn't use it. So it just wasn't suited for gameplay. So we scrapped it and I didn't take the hint until many times, many years later, I kept going to Jeff or Alex off for Sabi or Mets like, how about the dragon isles? How about the dragon isles? And it's just having rated as much as I should have realized that yet it's totally unsuitable for, for gameplay. So you don't want to play it as cool as a concept as it is. It's not playable. So at least in vanilla, it just didn't seem fitting. No, no, and not even in any way. I mean, it was just, it was one of my first dungeons that I built. So, you know, I had learned a lot about what MMOs need for dungeon design. So you'll never see it. Yeah. That's such a crazy thought to me that you were designing dungeons years in advance without knowing how big the group size would be or even what the encounters or mobs or inhabitants would be or where they would get. It's a crazy thought. Oh, yes. It preoccupied our thoughts quite a bit and, and all the level designers drove everyone around us crazy with questions. Just the camera. We had no idea how far the camera was going to be. That defines how high the ceiling is going to be. We didn't know, see, you know, like elevation changes. Does that break combat? Can stairs break in combat? What if something dies on the stairs and the corpse falls underneath the, like, you can't loot it? I mean, there's just a whole bunch of things that we were very much paranoid about stairs. And of course, all of medicine's con concepts were, oh, Black Rocks Fire is the tallest thing in a, you know, all these epic high fantasy buildings needed stairs. That's why Karazhan was killed the second time through is because stairs were just everywhere. So yeah, just, no, yeah, you're right. It was, it was pretty sucky. It's not no. Was there, was there any point where you were like, we're not going to make it? This game isn't going to ship. It's over. When I started writing my book, when I started writing, like dungeons, to be fair, dungeons were the most painful group. They were, I was at Blizzard and I had faith. I was very successful and I had a good camp, good career. For me to leave a good career, I wanted to go to a good company. And so that's what actually made me go to Blizzard. I didn't know what the project was when I actually moved all my stuff out of New York into California. I didn't know what the game was. Okay. On faith that I was hoping it was going to be an MMO. Thank God it was. And yeah, so, what was your comment? I lost my scroll. Was there any point where you were like, we're not going to make it? Yeah. And so here this, I was certain that Blizzard knew what they were doing. All their games were stellar. And here I am on World of Warcraft and everything is just a mess. I mean, we had no answers to anything they had. They were pumping me for information for building 3D levels in my interview. So I couldn't believe that this is what games looked like. And because I was a newbie in the industry, I didn't realize how humble games are before they're made. I'd worked with Quake 1, 2, and 3 when they were finished games. The state of a game when it's being worked on, it's awful. There's no fun at all. For many years, you know, there's no combat because combat is all fake. And it's just kind of stupid. There's no game that you're actually working on for most of the dev cycle. Like at the very tail end, when the editor works and everything's going, then you can actually put the game together. But you're actually not playing anything for most of the dev style. You're just frustrated that it doesn't look any better. So I just thought, how awful this, whether or not this game works or fails, it's going to be a good story. That's why I started writing the WoW Diary. Right. Yeah, that's crazy. And guys, if you haven't already checked it out, I've got the link for you here, I'll post in the chat real quick. The Kickstarter campaign for the World of Warcraft Diary written by Jon Statz. I've read over 200 pages of it that Jon sent me. I will tell you this, if you have any interest in World of Warcraft or just game design in general, you need to frickin' pick up a copy. It's really, really good, very well written, and surprisingly well written, by the way, Jon. I was like, dang, dude, like an author, man, like professional author. Yeah, you should have seen Edition 6, or Version 6 of, you know, yeah. It wasn't good till a lot, the teens. But even on top of that, even if you're not a big reader, it's packed full of cool, like very early vanilla pictures. It could double as a picture book. Like seriously, that's how visually entertaining it is. Right. And there's captions for, what drives me nuts is when there's never a caption to a picture. That nothing drives me crazier than when there's not a caption. Could just be like a cool castle. I want to know the name of the castle, you know. I just, yeah, there's captions to everything. It's fully annotated. It's a cool book, very cool book. A lot of cool shots of the early, of the early World of Warcraft interface and how it evolves and some of the early maps. Like there's one, I was talking to Esfand the other day, we were on a call, and there's a particular picture of like the map that was like drawn, like the original calendars. It was a mind blowing. And that wasn't drawn. That was painted on the wall of the team two area. So, you know, and I don't know if you've