World of Warcraft: Retrospective

The Numbers Game

In fact, the game surpassed all expectations from anybody internally - while 1 million users was the ambitious target for peak subscriptions that's been mentioned before, company president was even more optimistic. Mike Morhaime confidently predicted that 4 million people would one day be playing World of Warcraft, says Sams. "Mike was far and away the most optimistic, which is why he gets paid the big bucks and is the founder of the company, because he knew it was going to be bigger that all of us did.

"But it was even bigger than he expected - it's been quite an experience, and one that's very humbling to all of us, that we've been able to create something that would have the kind of appeal, following and impact that it's ultimately had. It's been incredible for us."

Since launch over five years ago World of Warcraft has pulled in unprecedented levels of subscription revenue and undoubtedly transformed the way that people view persistent online worlds.

Other companies have been and gone, while others still remain - but none have yet come close to the worldwide success that Blizzard's game has enjoyed. A big part of staying ahead of the competition has been the ongoing development that's happened post-launch, and anybody who played the game in its early days would notice the changes in design philosophy that have occurred in subsequent patches and expansions.

"We're always asking which areas of the game do we need to focus on, what are the issues with the players, or what do the players need more of?" explains Pardo. "We're always looking at that.

"Certainly if you look at Burning Crusade I think a lot of what we focused on there was the end-game content - where you drag your character through those ten levels, we really weren't planning on people staying in that for too long, so we had to really focus on the end-game content, the raid content, the 10-man dungeons, bringing down the raid cap from 40 people to 25... those sorts of things were the big things.

"Once you go forward to Lich King we introduced stuff like the phasing technology to try to create more of a dynamic world.

"And then also with the patches, there are some that are a little more focused towards casual gameplay, there are some that are aimed at PvP - so there's never just one thing. We sit down whenever we're doing a patch or a feature and really try to plan out whether we want to focus it on PvP and raids, PvP and casual, is it more of a five-man dungeon patch... we're always looking at that focus, because the reality is that we can't do it all with every patch and expansion. We need to focus, to make sure we can do a great job."

The Road Goes Ever On?

When World of Warcraft was first released I remember asking one of the lead designers, Shane Dabiri, how long the game would last. Back then his answer was that they could keep expanding the content for "five, 10, 20 years to come."

Now we've passed that first milestone and the third expansion - Cataclysm - is on the horizon, but with no firm release date, and those words could yet prove true.

So, finally, what about some fond memories of the game itself? Funnily enough, both Sams and Pardo give similar answers.

"I've played with my friends a lot, but in recent times my sons are starting to play, so being able to do that with them has been a lot of fun," says Sams. "Have them go to BlizzCon with me, to see what dad does, and see the enthusiasm in their faces about World of Warcraft. I have them asking me every day if they can play once they've gotten their homework done - and that's been something that's been pretty exciting to me to be able to see.

"It's one thing to be able to see how Blizzard games have affected me, or my friends - but it's much closer to home to see your kids being totally geeked out on what your company does too, to see how much fun they have with that. That's probably one of my more special memories."

And Pardo echoes that sentiment directly: "One of the things for me from years of playing WoW is playing it a lot with my daughter. She's ten years old now, but I remember when we were first playing a lot of it together and she was six, maybe seven, and she was playing a warlock... Here was this little girl, and we were doing Scarlet Monastery together and she was doing a great job on crowd control, off-mobs, helping with DPS.

"It was so much fun with the two of us, brought together, playing Scarlet Monastery in WoW - and there are probably ten or twenty other memories like that."