What made WoW environments so compelling is that were very stylized and deliberately not "realistic". If you look back at the history of games that focus on photorealism they date really quickly as the tech moves on yet WoW's aesthetic is much more timeless.
Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.
Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.
For the environment design aspect, I'd add that in the earlier iterations of the game something that inadvertently added a lot of appeal was the somewhat "organic" nature of zone composition, where there wasn't a 1:1 match between what the quest writers needed and what got put on the game map.
There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.
This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.
The term for this is "conveyor belt content". And yes, this took off in WotLK, probably in big part due to the achievement system. Why? This replaced player agency in determining content with a Blizzard-supplied checklist and the effects of this flowed on to map design (IMHO).
The character animation was also significantly better than what was typical at the time even in, say, an AAA FPS, which helped immersion. The travel system by flight both helped hide loading delays and provided an opportunity to show off the environment from a different vantage point, a kind of pre-programmed vista showcase.
Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.
Flight paths also offered some nice foreshadowing. When flying from Ironforge to Stormwind, which many alliance players would often do, you fly over Burning Steppes, a very high level zone. A menacing music starts to play, a brown fog covers everything around you, there's lava, dragons, the zone looks "scary" but also exciting. Makes you want to play so that you can go there and explore it for yourself.
It's interesting to compare the early super-military look for tf2 to the zany cartoon version they wound up with. Their original plan would have looked old within a year or two, but tf2 still looks great today.
> Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.
Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
> Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.
I’ve not found an MMO that feels as smooth as WoW to play the character, and honestly it’s not even close. Nobody has even approached WoW’s crispness of gameplay, almost seemingly because nobody has really even tried, and I wonder why that is.
I like ESO better in "smoothness". WoW combat feels a little bit clunky in comparison, especially in chaotic trash fights with multiple targets. I find it very frustrating when I can't attack just because my selected enemy moved to my side, even though there are 5 other targets standing right before me. Stacking nameplates doesn't help, making the position of a nameplate unrelated to the position of an enemy (but if you turn off stacking, you'll have trouble selecting the right enemy).
In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.
That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.
The Warhammer MMO was very close on a number of these key fronts - especially style and good gameplay feel.
It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.
Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).
Yeah, I played for about a year during the original release and haven't played since but I still go back and listen to some of the tracks as ambient background music while programming and often times they trigger nice memories.
It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.
I met a good friend through playing Counter Strike before social networks were universal, 2003-2005 or so. Early 2000s gaming felt (or I remember feeling) a lot different. Match making wasn't prevalent in PC games yet. You would play on different servers til you found you like. Then you would get to know the other players are form deeper relationships that I haven't had since then. I haven't really met any friends in Counter Strike after it implemented match making in CS:GO.
I was always annoyed by the loading screen when moving by boat between west and east continents.
I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.
Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.
These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.
I expect the loading screen was in large part to there being no smooth transition when sailing from one continent to another.
WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).
I think the tram had to be fake given the actual world geometry. If you consider where the tram should be it makes no sense. Well that, or they had to totally change the world to accommodate it or give it a very strange path.
The tram loading screen could have been an engine limitation. Streaming the game world from disk works nicely if the player moves at a pace that is slow enough that the disk can keep up. Long range teleportation breaks that assumption completely. You can deal with that case in two ways: accept a loading screen or build teleportation support into the streaming system, which means that both ends of the teleporter need to be loaded at once if you walk up to it. I assume that Blizzard decided against all that complexity deep in the engine for a single use case.
I think it's because you can't load assets from the entire game world in main memory, so when you go to a new zone it'll load assets from disk (slowly).
Not only was he an environment/dungeon/zone designer, but he recorded so much about the games development in the alpha stages. One of my favorite tidbits was how they worked to optimize the game for 56k back then. They got it to work extremely well with just a couple Kb/s!
