[Share] Tom Chilton Interviewed, Game Director of WoW

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In this interview, World of Warcraft Game Director Tom Chilton talks about the hectic final months leading up to the game's launch, crafting an MMORPG for a wide range of play styles, and the ongoing effort to improve the game through expansions and content updates.

Blizzard Insider: Before you came to Blizzard Entertainment to join the World of Warcraft team, you were the lead designer on Ultima Online -- you worked on several expansions and game updates, right?

Tom Chilton: Right.
When you started at Blizzard Entertainment, you started as a senior game designer while World of Warcraft was in development?

That's right -- when I started, there were a handful of associate designers and one or two mid-level designers
Thunder Bluff
Can you talk about the state the game was in when you came on?

Yeah -- it was early 2004, around February. The core look and feel and the quest-oriented gameplay were already there, but I think the level cap was 15. Most of the zones in the game had been created by then, but there was no content in the majority of them above level 15 -- they were basically empty.
We did a lot in nine months!

A huge amount of the content was completed in that time. Not all of the character classes were in place -- hunters and druids weren't in the game, and rogues were being redesigned. We had about three classes' worth of content to design essentially from scratch. Not many major game systems were in place -- there was a combat system in place, but we redid that during the last nine-month period. All of the math and the way stats worked were redone completely. A lot of the ‘feel' stuff -- the way the dodges and parries worked -- was redesigned. The guild and chat systems existed, but that was pretty much it as far as social systems. No auction house, no mail system, no talent system, no Battlegrounds or honor system. When I was brought on board, it was presumably to do a lot of work on the PvP systems, but we quickly realized that we were going to have to wait on that, because a large portion of the internal feedback we were getting during our alpha and early beta was that players didn't feel like they had enough character customization. People would say to us, "my warrior isn't any different from any other warrior!" It wasn't so much a visual customization thing as it was gameplay customization -- they couldn't distinguish their experience from anybody else's.

" No auction house, no mail system, no talent system, no Battlegrounds or honor system."

That led into the development of the talent system. There was a rudimentary talent system at the time; every level, you would get 10 talent points, and the things you could spend them on, "do 1 additional point of damage per hit, or 2 additional points of damage, or 3," were super simple, really rudimentary. You'd pop open the UI, and it was just a list of stuff you could buy. Eventually, you'd get most of them, so it wasn't really a customization system with progression. We decided that wasn't enough, and went through a few pitches for a redesign, but the one thing the team really gravitated towards was the Diablo-style tree system -- having multiple talent trees and choosing between different talents that were character-defining, and that's the direction we went.

From April until the game shipped, the vast majority of my time was spent working on the design for the auction house, the mail system, and implementing the talent trees for every class. I was the only person available to do that -- our other class designer, Kevin Jordan, was mainly focused on ensuring that all of the classes had spells and abilities up to level 60, and managing the flow of when you'd get which ability. Kevin and I, and Rob Pardo, and Mike Heiberg from the StarCraft team, all worked on that part of the game. It was exciting, but it was weird -- my experience with some of the classes was making a character of that class on an internal server, playing it up to level 10 to get a feel for how the class played, and starting to make 60 levels worth of talents. A lot of my early experience was trying to get familiar with every class.
Is it reasonable to say that the "something for everyone" scope of the game that we have now wasn't present at that point in development?

It definitely wasn't there philosophically. Back then, we had much more of a notion of two classes of players -- hardcore, and not-hardcore. Not-hardcore players, they'd level up to 60, and then either be done with the game until an expansion came out, or start up another character and level up to 60 and do quests again some unknown number of times. It was really only the hardcore players that would want to have endgame content. Most of our design for how endgame content would work was very much aimed towards the hardcore EverQuest type of player's mindset. They want stuff to be really challenging, they want it to take a lot of organizational effort, and they want to wipe a lot, but when they finally win, feel really good about it. At that time, we had very little concept of casual players caring about endgame content.
The concept of "casual" players of an MMO at the time was a little unheard of.

Exactly.
When did that start to shift philosophically?

