Alexander

“It was fair to say almost everyone was burned out by now. Morale was so low that the team, as a whole, didn’t crunch. The artists didn’t need to review their work in meetings anymore because everyone had the Warcraft look-and-feel down; they just moved from one art task to the next. Programming inched forward, mole-like, worrying only about the task immediately in front of them. Releasing the game in February didn’t look likely anymore. That meant more time crunching and bug hunting, and few were happy at the prospect. The game designers had the functionality they needed, but wowedit’s tools weren’t streamlined because David Ray had been reassigned to working on the god tool, an application that would be used by our GMs for in-game customer support. Most of the designers were too busy to socialize. The classes and combat were getting overhauled again, and the item system was getting revisited by adding procedurally created items to keep the loot tables feeling fresh. This meant possible delays for the friends-and-family alpha test, and everyone was tired of telling their nearest and dearest that our game wasn’t ready to play yet (and that they’d be the first to know when it was). Even the producers had resigned themselves to the fact that we wouldn’t be shipping in the first quarter of 2004. They were seeing stability problems, and we were having a hard time getting a playable build. This made things especially hard for the game designers, who needed to test their data, but no one was really coming down on the programmers, as they were already haggard. Nevertheless, when the game crashed, people were getting visibly upset. Our shipping date was pushed to June, although some people doubted even that was possible.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“A couple of coworkers and I went to see the movie Collateral one evening. When we came back to the office around 11:00 (to go back to work), we ran into Chris Metzen sitting in the hallway. Upper management was making an effort to stay late with the team to show solidarity, and tonight was Chris’s night. He was playing the new beta and preparing for the final boss fight in Gnomeregan. Dungeon crawls were far more intense than anything he was used to, and he told the people standing behind his desk that he actually felt nervous before the fight. “Dude, my heart is pumping so hard right now, I’m gonna have a fucking heart attack. Just look at my hands, they’re shaking. I’ve never been so nervous about a game before this!” As his party prepared to fight the Gnomeregan end boss monster, Mekgineer Thermaplugg, Chris typed, “Remember guys, he’s just a gnome!” After a heated battle, Chris died screaming, seconds before the boss collapsed. This was before players received postmortem credit for kills, so Chris couldn’t complete his dungeon quest. He was so disappointed, he immediately went home. When I told Jeff what had happened the next morning, he laughed and replied, “Ouch. That really sucks. We should give kill-credit to everyone in the party, dead or alive.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“Gameplay trumps everything, and finding fun is more important than conventional wisdom, licensing trends, publicity, analytics, innovation, monetization, or any other facet of the entertainment business. If fun was expensive to find then so be it.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development

“The list of intended features was long and seemingly unrealistic for a team so fatigued by the past years’ effort—but they all sounded like good ideas. The producer’s schedule was a bit ambitious, but the September 15 deadline was the first hard date the team had ever discussed…however, we still couldn’t tell if we were near the top of the mountain or if there was yet another rise over the ridge. One thing was true: We were exhausted and sick of WoW. We worked on it all day, played the test on weekends, and talked about it over every lunch and dinner. When we talked to someone outside the company, it was often the only topic of conversation they were interested in. It was decided for the last two weeks of February the team would work only forty hours a week—late nights would return again in March. But some were working those hours anyway. For the most part, morale was low among half of the employees. Some were doubting that our workload would subside after shipping, because there would be so many bugs to fix and pressure to create more content. With the game still unfinished, and with the imminent expansions and live updates ahead, we were beginning to wonder if we were ever going to reach a conclusion. The team’s spirits were somewhat buoyed by the enthusiasm of the design staff, who were coming in to work on weekends. But even the designers agreed that they never wanted to work on another MMO. They were just too hard and too risky, and took too much time and effort to make.”
― John Staats, The World of Warcraft Diary: A Journal of Computer Game Development