ever done a mural. I did a mural in high school. When you're up against a wall, you lose a sense of proportion sometimes. So I don't know if that was the case, but it was kind of weird that there was just this map that I'm sure it was out of date before the paint dried. I mean, that's how fast the lore changes. Like Derek Simmons was a, he was a recruiter for a while. He came up as a designer. Derek Simmons was a blizzard before he came to team two. We tasked him with the ability to, we wanted an intranet. Okay. We wanted an update version of World of Warcraft. So, you know, all the developers could be on the same page, but changed in every way on a daily basis. It was absolutely impossible. So he put this map up and he put all the hot links. By the time it was linked up, it was out of date. And so it's something that it's, it's something that people wouldn't imagine in game development. If he updated it, by the time he finished updating, the map would be out of date. Like it would be a constant, constant, unfun job of, because once the developer, like say, say something changes on the map, and this is just the map, it's not class abilities, not what, where people live, like what, you know, just the map. If someone changes something in his zone, they're not going to tell anybody about it. They're not going to stand up and say, Oh, I got rid of this extra village in the Barrens. So now it's more barren. They don't tell anybody. The art director says, you know, let's, let's just get rid of the village. And then that's as far as it goes. Nobody else on the team knows about it until like, maybe the village disappears. Somebody says something. Oh, well, you know, I thought I had, I was going to do quests over there. Then they had found out, you know, who knows when later. But that's just the old cowboy way of Blizzard. I'm sure they've got a lot more organized way of doing things. But now, certainly. So in, in say 2004, when vanilla came out, did you guys, like how many expansions in advance was on your guys radar? Rathawich, King, or Kata? How far in advance was that so planned? Not more than one. Our first expansion was going to be South Seas. We like, we like Booty Bay so much. Some people were romanticized about the idea of sailing a ship, but there's really no player controlled ship. Like, but there's really no gameplay, you know. So we'd kind of like, we were thinking of Natchitar being a source where the Naga, that was the days where, you know, we thought the Naga were going to be a playable race until their geometry and the fact that they couldn't mount on top of anything. Or wear shoes. Yeah, or do anything. So, but once we learned that, okay, definitely not Naga. We backed away from the South Seas. And, oh, we only did one. The reason why we did the Burning Crusade was because we had to keep people off, off of Azeroth. The zones were actually to, there's too much data. There's the, there's so much data on those two world tabs. The Eastern Kingdoms is one world tab. That's why you get a hard load when you go from there to a dungeon or from the calendar. They're on world tabs. Okay. So that's, there's no physical connection between the two. Right. At least when I was in development there was. So, yeah, Joe, the server guy, Joe Rumsey was like, guys, there's too much data. There's way too much data. We can't keep adding zones to these areas. So that's why we went to the, that's why we went to the Burning Crusade. Maybe to let the server architecture and hardware catch up with our plans of not giving a dam on how much information we put onto a single world world tab. So that's where the Burning Crusade came. It was, it was, yeah, like the bank, like I said in the book, the bank was just the, the size of the database. That's how many slots in the bank and how many bags you could carry was completely decided on the expense of server architecture. If every player can start X amount of players, characters, then every character can have so many bags. And in each slot, a bag can be fit into a bank. We figured out how much data like what we once we figured out how the size of a item, items have slots in them for upgrades. We had buffs and all kinds of stuff you could do with items, tailored stuff you can name. What is how many bytes would that be? Not kilobytes. Then we know the size of an item. From there, we can extrapolate the number of items each character can have as a maximum. For each character per account, we know how much server space we have to reserve for each subscription. Then we know how many subscriptions per realm. And then we figure out, okay, this is how many bags we can actually put in the bank. That's how you, that's how you decide. So there's some, there's like a billion different levels. Oh yeah. So many levels. It takes months to figure out how many bags are going to be on a character in a bank. So a similar thought process led to the vanilla server caps, you know, two and a half or three thousand people per server, right? Oh yeah. That we knew from just performance from day one once we reconfigured our servers. Do you know what that exact number was? Was it 3,000 or two and a half or somewhere between? We were always shooting for 2,000 per realm. That's how we engineered the code. That's concurrent. That's concurrent. Right. Could you see them upping that number up? I'm sorry to cut you off. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, absolutely. Through code or through hardware. I mean, it's completely unforeseen. But yeah, we had an idea with, I mean, we also thought concurrency, our numbers would be about 30% because we figured, well, the highest concurrency on other MMOs is 15%. In fact, we'll go crazy. Let's say 40%. When WoW shipped, the concurrencies were 90%. 90%. Absolutely. I mean, you can't even plan for something like that. Well, I just remember, because I started playing on November 29th. I started playing six days after launch. And I remember, if I look at my account history, I have so many one-day credits from the servers being down. Just nobody was expecting any of it. So it's just crazy to think how big of a hit it was for you to run out of the bat. And the servers going down, it was a hardware configuration. The guys who put the machines together, they did it wrong. It took that long to find somebody who, and the servers hadn't been used, certainly haven't been tested as much. So that configuration, once it flipped the servers, they were overloaded and there were queues. And we had to get more servers, but they were mostly fine. The code really didn't change at all. Yeah. So could you, you know, tips kind of touched on it, but like, could you see there being like 10,000 in Azeroth? Concurrent. Possibly. Probably not on a single world tab. That would be your limitation. There's some way of separating those 10,000 onto, oh absolutely. On the two. If you could separate those people onto different servers like... Sharding. Well, see, here's the thing. Servers is a word that's reused over. It means different things. Like, there's different machines. There's different realms on the same machine. Those are also referred to as servers. And, you know, so basically, and I actually don't understand what sharding is. So I don't know what that means. But if you had instances, that's what can actually put people. But to have a zone with 10,000 people or even a world tab in one continent, I can imagine maybe hardware has improved to where you can. But it would be that. Yeah. So there's a lot of good questions coming in. I'm going to move off of Twitter soon. We can go to the chat. I don't want to keep you all night, of course. Yeah. But we have a question from Fishy Lonnome. And a lot of people actually ask this question. What can you share about GM Island and I guess, what's the story? What's the story behind GM Island exactly? GM Island, I don't know about Programmer Island as people asking about. To make a island like a designer island was just a testing bed. Programmer Island was a testing bed. When you can just go to, I don't, I forget which world tab it was on, you just copy and paste terrain and boom, it's an island. You have your own island. It's a 10, it's like a five minute operation of hitting copy paste. That's all it and you've got yourself. And what you can do is you can test things and be assured that it's not going to screw anything in the game. When it works on your island, then you copy those assets and you just place it into, into Westfall or the dungeon or wherever it is. In fact, Westfall is where we tested a lot of the mobs in molten core. Really? Yeah. Just throw Ragnaros in there. I think 0-0-0 is in Westfall. I think that's the origin. Oh, okay. But it's also, I think where the tower is, there's an easy graveyard accessible and everybody knows where it is and you just port Westfall and it takes you right there and you just, oh, okay, we're fighting Baron Geddon today and that's where, you know, Baron Geddon would be fucked. It's kind of funny, but yeah. That's cool though. There's a question from a docs SF. He says that the Dragon Isles have been teased in BFA and, you know, since you worked on the original version, what would you like to see, like, or like, what would you like things that stick out to you? Like, if you can remember, like, things that you would like to see differently to maybe make it work, because surely it's going to be completely overhauled. No, the only thing that's cool about the Dragon Isles is the concept and I can't take credit for that. I mean, they would definitely not use my mesh, but the Dragon Isles was probably, the reference, the tease was probably just the lore reference to Metzen's, you know, cool kick-ass idea that there was like old god temples out there. That was the original, who knows if that's going to be actually the form of Dragon Isles when they do it. So who knows? Maybe it's someone who'll come up with a lore idea of how to kill green, red, blue dragons without, you know, killing good dragons, because the only bad dragons are black dragons. So they're going to get sick and tired of killing black dragons over and over and over and over again. We kind of actually went forward with the idea of Dragon Isles, not knowing that Metzen was going to say, oh no, all the dragons are good. You know, the annoyance of all the game designers like, what do you mean all the dragons are good? We can't kill the dragons? Oh man, you know, that was the reaction was like, oh, this is nuts. Why can't we kill all these cool, there's, so now you have to have, oh, it's a corrupt dragon or it's been under the influence or please kill me, kill me, you know, that's those are the dragon battles. So maybe they'll come up with some lore reason to make all the dragons of different colors killable, you know, there's a reason to kill. So what is also like pretty interesting