Though not dial-up, my internet at the time was still very slow and the servers were a very long way away, so I routinely played with a ping of 600-1000ms with no issues at all. WoW and Guild Wars were about the only online games that worked, come to think of it. On behalf of 13-year-old me, I thank him for his efforts.
You can't just discuss WoW environments without bringing up sound design and weather effects. Graphics are merely one aspect of why WoW felt like a world.
Ever been to the Shimmering Flats in old WoW? How about at night?[1] It's an entirely different feel (and then you know why they call it shimmering). It's an amazing experience to go from day to night in WoW. Your friends might drop off for the day. You're just alone in this vast quiet world. And it rains. Or you enter a tavern and it feels warm thanks to the welcoming music. How about Duskwood during Halloween? This one game can evoke so many different feelings depending on which zone you're in, what time of day it is, and what weather effects are going on.
When making a game world, there are many parameters you can tweak. One of them is the distance between points of interest. I think WoW struck a good balance between short distances (where the game feels like a casino or theme park, where everywhere you look there's some quest or shiny item begging for your attention) and long distances (where the player might get bored pressing the W key to move forward). It actually fell a bit of the "long distance" side, and it did this by keeping the environments grounded in reality.
But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!)
Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness.
Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).
I doubt I'll ever feel the wonder I felt from those first months of classic WOW. I started as a NElf, and those environments still feel kind of homey to me, even all these years later.
I played off and on for about 9 or 10 years, and then stopped. The game evolved past what I enjoyed, which was mostly in-world advancement with friends. I was never much of an endgame player.
Glance at the thread has me surprised (I think) nobody has brought it up, but by far one of the strongest aspects of WoW's environments is the fact that they tie in with the lore of the game.
WoW environments are not just generic, they reflect and take place in stories that people have loved for many years even before WoW came around. the very first place that came to mind reading that article was the entrance to Undercity where you can hear, if you have the audio loud enough, scenes from Arthas Betrayal in WC3.
Many places in WoW have genuine weight, they feel like real historical places in a way. This is what makes them memorable. You do not have this attachment at all in any modern MMO were most people just click through the cinematics.
> You do not have this attachment at all in any modern MMO were most people just click through the cinematics.
I have a bit of the opposite opinion. The story in WoW for me felt very half-baked. I wanted to read the quest text, but usually it was kind of dull. The overarching story was at once overly complicated and a boring mess. Despite putting hundreds of hours into that game, I don’t think I really care about any of the characters in the story.
In comparison, the writing in FFXIV (another, more recent MMO) is a masterpiece. I cried several times through the main story quest. I don’t think I’ve ever cried before in a video game. Unfortunately the best writing is the most recent part of the story - and to get to it you need to play all the previous expansions first.
But World of Warcraft makes much better use of its world. Especially before they added flying, the world really felt like a place you explored and were present in. It has geography, that you need to learn as you play. And it takes time to move from place to place. WoW really invites a sense of wonder and curiosity as you explore the world. There’s always something interesting over the next ridge. And it might be a monster that eats you. It was a delight.
Despite its rough edges, wow is still a work of art. I’d love to work on something like that at some point in my career.
It’s funny you say that. I thought the overarching story was pretty straightforward and simple in the original game, including the RTS games. Warcraft 3 did add some extra elements to it, which were carried over into WoW, but it felt like lots of small stories. There really wasn’t a single, cohesive overarching story in the original WoW. Only now in modern WoW do we have these grandiose, trans-cosmos, overly complicated storylines that retcon everything that’s happened.
I remember playing through Morrowind. It was my first Elder Scrolls game, and I got entranced by the in-game history books about a character called Jagar Tharn. They were deep and convincing in a way I'd never seen in atmosphere-setting content before, it really felt like I was reading about real events.
Turns out, Jagar Tharn was a major character in an earlier game in the series, and the histories more-or-less recounted the plot of that earlier game.
