“Good Morning, Mr. Brazie!” spoke Brianna as she walked into the office I shared with a member of the QA team.

“Mister? I do look THAT old already?”

“… Yes.”

“Damn. Okay, what’s going on?”

“Well, I just had a question…”

Collaboration

It’s pretty common to collaborate with people outside your specific area of design. While I did a lot of combat/game mechanic design work, quest designers would often ask me for thoughts and advice on how to do steps of their questlines – or like Afrasiabi, just ask me to implement combat sections for them.

A lot of this was born as a side-effect of three things:

1. I helped the Quest Designers out a lot by making scripts they could re-use or teaching them Lua
2. I was the youngest combat designer at the time and worked fast
3. I talked to *everybody* – in general, I loved socializing and did it as much as possible
   • I even spent a lot of time talking to QA back in 133 until someone told me they felt I was overstepping my bounds by hanging out with them too much.  (Still don’t feel that’s true today, but being young and scared, I backed off)

This is a really important factor in any career – you don’t necessarily need to know every developer’s name by heart, but get outside of your team and bubble to meet others. Anyways… Ms. Schneider came up and asked.

The Druid Flightform Questline

Bri: “How do you feel about class-quests?”

Me: “I LOVE them. I feel like the game is a lot richer for having unique experiences that are memorable and specific to a decision.”

Bri: “Okay, then great, I need your help. Alex gave me permission to make one for the Druid Flight Form epic speed upgrade, but Jeff is really concerned about putting effort into making a questline for just one class.”

Me: “Well… I’m the worst person in the world to persuade Jeff of anything.”

Bri: “Oh, don’t worry, Alex will take care of that. The reason I want your help is because you know most of the classes – in fact, you’re the only one playing a Druid right now – and you work fast.”

Me: “Oh.”

Bri: “Yeah… anyways, I have most of the solo-quest stuff down, but I suck at combat mechanics. Can you cook up a few challenges to test the players?”

Me: “Sure. Let me know what you want…”

Structure

Most class questlines historically followed the following structure, courtesy of Patrick Nagle:

• Quest Discovery
  • A LOT of NPCs around the world direct to the starting NPC
  • This part is incredibly important, because it ensures that you can find the quest line, no matter *where* you are adventuring.
• Story Framing
  • Where you explain why you’re on this questline
• Resource collection
  • A time and gold sink  to make sure you value what you’re about to get
• Exposition
  • Continuation of the story, with plot reveals and narrative
• Solo Testing
  • Basic feats of competence to showcase that you understand your class’s mechanics
• Story Climax
  • The build-up of your preparation leads to a final showdown
• Group Test
  • Grab four friends and complete the final challenge, showing you can use your class unique skills in a group scenario.

This structure was considered important, in that it reflected the need for a diversity of experiences and a mental, emotional, financial and time investment in your character. It’s why it was reflected in the Paladin, Warlock and Druid travel quests.

Storytelling by Doing

In crafting video games, you gain a power that storytelling and movies cannot: The power to make the player experience and interact in the events that are about to unfold.  This is why the medium is so alluring and powerful. To hear, to see, to do.  Which creates the strongest impression?

This is why Brianna’s questline had you interacting with wildlife and other things like that. Similarly, in re-enacting the events at the three “Raven” stones, we had the player re-experience moments related to the hero whose path they were following.

In the case of the eagle statue, the player avenges a fallen eagle who was swarmed by using their tanking form, long-duration regen abilities and Thorns ability to endure the assault.  For the falcon statue, you have to outpace the enemy’s increasing damage – demanding the use of your high dps cat or Moonkin forms.  Finally, the Hawk’s statue boss tests your root/crowd control and kiting abilities.

In so doing, the player demonstrates basic understanding of their character and the many skills available to the multi-formed Druid.

The Raven God

Finally, we wanted to end the questline with a party-challenge that would allow the druid to be excellent in any form and also give the party that accompanied the Druid to the encounter a reason to take them inside.