to me is you mentioned how like the South Seas expansion was initially, I mean, that was the idea for the first expansion, right? So now it's like we have BFA, which is essentially that, you know, we're going to Colteris and you're seeing all this stuff come now. You it's pretty like, you know, well, well documented in data mine that Hellfire Peninsula was in the game files very early on. Like a like a, I guess I should say working version of Hellfire Peninsula was was found in like the 1.12 client or not even the 1.12 client, I think it's the 1.1 client. How like was Hellfire Peninsula planned to be like introduced in vanilla at all? Okay, I'm checking it out. Okay, so that that's the Outland Zone. Okay. There's there's a Hellfire something under Ogremar, isn't there? Ragefire. Ragefire. That's right. Okay. Ragefire. Okay. Ragefire. Chasm or something. Okay. Yeah, Hellfire Peninsula was that was always an Outland, I think. Right. Yeah. So real quick, what's the question again? I was trying to in vanilla. Wow. You could sort of like, I remember there's a bug with deadlines, you could bug through deadlines and fall into Hellfire Peninsula during vanilla. Wow. So it was like in the game files. It was pretty close to what it looked like in TBC. Yeah. You know what? Matt Sanders had started on Hellfire Peninsula before the Burning Crusade. It was always meant to be part of another world tab. It was never part of Azeroth. Right. Yeah, absolutely. He was probably doing, he was actually like, it's kind of calm. I mean, he was probably doing a different technique on airbrushing the textures on the terrain. He was probably seeing what could be done because we had better tools to work with. We had, what do they call the outer edge of a brush? Oh boy. There's an inner and outer pressure sensitivity on a lot of brushes. And we only had one. We just had a circle and vanilla. Wow. It was very hard. The tools were very imprecise. We got a much better tool. That's probably what he was doing was just seeing what he could get away with. So never definitely, absolutely not. Yeah. Always part of, you know, a different world. Right. We actually had talked with this before we went live, but can you give the brief story of the battleground Azshara Crater that was scrapped? Oh, yeah. I talked to, yeah, I talked to Jim Chadwick today. He's a lead level designer on World of Warcraft right now. And I sent him a text and said, what was the story with Azshara Crater? And he said that Arathi Basin was such a hit that they just stopped doing another version of that type of gameplay. There was just no need to do it. That's kind of what, it was just such a hit that why do another one, you know? That's kind of why they, yeah. Yeah. So it's just, and sometimes that happened. They work on a map and, you know, a gameplay thing would be learned, and it would make that obsolete. Like Dragon Isles or, you know, Charizard or Azshara Crater. Yeah. I think Azshara Crater was supposed to be a 40-man. Maybe even Ultrak Valley kind of filled that gap as well. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, oh yeah. In his text, he said AB. Maybe he meant AB. Because the V and the B are right next to each other in his text. So forget about what I just said. I was actually talking about AB. Okay. It doesn't matter because we have war fronts now anyways. I got a question actually. You know, based on everything you've experienced in the wild development process and stuff, do you think we will ever see another vanilla world of Warcraft? Any, a new MMO with as much cultural impact and popularity as vanilla WoW or do you just think the market is not going to, you know? Oh, oh, totally. I mean, it might not be a game. I mean, it might be like the metaverse type of ready player one type of thing. I mean, okay, not that type of thing. I mean, but, you know, it might not necessarily be a game. It might be just more of a three dimensional type of virtual reality. Who knows? I'm still waiting for some application virtual reality to, you know, impress the world, grab the world by the horns, you know? But, oh, totally, totally. Absolutely. In fact, I would say it's a certainty. You'd have to, I mean, I, you know, WoW is a game. I think there's other applications that could be, you know, that physical interaction with people might be important. You know, who knows? But I think that there's going to, I don't know if I, if you're asking me if another MMO is going to come along. Oh boy. I don't know. Not, certainly, I don't think within a long while. Not for a long while. They're incredibly expensive to make. So it's a huge area of entry, right? It's not that they're, people have plenty of money. Like there's a lot of, you know, sugar daddies out there who just want to make a, you know, have their own world. You know, there's a lot of Google's and Facebook's out there that could just fund it. It's not money. It comes down to the failure rate. They're so hard to make. They are so hard to make. Yeah. Money is not, it's, it's whether or not you can get the right team, get the right backing. You have to have realistic investors. That's actually the one of the people to have actually a realistic investor that will delay the launch and keep throwing money in. And frankly, it's finding an honest studio that the money, the more money you put in something, the more it attracts dishonest, disreputable people. And, you know, and sometimes someone who's worked on an MMO could just say, Hey, this is where I'm going to cash in, you know. So it's hard to tell the honest people from the dishonest people. And let's say everybody's honest. It's hard to tell the competent people from the incompetent people sometimes because it's, it's, it's incredibly hard. