Phone from Irvine, Calif lwa: or we meaning had a tour at Blizzard, the gameontwikkelaar which include World of Warcraft and Starcraft? Well… Report of a visit to a company where just not crazy enough.
About 1500 tours think guide Lindsey now to have given: for her it is almost daily work. I’m, however, not so often at Blizzard Entertainment on the floor, and am therefore quite curious as to what they may show of the studio in Irvine, a suburb of Los Angeles.
It is pretty amazing that Blizzard someone in service that offers guided visits. I have a lot of studios visited, but know of no other developer on this way. Blizzard was not the first the best, but the studio in the last few years also has grown significantly. A mmog requires a larger team than the average edition of Diablo or StarCraft, so since the work on World of Warcraft started, the workforce has grown significantly. By now there are around 1200 people, but not all games work. A part of the people plays a supporting role: as a part of the customer support for North America in Irvine, including the Game Masters of World of Warcraft.
Precisely on the day of our visit, the work completed on the huge image in the middle of the campus. It is a picture of an Orc on a ferocious snarling wolf drive. The copper image is beautiful, but the rosette where the image is at rest I think is actually impressive. On the eight points of the escutcheon are the values written that the Blizzard staff should respect. Including slogans like ‘Every voice counts’ and ‘Gameplay first’, but the most beautiful is perhaps ‘Embrace you inner geek.’ It is not just a slogan: Blizzard attaches real value to the staff of nerdy stuff. There are regular nights are held in which the personnel board games, playing or trading card games. I met a woman who me proudly, she tells them that a G1 has, because it is a geeky phone, with Android on it. No iPhone for her, which is much too mainstream.
In the small Blizzard-museum where Lindsey will bring us, there are quite a lot of awards that the games of Blizzard over the years have been given, but other stuff I find interesting. So there are all the books on the games of Blizzard are written, and there is a letter from an astronaut that his copy of Starcraft on his space trip had taken. Not that he could play, but he had the game during his training many played online with his family, and the game made it to home thinking. Also in the museum: the script of the episode of Southpark about World of Warcraft, and in all of the 31 versions.
After the museum we will go to the department of WoW, where working on expansion for the game. The office of Blizzard is so arranged that there are roughly every thirty employees and a lounge-corner, and to the number of games and consoles to see which places regularly used. Most of the workspaces are richly decorated, with here and there a ferocious metal sword or shield on the wall.
Also the decoration of the hallways on the WoW-department. As designs Blizzard for every content patch of WoW wallpaper, that here, on two by three meters magnified, is found. Smaller, but more impressive are the tft screens that are throughout the building in the corridors. Those screens show a map of the world, where tiny colored dots the activity of WoW players in the various parts of the world. Each dot is a logged-in player, and so can the staff throughout the day the activity shifted from Asia to Europe to USA and back to Asia. On the map are clearly the major urban areas in Japan, China, Western Europe and the USA are distinguishable.
Starcraft II is made in another building on the campus. In that building is also the nerve center of WoW: the refrigerated space from which 24 hours a day, 365 days per year all WoW servers all over the world in the holes. The Starcraft course are less elaborately decorated than those in the WoW department, but the workstations are just so full with games, action figures and other geeky stuff. After all, that is a condition… Also here we can unfortunately only from the corridors and see how they work, even though I would but what would like to on the monitors want to peek to see what the people are doing. Perhaps it is also good that we at a distance have to stay: the employees would otherwise but have to be derived, and Starcraft II is already so long in development. Of course, we don’t get to see everything: the part of the building where the still unannounced mmog working, is, for understandable reasons, not been included. Would that be hidden behind the sign ‘Project Hydra’ that we are on a carefully closed door encounter?
Fortunately Lindsey us still what to show, such as the cinema of Blizzard, a hall with fifty seats, where not only movies can be shown, but also the games through Battle.net be played. We get a number of oefenpotjes to see between Matt Cooper and David Kim, the two regular testers who do nothing else than Starcraft II play against each other, with the aim of testing and eventually improving the balance in the game. Starcraft II’s lead designer Dustin Browder is present in the chamber to the matches live commentary, just like in the Battle Reports that Blizzard releases. Between the businesses to let Browder get a glimpse of the new Battle.net see. That makes impression, and Tweakers.net hopes soon to be expanded on Battle.net to come back. The jars between Cooper and Kim appear to be just as exciting as the ones in the Battle Reports, and make me painfully obvious that I’m in the Starcraft II league, never the top. The room is also a number of Blizzard employees, that the jars between Kim and Cooper with great interest follow. Loud round of applause when Cooper two times in a row, Kim knows how to defeat: that has never happened. After this demonstration of sleight of hand sends Browder us to the pc’s where we have Starcraft II to play. Happy with each other and not against Kim or Cooper.