The Sethekk halls were chosen for two reasons:

1. Theme
2. There were only two bosses and an extra boss would help the zone

Anzu himself was a fairly simple fight.  He would stun all players for 6 seconds sometimes. This would allow the group to benefit from HoT spells the Druid specialized in bringing, while allowing Warrior tanks to continue tanking freely. (At this point in time, Paladin tanks hadn’t reached vogue yet…)  Anzu’s Dive added movement to the fight and forced the tank to reposition.  Next, Spell Bomb allowed the Druid healer or DPS to dramatically improve the effectiveness of their allies by cleansing off a mana-draining effect that would hurt them.

At 35% and 75% he would go invulnerable and summon flocks of AoE monsters  – ideal targets for a Bear tank to handle with Thorns and Demoralizing Roar. Finally, three statues in the room could be activated by an attentive druid casting Rejuvenation upon them. The eagle, reflecting the power it missed out on in life, pulses AoE damage, while the Hawk reduces Anzu’s damage to a reasonable level and Falcon increases the DPS of its allies.

Clever, right?  There was also a secret mechanic that doubled the length of any rejuv spells cast upon the statues to make keeping all three active possible, but difficult.

There were more nuances that players discovered as they fought the fight, but those were the mechanics we put in place.  It wasn’t supposed to be a terribly difficult fight, as we wanted players with Druid members to *always* want to add Anzu to their dungeon run.

Which is why…

Put a Great Reward

When we found out that Roman Kenney was creating a unique boss model for Anzu, and that it was made as a mount, it was only natural we make it an epic, super rare drop for anyone in the party. This cosmetic, brilliant reward gave everyone in the party a motive to do the fight each time they came across it. So successful was this motivation, that players would often recruit druids to do Anzu runs just to get a chance at this mount.

Getting players to work together in the pursuit of cooperation and phat lewts. Isn’t that was MMOs are about? 🙂

Oh yeah, and making new friends or something like that…

 

It was a warm, sunny day in Irvine, when Alex Afrasiabi called me.

“Brazie!”, he called out with his usual pomp and swagger, “We have something delightful to craft today. It will be memorable – to say the least, so I’ve conscripted the next week of your time from Scott.”

“What on earth have I gotten myself into I wondered….”

Little did I know it would be the be the first of five events that would charm and delight players throughout the years.

 

The Ring of Blood

For the uninitiated, the Ring of Blood is a dungeon-party (5 player) sized quest-chain that takes place in a single location in the outdoor (non-dungeon) world. In between each step of the quest, the quixotic, yet poignant Gurgthok (Ion Hazzikostas, aka Watcher) and his assistant Wodin (Owen Landgren) test the mettle of the player and their team.

Lovingly crafted by Alex Afrasiabi, the flavor text and theming of each wave was done to amuse, delight and challenge players. Having the overall concept and creature theme defined ahead of time helps immensely – it set the flavor, pacing and sense of progression the game design needs to follow.

Brokentoe

Yes, Brokentoe.  An unepic name for an unepic fight.  This encounter was initially part of a five-beast encounter that ended up feeling too similar to Nesingwary’s Expedition capper questlines. However, the spirit of the idea was good, so he stuck around.

Brokentoe was designed to be a 3-person fight – something that you could get started while you waited for more people to arrive. Each fight is supposed to be successively harder and more interesting than the previous one, so it’s wise to start on a (relatively) quiet note.

At this point in the game’s development, stuns had the secondary effect of causing monsters to ignore the stunned target. So I put a very simple stun on Brokentoe to ensure he ran around the arena and scared the casters and healers a little bit. But this fight was an easy one, intended to draw players in and invest them in finding more players to finish the challenge and create a social experience.

The Blue Brothers

The Blue Brothers, a not-so-subtle reference to the classic 80s movie, were pretty simple.  Dual wielding knives, they had Mutilate and Sinister Strike.

Pretty boring? Yes, but effective. The Blue Brothers were CC immune – intended to ensure that by this point, your team of only-casters can’t just sheep and run around the arena to beat the encounter. The fast-attacks and bursty damage were a simple way of saying, “don’t try to solo through this fight with heals.”

As a group, the presence of two monsters means your tank needs to be minimally capable of tab-selecting between the monsters to keep them from running away from him. Almost like… practice… for dungeoning, perhaps? Nah.