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, especially in this age of like kickstarter MMOs and like crowdfunded MMOs, you have so many developers that they say the right things, but they might not have the technical expertise to follow through. Right. Or they have the technical expertise, but they're not capable of seizing the funding for whatever reason. They're not marketing people. Right. I'm finding that right now. Like I'm talking to guys who are kickstarters. They are the great sales people. They say, John, you're a creator. You are not good with running the campaign. Like for me, it's physically painful sometimes. I feel my soul just leaving when I say, don't forget to share it with your friends. You know, like when, like, you know, when I say, I just like, I lean against my desk and I just go, oh my God, am I that guy? I'm saying that that feels painful to me. I just want to make my book or make my game. And just that's what I want to do, but I don't want to be the salesperson, but you gotta. Yeah, it's a lot like Twitch Prime. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we're going to, we're going to take some questions from the chat here in a second. I have one more question we talked to about a lot of zones that, you know, there, we can physically see it on the map, but you can't enter. They're inaccessible. Above Stratholm, like the next area behind Stratholm, there is a zone there. What was that? And is that supposed to be just like the inside of Stratholm or? Yeah, that's a Stratholm to get. Let's see. Yeah. So when you go into Stratholm, you, I can't remember. You probably do see the landscape on the horizon. I don't know if, I don't know. I can't remember, but that's usually what it is. Dungeons are so disproportionately large to like razor fin, you can actually see. You can't hide razor fin because of the canopies, but dungeons are gigantic. They're so much bigger that the whole TARDIS effect where, you know, it looks small and from the outside you go in and, you know, but yeah, Stratholm, I think was one of the areas that maybe originally they wanted to do it on the exterior zone and who knows. But yeah, that's Stratholm. There you go. Okay. Let's take a few more questions from the chat before we wrap it up, guys. And of course, after this, I'm going to continue streaming after this. A few more questions in the chat. I'm going to continue streaming after this. If you guys, this is your first time watching Classic Cast. We post, this is our 12th episode and we post all of these on my YouTube channel. You can go down to the link below, youtube.com slash sfan TV. You guys can check out the previous episodes of Classic Cast and of course, sub to tips and stay safe on YouTube as well. Follow them on Twitch, tips out baby and stay safe TV. And yeah, we're all on Classic Cast every year. Well, we're going to shoot to do them once a week. We'll see what we can do leading up to Twitch.com BlizzCon. So yeah, you guys should be very excited for that little sneak peek. But yeah, so just from the chat. Let's see here. This one's from Fellerin. Okay. John, do you know about the WKM room in Orgrimmar? And do you know why it's there? Yeah, it's documented. Yeah, you can look this up. I think that the initials are wrong, which is a shame. It's a tribute to a developer who died on a different team. And I don't think anybody on team two really knew the person, but for their brother, they put in this little thing. But the initials may have gotten screwed up. That is my guess at what happened. I don't know. I actually don't remember when that was because I know the guy who built Orgrimmar and I was in his office. So I may have just missed it when this happened. So I don't know what happened. It may have been, I think he passed away after like during vanilla a while, but I just my head was into my editor so far up that I didn't hear any of this. So I didn't, you know, but that's what it is. Right. A lot of people have been asking about this. Is there anything that you could share about like Project Titan? No, I could, but you know, I think that's the great thing about being a self publisher is you kill your mistakes, you know, and it's Blizzard, you know, that that's their business, you know, they don't want to talk about it. And when they do, I'll have something to say. So there you go. But there's no reason to talk about. I mean, there's so many games that like in my book, I mentioned half a, you know, half a dozen games that got canceled, you know, Blizzard games, you know, what was the my favorite one is Oh, geez, what was the real time strategy game Starcraft Ghost? Oh, no, no, no, no, came out before maybe while Starcraft came out, they made it was like somebody else bought it, THQ bought it, and they released it. Oh boy, let's uh, did THQ, no, no, no, no, no, it was a space faring expansion. No, it was a space faring expansion game. It was a real time. Oh, Jesus, it was like, it was like Mewtwo is like Mewtwo. Basically, they made this game, and they, they killed it internally. And then they got an offer from another studio to buy