I think you're right that that referencing of earlier stories really carries a lot of weight, but I don't think the player even has to be familiar with those stories to profit from them. The very fact that they are "real" stories and places that exist outside of that game I think allows the designers to treat them more convincingly, more engagingly.
Not all of WOW is very compelling and I wish the author had taken his admittedly unscientific ranking and examined different zones to see what would come out on top. Especially in Vanilla there were a lot of grindy areas and depending on which faction you chose you would have a radically different early game experience. The Orc, Tauren, Dwarf, and Undead starting areas I remember being pretty boring and it seemed like a lot more care was put into the Night Elves and Human areas.
The best environments were generally in the mid game where the developers seemed to have the most leeway in what they were building theme wise. Once you got to the end game it became very grindy and the environments were not so compelling. Everything became volcanic, lots of generic evil and vistas of browns.
Having said all that - I think the real reason it was so compelling was the community. It hit at just the right time where everyone was finally coming online and there weren't many other games of the same quality level pulling people away. It was a well designed game and everyone seemed to be playing it. I only spent so much time there because it was where I could reliably chat up friends. The few people I know who are still playing it today only do so because of their guild.
I remember the first time going into Ironforge, and being immersed completely like nothing else before or since.
Even my first Oculus did not beat that.
I'm not sure what it was. The graphics were far from ground breaking. There were other games with big worlds. But I think the combination of world building, graphics, scale, and quality of execution (nailing the style) just completely shattered the level of anything else that came before - or at least for so many people that played the game.
The reasoning for the difference in complexity of the Alliance vs Horde starting areas (and lategame areas) in Vanilla was discussed somewhere (don't have a source handy). The artists and other creators started with the Human and Night Elf areas and created the elaborate areas you reference. Once they realized how long it took to do those areas and that they would never be able to meet the release deadline if they took the same amount of time and effort for other areas it became much more of a copy-paste job.
Indeed, if you ever pull up the earliest alpha screenshots where WoW is recognizable as the game that got released, the very first zones that were worked on were Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Duskwood, and Stranglethorn Vale and that was very apparent in Vanilla.
Some areas were also just unfinished. The stories/quest-lines just simply ended. For example Dustwallow Marsh suddenly ends, and while you do go back that for one of the first raids (Ony) it is largely disconnected from the zone itself.
WoW Classic had this stuff in spades. Areas that were masterpieces (Tanaris, WPL, EPL, Human/Dwarf starting, et al) and areas (and ideas) seriously neglected or forgotten. Most of the content added in patches was fairly high quality though, they just seemingly focused their attention on that end-game instead or revamping since "most players have levelled passed that."
My first character was a Night Elf. You can never capture that first experience of playing WoW. Starting out in Shadowglen and growing to the point I could reach Darnassus is simply the best gaming experience I've ever had. Then you realize that you're just on a tiny island and there is an entire world to explore beyond what you have just witnessed. I never thought you could experience actual awe in a video game before that. And I have never had that experience since then.
Graphic design played a large role, I'd guess. Warcraft imagery had this unique mix of cartoon, fantasy, and realistic in a way that most of its successors (and even later versions of WoW itself couldn't match. Plus, the open world aspect of it was the first time many players had ever encountered something like it. There were loading screens only for dungeons and continents. You could walk, run, or ride in Azeroth for hours without anything from outside intruding on the experience.
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Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.
Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.
There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.
This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.
Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.
Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.
Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.
In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.
That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.
It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.
Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).
It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.
I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.
Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.
These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.
WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).
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Not only was he an environment/dungeon/zone designer, but he recorded so much about the games development in the alpha stages. One of my favorite tidbits was how they worked to optimize the game for 56k back then. They got it to work extremely well with just a couple Kb/s!
