about 15 mil iirc. wow budget wasnt that high.
budget comes from voice acting, pixel-perfect graphics… scripting a quest chain and a few mobs is not expensive.
we know MC took a week to make and it launched with placeholder tier 2 items.
Then they added a WM layer that literally put the edge of one layer on top of another making it impossible for me to finish a few quest turn ins because the NPC stood a millimeter outside the WM one. Or I had to complete the non-WM version before I could do it at all. Zulduzar had a few.
2 Likes
Gotta love phasing-sharding-etc hell!
1 Like
those people don’t work there anymore
This just tells us you didn’t play during vanilla. Leveling was quite the ordeal during vanilla. We didn’t have boosts or AOE blizzard mages to do it for us at the time, and paying some Chinese farmer to do it was a good way to get your account stolen and banned.
There were also some pretty solid items in mid range dungeons, especially if you were building some resist sets. But also thrash blade was amazing, so was mark of the chosen (for leveling, or a tank anyway). As I recall the level 50 class quest required Sunken Temple, and some of those items required a fair bit of raiding to replace.
Your example of Deadmines, it was a piece of cake to find a group for. This was kind of the point of leveling where things really started to slow, and forming a group, doing a dungeon, and turning in half a dozen quests ways a great way to get a little boost. Horde tended to skip it, the same way Alliance tended to skip Wailing Caverns though. Maybe that’s the flaw in your perception.
I think Uldaman was probably the worst to get a group for. And even then, enchanters needed to go once in awhile. But this might also be a Horde perspective since I was Horde at the time.
1 Like
I leveled 10 toons in Vanilla. 5 of each faction on Argent Dawn. Started in May 2005.
The example of Deadmines was not saying it was unused, but that it was reused for a later expansion.
My comparison with the leveling dungeons being under used was just my observation. To gear up you needed to run the max lvl dungeons many times.
Of the leveling dungeons I prob only saw each one four times at the most between 8 toons.
/thread 
1 Like
This is one of the things I completely despise about the more recent xpacs. Tons of mobs everywhere.
The worst is ZM with those gd birds and mawsworn constantly attacking you while you’re flying.
Blizz, just gotta make things as annoying as possible.
2 Likes
Vanilla was one big beta test.
Most of the issues were supposedly fixed in TBC & LK.
Great question, something I’ve often wondered but never quite put into words.
I imagine that answer has to do with the amount of polish and complexity that goes into new zones and dungeons. You might combine all the abilities of a dungeon’s bosses in vanilla and end up with the equivalent of one dungeon boss in Shadowlands.
From what I read it took 4-5 years. I’m guessing more 5-6 if original planning is added (AAA game titles take 2-3 years.)
All these reasons make me sad, knowing what the game has been limited too. In half the time it took to make all of vanilla, they can’t make much content for an expansion in 2 years. I guess theres been too many cuts to employment at blizzard to pull off anything decent anymore.
Yeah the older design where mobs were almost always a good distance away from roads was nice. There were exceptions to this “rule” in Vanilla, but they were usually done with the intention of catching the player unaware (think Stitches on the road in Duskwood, or the the group of elite Scarlet Crusade mobs that patrolled the road in Eastern Plaguelands).
1 Like
A long time. They used the Warcraft 3 engine too, so if you want to include that development time into the project too…
A lot of the assets are re-used.
If you played a lot of vanilla you will see that all the caves in the game are selected from like 4 preset templates. Scale is less of an issue when you can copypaste like this.
Not a lot. Blizzard was essentially a start-up when they were coding WoW. Not exactly a start-up since WC3 had commercial success, but they were hardly the billion dollar company they are today. A lot of the higher ups at the time probably only got paid once the title was released and it turned a profit. People like Jeff Kaplan, Tom Chilton, etc. were betting on themselves to produce a product that people would want to buy.
Much smaller.
Go watch Internet Historian’s video on “The Engoodening of No Man’s Sky”.
Blizzard’s development team would have been very similar to Hello Games.
1 Like
Those initial few caves still have their bones reused. They might look a bit different but several of the caves added in BfA and Shadowlands have identical layouts to e.g. the Hillsbrad yeti cave.
1 Like
Something else that changed was the players. People weren’t complaining then near as much as they do now about leveling. I don’t want to say they enjoyed the game more, but with less of an actual endgame, and with Molten Core being a total pain to get a group together for, there wasn’t a huge rush to get to max level.
This also meant the dungeon design philosophy was different. I recommend going back to Classic, maybe starting a TBC-level character, and then visiting old Scholomance or Sunken Temple. Instances are far more direct these days, compared to how they used to be, because players would be up in arms if a regular instance had a mechanic more complicated than “don’t stand in the bad stuff”. (Slight exaggeration.)
1 Like
`https://www.amazon.com/WoW-Diary-Journal-Computer-Development/dp/B07LB927QF
check out this book if youre interested about vanilla development.
Back then I didn’t even know raiding existed until I had been 60 for a few months, and I don’t think that was uncommon. A lot of players were too wrapped up in questing, exploring, doing sub-60 dungeons, gathering, leveling professions, and goofing off with friends doing dumb stuff like raiding crossroads to really care too much. It’s been repeated almost to the point of being trite now, but the whole game was the game instead of just the end, which made raiding one of those things that’d be nice to get around to at some point but not a goal in itself.
Even in TBC and WotLK I ran into players who didn’t do much but serially level alts and run low level dungeons. That didn’t really start tapering off until heirlooms and the generally mentality of fast-tracking to the end that came with those were patched in.
1 Like
This is all ive done in classic since launch. Level alts, get to 60 casually, casually gather and craft pre-bis, farm, level professions, casually pvp, rinse repeat. I’m young age wise (under 30 still) but i still feel like modern WoW has left me behind and has no place for players like me. even tho people always tell me its “”“more casual friendly”“” than vanilla, which i still dont get or see.
EDIT: not trying to turn this into a retail vs classic thing but its something thats stood out to me design philosophy wise.
Yeah I feel you. If they ever add a new server ruleset to Classic that is specifically designed to cheese off speedrunners and cutting edge competitive players so that its community is more chill and “scenic route” I’d play it without question.
1 Like