It started to shift, I would say, with Zul'Gurub. That's when we saw those first signs that organizing 40 people wasn't for everybody, and was pretty hard to pull off. There were a lot of smaller guilds out there that wanted to do end-game content, so they ran Upper Blackrock Spire a whole bunch, but they didn't have anything to do beyond that, so they just kind of got stuck and ran out of progression. That's when we started to feel like we could start alternating -- this patch will be for the smaller guilds, and the next patch will be another endgame raid zone for the hardcore guilds out there, and we'll go back and forth. After doing it for a while, we realized that it was just happening too slowly. People would go huge, 6-month gaps of time where their playstyle didn't see content. That wasn't good enough. We tried to address that more with Ahn'Qiraj where we introduced a 20 and 40-person version simultaneously, and those results were better, but the amount of time it took us to make it, and the fact that 20-person was still fairly hardcore, led us to the decision we made in The Burning Crusade -- to make this content more available to people, we're going to have to make content for 10-person groups, and the big stuff will be more like 25-person. We still felt like it would feel epic, but a lot of arguments back in the day were along the lines of, "does 25 people really feel epic?" or "That's so weird that it would only take 25 people to kill a famous name in Warcraft lore!" It's funny -- now, nobody thinks twice about it, but back then, we'd instilled this mindset that 40 people were necessary to make a fight epic.
Undead Warlock
As a player, less so than a designer, do you have a favorite part of the game?

Yeah -- over the course of time, one of the things I've had the most fun with is Warsong Gulch. I've always liked the 10-person format; it's given me the ability to affect the outcome of the battle more than, say, a 40 on 40 -- which is cool too. I do like mixing it up -- like pretty much anybody, if you stay in the same Battleground for too long, you'll get tired of it, but Warsong is the one I come back to more than the others. I like the capture-the-flag format -- it's clear. Somebody can be the hero in terms of capping the flag or returning the flag, and I have a lot of fun playing on both sides of that.
One of the things that I'm most curious about here is the ‘why' of World of Warcraft -- why is it as successful as it is?

There are a zillion little reasons that play into it, but the big ones in my mind: number one, the player experience is carefully directed through quests. Also, it's not punishing to players. When you die, you aren't losing progress -- you lose a little bit of time running back to your corpse, but it doesn't feel really punishing. We have a good rewards cycle for advancement -- you don't advance so slowly that you feel like you're not making progress. The game feels very responsive -- the controls are good, the framerate's good, it runs well, the world is really inviting, and inspires people to explore it. The zones are really different from each other, and every zone has a lot of character. The NPCs within the quests have personality. It's really hard to come out of one of the first zones without wanting to see more.

" I didn't imagine that it would get as big as it has today, but I could tell that it would be a really good game that I couldn't wait to play. "

Did you know or predict the game's success early on the game's development?

Not the extent of the game's success, no. Before I even worked on World of Warcraft, I saw it at an E3 in 2002, which is where it was shown first. I remember immediately thinking, "this game's gonna be good." It was responsive, it looked inviting, it had a good core -- you could see the kernel of the game's success back in 2002. When I came onboard in early 2004, playing in the alpha, and got to experience some of the quests and see some of the zone transitions -- like the first time I went from Elwynn Forest to Westfall, and saw that it was a totally different feel -- I knew it would be the best MMO on the market. I didn't imagine that it would get as big as it has today, but I could tell that it would be a really good game that I couldn't wait to play.
How did that runaway success and out-of-control growth change how you designed for the game?

We've had to learn a lot of hard lessons about planning for the worst-case scenario. I say worst-case, but they're actually problems that we were in a sense very fortunate to have -- you have too many people that want to play, for example. We thought about that when we launched The Burning Crusade. "We're going to have a huge chunk of people all going into Hellfire Peninsula at the same time -- how are we gonna handle that?" We had this worry that it would be way too crowded, so we made the zone really big, and the instant you came through the dark portal, we were shuttling you off to different parts of the zone. "Alliance, you guys go over there to Honor Hold, Horde, you guys go to Thrallmar, stay away from each other!" We took that a step further in Lich King with the separate zones -- we essentially cut that area's concurrency in half again. With things like Wintergrasp, we really didn't know what to expect. It was this huge, nebulous thing -- were we designing for 15 people being there, or were we designing for 100 people being there? We've only seen since then that we really have to use those same kinds of worst-case scenario design principles so that we're better prepared for load balancing.
There have been some pretty significant philosophical shifts in World of Warcraft's design from day 1 to Lich King, obviously. What do you think is the biggest change?

There were a lot of sacred cows that had to die. One in early World of Warcraft development was the idea that there should not be an auction house. We were hoping to see the social interaction in any kind of trading -- players meeting up face to face, deciding what the price on something would be, and determining what they were going to do to exchange their goods. After the game had been in beta for a while, and we saw that trading was incredibly cumbersome, and people weren't able to efficiently buy and sell stuff, we made the decision to include a game system to support it. There were also some perceptions about how hardcore raiding was, how much we'd expect out of a raider in the general sense, that have changed. We wanted to make content available to more players, but preserve challenge for hardcore players by including hard modes and that sort of thing.
Stormwind Cathedral
What sort of creative inspiration guided the team during the development of World of Warcraft?

