kip/bot/blog

Yet another immensely useful link from business thinking sherpa Todd, this time about how Blizzard software stays innovative. The list is interesting, if unsurprising:

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own products
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different kinds of customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics boulster experience
9. Demand excellence, or you’ll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

Blizzard is the creator of Diablo and World of Warcraft, two games to which I have given many, many hours of my life. They are also two games in which a sense of place has really taken root. Just last night I twittered:

Elwynn Forest is where I started my first character. When I bought a horse, at level 40, I travelled all the way back to Elwynn Forest for it, “local boy makes good” and all that.

A street sign that I saw with a fun graffiti prompted me to write “mmmmm, fresh meat”, a line from a character called the Butcher in Diablo (one which players often heard too often, since this was a tough, hard-to-beat, mid-game boss).

And finally, screenshots with amusing sense of places, like this labor dispute that I had walked into:

The article focuses on WoW, which has been the focus of the company’s efforts for several years. There were some fun bits, such as how the “Samurai panda” managed to put off both Chinese and Japanese players, the heavy emphasis on working with high level and low-level players (probably WoW’s greatest strength), and the way in which they specialize:

At Blizzard, small teams focus on narrow elements of the game. For example, different teams of artists specialize in trees, rocks, the game environment, and monsters, said lead producer Brack.

Multi-disciplinary “strike teams” serve as critics of how the different aspects of the game work together.

Point number 8, about the stats, is also interesting. WoW is constantly being tweaked to maintain game balance and players are keenly aware of, and generally glad for the game balancing. Blizzard has character class committees that meet regularly to decide if a character’s skills, equipment, and attributes are too strong or weak in comparison to other players. Patches, which happen with great frequency and remarkable ease, frequently “nerf” or weaken a class attribute that has proven too strong or easy in the field. Blizzard also spends a great deal of time watching emergent gameplay to see what players are doing that they hadn’t planned or expected . . . creating a nice feedback system to get creative ideas.

But, I think it’s really important to point out the level of focus Blizzard has. It has a very narrow range of game types and titles and works to make them incredibly good. Anyone who has played RPGs before WoW is regularly impressed at how they’ve improved nearly every mechanic of the genre — the quests are fun, funny, and interesting; resource collecting and skill acquisition are generally fun; major things like the introduction of a mount or a class item/skill come at just the right time; and exploration and paying close attention to things (like the plane crash in the fly-over to IronForge) always pays off. WoW is also does an amazing job of combining directed activity with emergent gameplay. They’ve picked a genre — RPG — and chosen to do it really, really, absurdly well.

A few other companies have hit the billion dollar mark with a similar focus. Rockstar Games started with the memorable insight that not all gamers read Lord of the Rings, some of them watched Goodfellas, and Bioware just wanted to bring the AD&D game system to the computer.