Ever been to the Shimmering Flats in old WoW? How about at night?[1] It's an entirely different feel (and then you know why they call it shimmering). It's an amazing experience to go from day to night in WoW. Your friends might drop off for the day. You're just alone in this vast quiet world. And it rains. Or you enter a tavern and it feels warm thanks to the welcoming music. How about Duskwood during Halloween? This one game can evoke so many different feelings depending on which zone you're in, what time of day it is, and what weather effects are going on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEM4xVhDAjI
But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!)
Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness.
Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).
Every area had a specific theme and lore to it, which connected to other areas and the overarching story.
What worked best for these environments were the memories of early multiplayer for me.
It's easy to forget how old school the graphics are yet my memories of Tarren Mill and the first beginnings of PVP are still very vivid.
Same with the first server event with Ahn'Qiraj (which in my opinion had some of the best design in the whole game).
I played off and on for about 9 or 10 years, and then stopped. The game evolved past what I enjoyed, which was mostly in-world advancement with friends. I was never much of an endgame player.
WoW environments are not just generic, they reflect and take place in stories that people have loved for many years even before WoW came around. the very first place that came to mind reading that article was the entrance to Undercity where you can hear, if you have the audio loud enough, scenes from Arthas Betrayal in WC3.
Many places in WoW have genuine weight, they feel like real historical places in a way. This is what makes them memorable. You do not have this attachment at all in any modern MMO were most people just click through the cinematics.
I have a bit of the opposite opinion. The story in WoW for me felt very half-baked. I wanted to read the quest text, but usually it was kind of dull. The overarching story was at once overly complicated and a boring mess. Despite putting hundreds of hours into that game, I don’t think I really care about any of the characters in the story.
In comparison, the writing in FFXIV (another, more recent MMO) is a masterpiece. I cried several times through the main story quest. I don’t think I’ve ever cried before in a video game. Unfortunately the best writing is the most recent part of the story - and to get to it you need to play all the previous expansions first.
But World of Warcraft makes much better use of its world. Especially before they added flying, the world really felt like a place you explored and were present in. It has geography, that you need to learn as you play. And it takes time to move from place to place. WoW really invites a sense of wonder and curiosity as you explore the world. There’s always something interesting over the next ridge. And it might be a monster that eats you. It was a delight.
Despite its rough edges, wow is still a work of art. I’d love to work on something like that at some point in my career.
Turns out, Jagar Tharn was a major character in an earlier game in the series, and the histories more-or-less recounted the plot of that earlier game.
I think you're right that that referencing of earlier stories really carries a lot of weight, but I don't think the player even has to be familiar with those stories to profit from them. The very fact that they are "real" stories and places that exist outside of that game I think allows the designers to treat them more convincingly, more engagingly.
Having said all that - I think the real reason it was so compelling was the community. It hit at just the right time where everyone was finally coming online and there weren't many other games of the same quality level pulling people away. It was a well designed game and everyone seemed to be playing it. I only spent so much time there because it was where I could reliably chat up friends. The few people I know who are still playing it today only do so because of their guild.
One second I was sitting at my computer watching a loading bar, and the next I was standing in a vast winter wonderland
That's not even saying anything about Ironforge..
Even my first Oculus did not beat that.
I'm not sure what it was. The graphics were far from ground breaking. There were other games with big worlds. But I think the combination of world building, graphics, scale, and quality of execution (nailing the style) just completely shattered the level of anything else that came before - or at least for so many people that played the game.
I think the background score adds to the effect.
I can never forget the surreal feeling when logging into the first time in Elwynn Forest with its iconic music in the background. Very idyllic.
There is something about WoW graphics. Its a right balance between cartoonish and photo-realism.
I remember needing to drop down all my graphics settings just to be able to enter Ironforge.
WoW Classic had this stuff in spades. Areas that were masterpieces (Tanaris, WPL, EPL, Human/Dwarf starting, et al) and areas (and ideas) seriously neglected or forgotten. Most of the content added in patches was fairly high quality though, they just seemingly focused their attention on that end-game instead or revamping since "most players have levelled passed that."