it. They bought it and they went, they want to pay for this? Okay, here it is. You know, and they bought it because they thought Blizzard would spend gold every time. And it was absolutely terrible. My roommate played it. And it was a real time spreadsheet. It was the great thing about real time is that you watch little characters. Okay, this is a space game. And so you see these little numbers changing in real time. It made no sense at all. Okay. And it was just the dumbest game and somebody bought it. Sounds like day trading or something. Uh, yeah. And I wish I knew the name of that game. Oh, is it Yvonline? No, no, no, it was, uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of guesses that the name is. Yeah, look at THQ. THQ is the publisher of this game. And uh, they bought it and they took the hit. But anyway, Lewin has asked quite a few questions. And I'm trying to try to get more serious. Yeah. But uh, Lewin is asking, uh, did you guys have any intention of old zones being revisited at any point? Because sometimes you can see like higher level mobs in certain zones. You know, like you might. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's uh, uh, yeah, sure. Um, just to like change things up. Yeah. Just to like, rather than killing all these high things in the high level zone, you know, put, it's kind of cool. But there was always that danger of lobbies running in Pax Imperia. There you go. Pax Imperia. There you are. That was the game. Pax Imperia. Anyway, the, uh, yeah, they, they would mix that up a little bit. They used to have like cross zone quests too. And because people would think, oh, this would be so epic. This quest goes all the way from one zone to another. And players hated it because it was all downtime. You got this quest, but you can't turn it in until you go to this other zone. And most quests, uh, tips is dying over there, but, uh, you liked them. I kind of like the idea, but when you're questing, and it's just one of the quests that leads you out of the zone, but you've got all other quests in your quest log, it just becomes this annoyance that you have to leave the zone and then do this. And sometimes you're leaving by yourself and the quest target is, is an elite mob that you need, you know, group. It's just, it just didn't work out. So they tried some things. I don't think, I don't think, I don't think skulls in zones are a good idea because you can act like a creature with a skull on it that gets deadly. I think that they kind of veered away from that. But yeah, they tried that once. That's a short answer. Okay. I mean, one thing I liked about those like cross zone quests is like, like you said, the sense of scale and epic adventure. I do agree that, that sometimes, like in some, you know, cases doesn't really work out, but things like, you know, the enixia quest line or like the mix, the missing quest. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, totally. You know, I'm talking about just garden variety. Oh, you're in stranglethorne and now it says, oh, you want to, you know, swamp of sorrows is where you're like, what? Now what? You know, they tried a couple of those in alpha and, you know, well, they're still, they're still all over the place. I call them FedEx quests. Yeah, I kind of like them. Like I like the, what's it called? Like the star, the something, the heart. I can't, I can't remember the hand in the heart. Yeah, I can't, I can't remember the name. Yeah, but I couldn't remember it. But, you know, that was one quest that like, I always think of that whenever I think of FedEx quests, they was just like sending you all over the planet. Right. It's a cool quest. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. What a, you know, a quest. And actually it's the, it's like the main quest chain in Duskwood and I love Duskwood. Duskwood is probably my favorite. Everyone loves Duskwood. It's so good. It's so good. It can't do wrong with Duskwood. Yeah. So with Duskwood, there's the, there's like the, the Stalvin quest chain that, you know, you basically, you're running back and forth and like, I remember times where like, I would, I would kill myself just so I could like, Spirit Res and then like, AFK and go to the bathroom while my Res sickness was running out because I just did not want to run all the way across. But I love how the zone looks. It's like, it's, it's one of my favorite zones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good zone. That's kind of why I put the extra Catacombs under Karazhan is that it's such an easy set to work with. Like the spooky Gothic stuff is so easy to make cool architecture for. Like we all have a visceral reaction to bones and spooky stuff and it's just easy. When did, when did you start designing Nax Rammus? How early on? Well, I didn't, again, I didn't design Nax, Nax Rammus. I built, Dana did all of Nax Rammus. He didn't finish one quarter. And I think I redid the spider quarter. So like the design of it was all Dana. I kind of filled in. I started boy. This is probably after WoW shipped. Yeah, right after WoW shipped. I took over because that's when Dana left. I took over what he was working on. Yeah. Okay. But you said you said you had a Q20 and a Q40 builds like two years before WoW came out. Well, yeah. But a Q40, I rebuilt over and over. There are so many changes because it was very inflexible. In my article, I talk a lot about, I'm going to have this