GameDevMike

Raph Koster did everyone a favor and transcribed Rob Pardo’s AGC Keynote speech. Rob is the VP of Design at Blizzard and has been with the company a long while. The topic of his speech was the design process behind World of Warcraft. He touches on several different ideas on what makes WoW and all of Blizzard’s games successful.

One of the things that struck me was something Rob called “concentrated coolness”. I’ve blogged before about tips from Steve Streeting and Raph Koster which relate to the importance of setting boundaries in software design. Rob’s “concentrated coolness” is another application of that same concept. His specific example is the design of the classes in WoW. It would have been easy to have a number of classes with overlapping features. Instead, they concentrated the class ideas into fewer classes in order to make each class as unique as possible.

Concentrated coolness. What this means is, rather than make variety and lots of things to do, make fewer things really cool. The best example in woW is the class system. Lots of games have more classes, multiclassing, etc. We consciously avoided that in order to make each class as cool and different from the others as possible. This allowed us to have unique spells, abilities and mechanics. No red fireball, white fireball, blue fireball, etc. Even the two pet classes, hunters and warlocks, use their pets completely differently. We consciously avoided sharing mechanics across classes.

The speech is full of great ideas and advice. Anyone interested in game design tips, or specifically in Blizzard’s design process, should give this a read. And give Raph a big thanks for typing it up and posting it for us.

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