I'd say the earlier MMOs had the strongest influence as far as interest in the genre. So much of the creation of World of Warcraft is a result of the fact that the team at the time was playing MMOs, was super invested in the game-type, and felt that it was an untapped genre -- there were games out there that had done well, but we felt they could be done so much better.
The team's gone from 15-20 people to 140 today -- what does that change mean for you?

When we launched the game, the team was around 65 people. It felt like a really big team even then, but at this point, it's an operation. The most significant change is that we deliver more content than we ever did before. If you look at the patches that we did early on in the game's life cycle, the first patch had Mauradon, and that was it -- one 5-person instance that was already half-done when we shipped the game! We went from that to Dire Maul, which was aggressive at the time because there was Dire Maul East and West! We've gotten a lot more efficient, our tools have gotten better, and we've just got a lot more experience. Internally, the dynamics of team communication changed, too. When you are a smaller team, located in a physically smaller area, communication gets easier in a lot of ways. Now, we have to be more careful to make sure that parts of the team just aren't off on an island, that everyone gets their feedback heard, that we talk to people on a regular basis, and that the team doesn't become these separate pods of people who don't really talk to each other much.
Is there an old-world relic that you're particularly excited for, an aspect of the old-school game that you're looking forward to bringing back?

Yeah, I'm really excited to return to Blackrock Mountain. We're redoing some of it, and adding some new instances like Blackwing Descent. For me, Blackrock Mountain was one of those really defining experiences in World of Warcraft's history -- so many players went there for endgame content, whether for lower or upper Blackrock Spire, or Blackwing Lair -- it was the hotbed of player activity. It's such a geographically significant element of World of Warcraft -- a huge lava-filled mountain. It felt really epic.
Is there any interest in recreating some of the old-school community classics? Corrupted blood, Tarren Mill v. Southshore, etc.

Well, Corrupted Blood, for example, we took that concept and did the zombie invasion with it. The Zombie Invasion was the deliberate version, whereas Corrupted Blood was an accident, where we were like, "whoah, what happened?" But it gave us the inspiration to do the Zombie Invasion, and there's a good chance that we'll do something along those gameplay mechanic lines in the future. As far as Tarren Mill and Southshore, that type of PvP is part of the inspiration for things like Lake Wintergrasp, but we think it will further evolve in Cataclysm with Tol Barad. Every now and again, too, we try to light it up a bit between Tarren Mill and Southshore with things like the Hallow's End event. Those player-driven experiences definitely continue to have ripple effects on our design.
Grass and Gnolls
If you could go back the beginning of World of Warcraft's development, to the very start in 1999, before you'd even joined the team, is there anything you'd change dramatically?

I would probably want to change earlier the philosophy of how we approach the creation of endgame content -- I'd want to deliver content with more types of players in mind. That's probably the only philosophical change -- obviously, I'd love to have seen the game launch with Battlegrounds and Arenas and all the cool stuff we have today, but that's kind of cheating the question.
What do you think the legacy of World of Warcraft will be for the development community and culture in general?

" ...We broadened the audience by making the game accessible and capturing people's imaginations."

I think that World of Warcraft proved that an MMO can be done on a large scale -- that you can have success with an MMO outside of a niche market or genre. Before World of Warcraft, there was a perception that MMOs were smaller, side projects with pretty good money in them if they were done well, but they'd never be mainstream, really big like a console game. More than anything else, that will be World of Warcraft's lasting legacy -- how we broadened the audience by making the game accessible and capturing people's imaginations.
So, last question -- you've been working on this game for six years of your life -- what's been the high point for you?

It's hard to identify any single high point. The ones that stick out the most are the product launches. Launching World of Warcraft, launching The Burning Crusade and launching Wrath of the Lich King were the big ones. As far as high points within patches, the introduction of Battlegrounds was really cool -- I still remember to this day the first day that we launched Battlegrounds. When you think back to how PvP worked before Battlegrounds, how it was just kind of random and unstructured, there was no particular "point" to it -- you didn't get anything for winning, there was no sense of satisfaction outside of "ha, I killed that guy," and compare that to going into Alterac Valley or Warsong Gulch for the first time, actually playing them live and then seeing the response to it, even by people who might be jaded by it now, but at the time, when it was fresh and new, having people come out and say "my God, that was so fun," or "that's the most fun I've ever had in World of Warcraft," it totally changed the scope of the game. It really introduced a type of gameplay that didn't exist before that.
Tom, thanks for your time -- we really appreciate it!