It's anecdote time again! Former 3D level designer John Staats is responsible for many dungeons of the vanilla era, has written a diary about the development of World of Warcraft and has been sharing insider stories from his time at Blizzard on Wowhead for quite some time.

The

latest anecdote is about the chaotic production of the first trailer for WoW.

Specifically, John Staats' story is actually about the trailer that was supposed to accompany the announcement of World of Warcraft (buy now €14.99 ) at the European Computer Trade Show in London (ECTS) in 2001. The developers were keen to show in-game scenes without giving too much away straight away. They had to consider the early version of the game, wanted to save big battle scenes for a later trailer, but of course wanted to deliver something cool.

However, the in-game shoot itself was very chaotic. Just getting a dozen characters to run down a hill was a nerve-wracking challenge. Sometimes employees missed their assignment and didn't start running at all, sometimes communication failed because not everyone involved was connected via a hands-free device. Suddenly, an employee flew out of the game and couldn't log back in, and no one knew exactly when he or she would be available again. As in filmmaking, waiting is part of the day-to-day business of producing such a game trailer ..

.The

fact that the production of this trailer took several days was also due to other factors. For example, after reviewing the final footage, the developers realized that they needed a smoother movement of the camera. The frame rate of WoW was high enough, but the in-game camera was designed for playing and not for recording. It took the programmers some time to implement a camera that could be operated with a joystick. Other shots were too dark because the person responsible forgot to set the time of day in the game before the "action" announcement.

A

lot of work also went into the screenshots that were to be released in parallel

.

The developers knew that fans, the press and the industry would scrutinize every inch. So that's exactly what the Blizzard veterans did. They tried to show as few of the Warcraft 3 icons that were still in use at the time as possible. In addition, the images should also only reveal certain things about the game. The developers had learned from the PR mistakes of Diablo 2: When the game was released, too much was already known about it.

Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham was then the one who took down the final screenshots

.

His comment: "I would give anything to see the faces of the people in the Everquest office when they see these screenshots. You guys should be proud of what you've created here. "

More anecdotes from John Staats

:
  • Vanilla dev John Staats raves about Crunch and the great WoW team
  • How Nomad's mistakes turned into vanilla WoW
  • Blizzard was afraid of the lousy MMO competition
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