Molten Core. Blackrock Spire. Ahn'Qiraj. If you're a World of Warcraft
player, especially since its launch 15 years ago, those names bring back
a lot of memories. Some painful memories of your party or raid wiping
for hours on end, perhaps. Others are fond memories of a bygone era.
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The man behind many dungeons and raids from the original World of
Warcraft, in addition to the previously mentioned ones, is John Staats.
Although no longer working at Blizzard Entertainment, Staats is credited
as having built some—if not most—of World of Warcraft's cherished
dungeons and areas. Recently, Staats published his first book, The WoW
Diary, which chronicles the development of World of Warcraft.
He moved across the coast to California to work on dungeons and other
areas for Blizzard, which as a former dungeon master for Dungeons &
Dragons, is a dream come true. As a person who enjoyed both architecture
and experience as a former dungeon master, World of Warcraft was a
"nexus of likes" to Staats. As for the team that Blizzard amassed?
“It was a blessing that we had the right programmers. I still think the
programming team was the best team that has ever been assembled, at
least while we were making that team. They were just—every single one of
them was just a rockstar," he said. "They were a department in and of
themselves.”
The massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre was barren at
the time. Designers like Staats drew inspiration from FPS games, with
him citing Quake in particular. The team began with a tool that made
everything far too clunky and rigid, with inflexible geometry, as Staats
descrembed it. But more importantly, the team looked at EverQuest. The
team's aim was not to directly emulate what their potential competitor
already does, but to improve upon it. This was the philosophy of Allen
Adham, one of the founders of Blizzard Entertainment.
"Allen was our design lead up until the last year of the project," said
Staats, "and I remember him saying that, 'World of Warcraft wasn’t going
to be revolutionary; it was going to be evolutionary.’”