Simple, effective and oh… yeah about 30% more HP and damage than Brokentoe.

Rokdar the Sundered Lord

Ah, I loved this model. The Nagrand earth giants were one of my favorite creatures in the expansion. If you’ve been following the Blog series, the fracturing, shattering and creating smaller versions of themselves was a Family ability that Mike and I defined for the elite monsters when we first saw them.

Unfortunately, my ability to sell spawning visuals was not very developed at this point in my career and the best I could do was shrink the summoning creature. Afrasiabi was not impressed with it visually and told me to just make the fight Brokentoe 2.o – this time with more need for self-preservation.

So repeating the AoE stun, I also attached a DoT and a knock-away effect that took-advantage of the shape of the arena – players would be punted away from Rokdar, but never so far that they couldn’t just run back to the fight.

An additional 30% hp and 50% damage from the previous fight ensured he felt tough and also scared your tank a bit. But I timed the knock-away effect to be around the same time that a tank would take mortal damage if he went the entire duration unhealed. Think of it as an insurance policy to give the healer a few extra seconds to heal – and the tank time to dig through his bags for a potion.

Skra’gath

Skra’gath is another amazing model that came out of the game very late in Burning Crusade.

A wandering voidlord model, Skra’gath was created to begin hinting at the deeper story of the N’aaru, the void-kind and the story beyond Burning Crusade that is just now beginning to be written out in the story of Illidan in his book.

Yes, guys, this story line goes back that far. Can you really believe that Metzen thought that far ahead? Well, he’s been planning this next expansion for a very, very long time.

Skra’gath had an elemental adaptation mechanic. The more the same school of magic was used against him the weaker it became. This existed to help teach players some of the raid mechanics that were used in Blackwing Lair – to recognize and understand their schools of magic are important.

Further, he had an AoE Shriek – an effect that silenced any casters within melee range. This was to teach the importance of keeping a distance. Finally, piercing shadow existed to ensure that if you took too long to complete the fight (stacking healers) that eventually, your shadow resistance would go negative (a mechanic removed shortly after launch) and ensure you eventually die.

… Unfortunately, despite all of my careful planning, I swapped the class of the creature from “Paladin” to “Mage” thinking it would be cooler… and that resulted in the monster’s armor being reduced by 80%.  Causing him to be quickly shredded – and indeed easier than the fight before it.  The lesson? All of your great design means nothing if you tune it below the level where players can appreciate it and are forced to pay attention.

The Warmaul Champion

 Ah, this guy. What a friendly clubbing arm he has! What delicious smiles and succulent metal plates. Ahem.  This guy was tuned at the difficulty of an actual Dungeon boss. And like any proper dungeon boss, he should scare the living daylights out of you.

So that’s what we set out to do.  Stacking him up with a set of typical warrior abilities, this guy hits hard, mortal strikes and charges at your team.  Very specifically, he charges at the *most distant* member of your team.  This mechanic was going to be used heavily in Karazhan and several dungeons, in an attempt to make Charge seem less random, so we included it on this fight, in hopes someone caught on and learned to exploit it.

The sundering cleave existed to threaten melee if they stood on top of the tank, instead of behind the monster and the battle shout and low-health enrage ensured the DPS of the monster would crush a tank if the didn’t bring either damage dealers or good healer.

… naturally this was the first of the fights to get nerfed after launch. Outdoor questing groups are rarely composed properly of a 5-man party and even more rare that they are coordinated enough to handle this kind of intensity. The idea for a dungeon tutorial was good… but a touch overdone. Oops. The opposite problem from Skra’gath.

Mogor:  The Final Challenge

So, after the champion, you’re done, right? No more questing, just time to grab your loot and… oh, wait, not quite yet.

Adding an element of surprise, Mogor, one of the color commentating specators in the ring, heads into the ring to protest your supremacy.  Talk about hands-on management!

