Design Philosophy of WoW: What Makes You Stick? |
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Rob Pardo, one of TIME Magazine's recent Top 100, gave the keynote in the on-going Austin Game Conference. Being the lead designer for the World of Warcraft, he used their company's design philosophy to illustrate what it takes to maximize a game's appeal to the wider market. Because in a large game-developing company like Blizzard, you have to make sure that all your designers are sticking to the company's design philosophy across all of your games. And what exactly is it for Blizzard?A donut.
Well, not literally, of course. But Rob Pardo explained how Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham used the donut as an example for their market. And he states: "The middle represents the core market. As the donut grows, it's increasingly important that your game is accessible to both [core and the casual gamers]."
In the gaming design arm of the company, one of their mantras is "easy to learn, hard to master". And they build on that philosophy. Because as a designer, your game should be very approachable to gamers (whether noob or hardcore) and easy to learn. Of course, the game must remain a challenge. What Rob Pardo asks is "What is going to attract players to the game, and keep them there for two, three years? How are we going to make this approachable, easy to learn?"
We see that making a game "easily approachable" and "hard to master" at the same time is a very hard thing to balance out. But with Blizzard's successful line up of games, we can see that they've pretty much gotten the equation down pat. Well, for what it's worth, personally, I think the Draenei Female Dance is enough to make me stick to the game.
2 Jumps Play World of Warcraft Offline
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