Blizzard Game Design Philosophy

By Author: KingJ
Total Articles: 43
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Blizzard’s games such as WOW, Starcraft, and Warcraft gain great popularity around the world. Why can blizzard make such big achievements? Blizzard has its own philosophy in designing games. The success of WOW best illustrates the point.
1. Gameplay first. The most important element of designing games should be fun of game play. The first motivation of player’s playing game is to get fun from games. So, game developers should focus on its fun—the fun of design, game system, background and so on. Not only funny to play for developers, also-the most importantly, for gamers. Take the design of night elf for example. Only night elf can select the class of druids in warcraft 3. In order to make the druid class, they should select skills that are accessible to both genders. Then the lore was changed to adjust to both druids.
2. Easy to learn, but difficult to master. If the game is difficult at the beginning, how could players go on playing it? So blizzard should do something to make the game easier at the beginning, such as adding more items, making upgrading easier. Only the game is interesting and ...
... attractive will it leads to players’ further playing. Besides, blizzard provides detailed instructions. Even if you are a green hand, you are able to grasp it quickly. When players reach to a lvl such as 60, they feel rather uneasy. ‘I have spent much time on it’ ‘in order to reach 60 lvl, I stay up all night’ ‘it is not easy to reach a high lvl’. But lvl 60 is just a beginning of the game, not the end. If u think 60 is the end and u have become the master of wow, u r wrong. There are more tasks, items waiting for you to explore. The harder the game is, the more players want to conquer it. Players are always aggressive.
3. Fantasy. What the game should look like? –Fantasy. Take the UI system for example. It should be simple to use and intuitive. The UI system, in fact, is not that successful. In the standpoint of development, if most players use addons to update the existing UI, which shows the way of designing UI is not quite right.
4. Make everything powered. Every class, every race, even every detail of the game should be powered, epic and unstoppable. A designer is given two abilities on his bar, a grow button and a shrink button. Players don’t see them in games, and these skills will grow or shrink the target by 10%. Before the designer stops he hits the grow button after bringing in Nefarian. He becomes puzzled why he is given the shrink spell. This is a story about DesignerIsland. Just try to make everything overpowered.
5. concentrated coolness. When something is made excellent, ‘less’ is not ‘less’ any more. Blizzard does a great job in focusing on just one aspect. How many classes are there in wow? Why not 20 or more? Blizzard makes every class and every race perfect. For example, they took the best elements from Warcraft 3 and built a new class of warrior.
6. Reword players. Players respond to rewords better than punishment. Seldom does wow punish players for making wrong choices. For example, blizzard doubles the amount of xp required to reach maximum level in the game, starts players out with 200% xp gained, and slowly drops it to 100% xp as they play. Otherwise, blizzard will discourage players from playing for a long time. An ounce of reword is worth a pound of punishment. Everyone was happy about awards. So why punish?
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