The Mogor fight was designed to highlight several class-specific mechanics relevant to dungeoneering:

1. Flame shock introduced a dispellable effect which eased the fight if handled
2. Healing wave introduced an interruptable effect which shortened the fight if stopped
3. Ice totem introduced an additional target, which dealt pulsing AoE damage and reinforced target swapping
4. Revive-self introduced the idea of unpredictability and multiple phases, keeping players alert
5. Frenzy introduced the idea of enrage phases – increasing damage on the tank by 300% rewarded saving and using defensive and damage boosting cooldowns for the second half of the fight.

 

Finally, all of these mechanics fit within the thematic image of an Ogre shaman.  How many of these did you catch when you played the fight? Maybe you just zerg rushed it down with 20 people waiting to do the quest.

That’s OK too. Working together with other players is one of the fundamental features that made WoW such an appealing experience.  But Blizzard quality and polish are all about thinking through each moment and giving the opportunity for a lesson, even if most never see or actively notice it.

The Rewards

Did you think we were done just because we finished up with the monsters? No sir!

It’s not enough to just create an interesting, difficult and engaging story sequence in the game. There needs to be a pay-off for investing the time, effort and organizational energy required to complete a multi-person questline.

And after some lobbying, Travis Day, aka Indalamar of the Legendary Warrior youtube video, finally conceded to make some awesome items for the end of this questline. But not before coming into my office and making me PROMISE. Promise. SO. HARD. that the questline monsters would be tuned tough and worthy of the effort.

I’m not exactly sure if he felt it was tuned hard enough, but in the end, the rewards he made were fantastic, memorable and well-worth the effort of organizing a group to do this questline.

And that’s why the Ring of Blood was worth a full blog-post of its own.  It understood the niche it wanted to fill, gave the players a reason to care, gave them ways to improve if they wiped on a fight, made them feel good when it was finished and perfectly suited the fantasy of jumping into a pit full of bloodthirsty fighters.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Please share it with your friends, they deserve to appreciate the time and love that goes into every game they enjoy.

-Alex

After creating Netherspite, Jeff Kaplan came into my office with a concerned look on his face.  In a nutshell, he said, since he felt like the complexity level of the fight was too high and the recent firing of a colleague, he felt it would be best if I went back to working on some basic content for a while.

In order to do this best, he was bringing in a mentor from the Starcraft 2 team. Michael Heiberg.

Heiberg, Warrior of Consistency

Now, anyone who’s worked with Michael knows what it is to get the Heiberg treatment. For those of you not-in-the-know, prepare to be inducted.

Heiberg, of the Heiberg helm, clan of 100 generations and wielders of rational thought has the following traits.

Passive: All emotions applied to rational arguments are ignored, except in case where they are the emotions of the player experiencing the content.

Q: Precision strike – rapidly identify the areas of greatest weakness and adapt a plan to resolve it quickly and with minimal waves.

W: Vigilance – Toggle – constantly rechecks work and ensures all work is proceeding at a well-tested and stable velocity. Is never toggled off, except on weekends.

E: Guidance – Provides precise and specific insight into design philosophies and adapts the lessons for the student.

R: Comprehensive Reconstruction – accurate rebuilds the entire philosophy for a game’s structure, design and creates a document commemorating that philosophy.

Teaching from the Ground Up

Michael’s process was simple – so far, I had focused on building things from a very instinctual, gut-feel, place. This was effective when reusing tools that existed and less effective when creating new experiences from scratch.  To understand how to create WoW, I must understand how WoW was built.

If you haven’t read “The Simplest Thing First”, go do that now. (http://xelnath.com/2012/06/30/the-simplest-thing-first/)

At first, the approach for creating monsters for the Outlands was simple. What do they look like? What should they do?  Birds should flap their wings and peck. (Sorry, J.)   Mages should cast arcane missiles and fireballs, then so-on.

This made a lot of sense and was generally pretty quick – make a copy of the existing spell (templates didn’t exist yet), change some damage numbers around, paste it and go.

Michael had a different philosophy. Instead of thinking about just what form of flavor each monster should have on top of existing abilities, each monster should be thought of as a note in a song.  Each one brings its own feeling – and too much of the same note makes for a very dull song.

So he changed the approach – spawn a few monsters in an area, then start thinking about HOW that combination of monsters comes together to create a complete experience.