article. It's about all my dungeons. I basically liner notes. It's a long article. And I talk about the first and worst dungeon was a Q40. And the number of times that I had had made revisions trying to accommodate the gameplay. And it really should have been scrapped, honestly. It should have been scrapped and rebuilt. How long did I spend talking about the willingness to redo your work to get into game development? And well, I guess when something takes months to build, the willingness to redo the work is not as strong as it should have been. I guess it was okay. I mean, they allowed mounts for the first time in dungeons because of that. I just didn't know what I was doing when I built it. I had no idea. I had no idea how big the raid was. I didn't know if the spaces were suitable for combat. I actually pictured people fighting in the tunnels. They were describing it like Diablo, where there'd be waves of monsters attacking you instead of you chopping on one or two monsters like the EverQuest paradigm. So we really had no idea. It could have been anything. So it just turned out that AQ wasn't fertile ground for a good gameplay for our MMO. Lots of revisions. So let's take one last question here. And this has been asked a few times. Do you know of any secrets, any little Easter egg fun things that you or somebody else may have put in the game that, to your knowledge, has not been discovered yet? Or is there anything that comes to mind that you're just like, you know what? I really like that I did this. I amuse myself. I want to say every single quest in the game is a reference to something. You guys think you guys know Easter eggs. You know the tip. You know the tip of the sword. Just the tip. It's just the little tip of the iceberg. Most of it is like personal references, names of people's cats, neighbors, teachers, classmates in college, you know. And obscure literary characters, even references to outside, like there's something in everything I want to say. I'm probably exaggerating. There's probably a quest designer who actually, I actually do know a question that they didn't do a lot of references, but many, many of them. I've looked at the references and it's a fraction of what there are. Now, some of them are like, I know that there's a cat in Red Ridge, Sean Carnards put FC. That's the name of the cat. Okay. He had his own cat that FC were the initials for cat, you know. That was just the name of their cat. And so they put their cat in, you know, but just little things like that, that when I know, and what's funny is that Sean would put that in the game, and he wouldn't tell anybody. He wouldn't tell anybody. It's not like something that he would just, I think it was just a natural thing. I've never done quest design, but maybe when you're just coming up with names, you just make this up and then you forget about that it's a reference to something. You just move on, you know. So you wouldn't happen to know where man Kirk's wife is, right? Uh, no, I do not. No, there's, there's all kinds of crazy stuff. I was talking about another podcast. I carved the name Lisa, you know, in the front of on Karash that you'd have to look at it with in wireframe mode to see. And Lisa was the receptionist. She and Dana were dating and she would hang out with us. And I just, I freaked her out by putting her name. She thought she was going to get in trouble or something, but I knew it wouldn't actually be visible unless you actually could see it, but it's still there. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, guys, I think it's about that time. We've been going for quite a while now. Guys, if you liked classic cast, we have 11 other episodes. This is episode 12. It's over on my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash sfan TV. You guys can go, you guys can sub there, sub to tips out baby, sub to stay safe TV. And also check out their Twitch channels as well. Twitch.tv slash tips out baby and stay safe TV. It's all the same. If you guys enjoyed classic cast, please hit me with follow. We're going to plan, like I said, we're going to plan on doing this. We're going to try to do it once a week. I'm moving next week and I'm making the jump to go on full time next week. It's going to be busy for me, but we're going to aim to do one, I guess, the following week. I mean, this week is kind of this. Today is this week, but yeah, this next week, we want to start doing them weekly. So yeah, that would be big time. And John, this was awesome, man. Yeah, this was crazy cool. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah. That was a lot of fun. And you guys can check out his book. It's the wow diary. So yeah, it's very, very exciting. The link's in the chat right there. And I'm going to continue streaming. If you guys want to stay and hang out and you guys, you guys want to watch me stream, then we can do that. But for now, we're going to take a short little intermission and we'll see you guys next time. Those of you guys who don't want to watch me stream. See you guys later, John. Thanks so much for joining me. Take care. See you later, guys. Take care. All right. We're off, right? Hello. Looks like we're I swear these freaking guys, dude, they can't, they can't keep their mouth shut. Okay. It's unbelievable. You just got to be patient, dude. You just got to be patient. That's why I'm S fan the patient. That's why that's my title. Guys, you know what time it is.