A Beginner’s Guide to WoW Abilities

As we developed abilities, he became creating categories for classification of abilities, as well as logging the different ways that players can handle the situation.

• Family Abilities
• Reactive Abilities
• Preparation Abilities
• Flavor Abilities

Family abilities make sense for all creatures of the same type to have. Wolves howl. Spiders poison. Scorpions throw silk nets. You know, things like that. This is where most people start when they are crafting abilities – “What makes sense?”

Reactive abilities give you the opportunity to respond, by either reducing, negating or otherwise adapting to the situation created by the ability. At it’s most basic, the Mage Fireball is an easy example.  If running up to the monster would cause you to aggro too many monsters, hiding behind a wall (… but not a hill, thanks terrain programming) will cause the creature to run around the corner to see you again. If you happen to be a warrior, mage or other class with an interrupt, you can reduce the damage you take with a well-timed Kick to the monster.

Preparation abilities are mitigated by doing something before engaging the monster or before the monster uses the ability. The simplest example – a monster which calls for help to nearby monsters – can be negated by isolating that monster and pulling them away from nearby, dormant monsters.  Another example of a preparation ability is a monster which charges when engaged.  There is little purpose in getting a long distance away, so instead you can pop a short defensive ability to absorb the initial damage.

Finally, flavor abilities are generally uninteractive but add visual delight, animation, just a cool message in the combat log or other thematic mix-up to a WoW creature. This is particularly important when you remember the origin of WoW like MMOs – born of the text-based MUD, most damage is targeted, unavoidable and auto-attacky. These flavor abilities break up the tedium, at least slightly.

Crafting a World

Me: Alright, Mike, I just hooked up about thirty monsters in the zone with abilities. What’s next?

Mike: Whoa, that was pretty fast. How’d you do that?

Me: Well, I setup a bunch of spell templates. The warriors all charge and do a strike.  The mages cast either Fireball or Shadowbolts and throw up an armor spell or two.

Mike: Uhm… and how many zones did you setup like that?

Me: Eh, just Hellfire Peninsula.

Mike: Hmmm…. maybe you should sit down for a few hours and play it?

Me: What are you talking about? Fireballs and charges all work, not that bad at all. Should be fine.

Mike: Did you test any of them?

Me: Yeah, spawned one or two as I crafted them. Why?

Mike: Just go pull test the zone and come back to me. Make sure you fight each one at least once.

… an hour later …

Me: Uhm…. yeah, so I fixed the issue where a bunch of the mages didn’t have mana. And uh, wow, getting stunned on aggro by every warrior type NPC in the zone sucks.

Mik(e): Heheheh.  You have a solution?

Me: Yeah… I’ll go through and add quite a bit more spells to the monsters.

Mike: Before you do that, let’s sit down and plan it out together. While you were testing it, I went ahead and made a list of every monster in every zone and what kind of outfit they wear.

Me: How will that help us?

Mike: Well, we can sit down, discuss the different monsters each morning, you can implement them while I’m in Starcraft 2 meeting, then we’ll sit down and test them together each afternoon.

Me: Isn’t that a little overkill? I think you made the point when I played the zone.

Mike: Yeah, perhaps so, but even while working alone can be fast, it doesn’t replace the creativity of a couple people working together. For example, when you put your mind to it, your ability design is very interactive, but tends to be scatter-shot and under tested. On the other hand, my ideas are usually safer to implement at the cost of some creativity and exploration.  If we work together, we’ll cover each other’s weaknesses well.

Me: Oh. That makes a lot of sense. And planning it out together lets us do that face to face… but what if I have a great idea while working on an area.

Mike: Then just do it – and document the new ability on the wiki here.  The goal isn’t to establish some master plan and execute on it – it’s to ensure we know why we’re making what we’re making and that players will enjoy it.

Collaborate

That story was a bit contrived, but these types of discussions really happened.  Working with Mike showed me the power of having someone else not just looking over your shoulder, but actively involved in ideas on a regular basis.  No matter how creative you are, having someone else reality check you often creates better ideas. When you’re in a quality focused company like Blizzard, that’s doubly important.

I remember one time I made this demon creature that shot a volcanic jet of ooze at a player. The idea was that the player could dodge the ooze by constantly moving while the missile flew through the air and left a puddle behind. After confirming it dealt damage, I hooked it up and left it in there.  A few days later, Mike came by and asked:

Mike: Are you *sure* you can dodge that spell?

Me: Uh… I think so. *cheats speed up and runs around*

Mike: Well, no actual player can move that fast. But… are you sure it’s working?

Me: Hmmm… I thought so when I built it… but it seems like the damage ticks are hitting me still – just much later than expected…. even when I’m outside the pool.

Mike: Who can help us figure out what’s going on?

Me: Sam.

I wandered over to Sam Lantinga’s office. 

Sam: Hey Alex! 😀 😀 😀  (He really smiles this much irl)

Me: Hey Sam! I’m trying to figure out why this monster seems to be dealing damage to me when I move out of the AoE.

Sam: Oh, that seems like a serious bug! 😀

Me: Yeah!

Sam: Let’s take a look. 😀 😀  Sit down while I repro it.

Me: You don’t just want steps?

Sam: Nope. Sit here in case I have questions. It also helps to have someone to chat with while I’m waiting for the debug server to warm up.

This often took 5-10 minutes… 

Collaboration sometimes means that you take the extra time to sit down and get to know the people you work with regularly and learn how they work. In Sam’s case, he’s an extremely social guy and being physically present with him shows that your problem is not only important, but that you respect the effort he puts into investigating the problem. 

Sam: So what you’ve done here is impossible. 😀

Me: What???

Sam: Yeah, there’s no way this could possibly have worked. 😀 😀

Me: But it did…

Sam: Are you sure?  😀

Me: Fairly sure. Now I feel crazy.

Sam: Well, how did you test it?

I reproduced the test case using a speed cheat. It worked!

Sam: Oh. :O

Me: How did that work?

Sam: I’m not sure, but it certainly shouldn’t have worked! 😀

Me: Hahhah.

After some investigation.  

Sam: So the reason it worked…. was that the speed cheat was so fast that it predicted on the server that you were outside the range of the spell entirely.  But on a normal player character, they wouldn’t have escaped so easily.  😀

Me: Oh no. What do I do? This idea is sound.

Sam: It does seem really fun to be moving around and sidestepping giant jets of Demon Acid. 😀 😀

Me: … I wonder if anyone has ever said that before in their life.

Sam: Hahaha. It’s ok. I’m going to show you how to set this up properly – and we’ll write some new code to do it. Grab a seat. 😀 😀

Back to the Lab

Mike: How’d it go?

Me: It will be a few days, but we’ll have a new build which fixes the issue.

Mike: Great, because I’ve added a new section to the overworld design guidelines:

Spawning and Abilities

• Ability Crossover
  • Care must be used when using control denying effects
  • If too many monsters with CC exist in one location, the player spends more time locked out than playing
• Spawn Density
  • Monsters should have a minimum amount of combat space around them
  • This ensures that players can safely engage the creatures
• Chain Pulls
  • Monsters which call for help need to be very carefully used
  • Doubly so if the monster flee at low health
  • Chain pulls – or situations where the player never gets a chance to rest can occur
  • This leads to inevitable death – either immediately by aggroing the entire camp
  • Or by a slow war of attrition
•  Disruptive Patrols
  • Therefore, it’s more appropriate for disruptive monsters to be relatively scarce
  • Consistent patrols allow players to handle them beforehand
  • This also reduces the number of the types of these monsters which exist at once

For a particularly harsh example, the Thief Catchers with nets in Orgrimmar are an excellent example of a particularly disruptive monster. (Though those were added to keep Rogues from ganking innocent orc players non-stop…)

Me: Huh, I hadn’t thought of it quite like this before.

Mike: It’s far from complete – and I know there’s a lot more to add on to this list. Help me out and we’ll make this list far better. 🙂

Summary

These kinds of stories were incredibly common throughout Burning Crusade and beyond. With thoughtful consideration and kind support, all of us who were fresh to the Blizzard team came to learn the patterns and methods used to craft the game.