ArenaNet那几位确实参与wow的开发,mike当时在BLZ是程序主管,BLZ的文件压缩格式至今都是以他命名的,不参与是不可能的。Jeff Strain更是一开始就负责wow项目程序。直到他们离职。而现在开发《火瀑》红5组的领导人Mark Kern是wow原版的组长。
————-—————— Jeff Strain is a game programmer and one of the three founders of ArenaNet. He served ArenaNet and NCsoft as the leader of the Art and Production teams and President of Product Development respectively. He was previously the lead programmer of Blizzard'sMMORPGWorld of Warcraft; he also created the StarCraft campaign editor and worked on Diablo and Warcraft III. He is credited as a programmer and executive producer for Guild Wars.
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:A.net官方維基百科wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Arenanet
ArenaNet was founded in 2000 by Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt
and Jeff Strain. All three of them came from Blizzard Entertainment
and were previously involved in the development of multiplayer
online games such as Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, World of Warcraft and the Battle.net gaming network.
GG: ArenaNet and Guild Wars seem to have become the biggest competition for Blizzard’s World Of WarCraft. Why did you leave Blizzard in the first place, where you had big responsibilities?
Mike O’Brien:原因很多。2001年的時候,我正領導魔獸3團隊,Jeff領導魔獸世界團隊,Patrick Wyatt領導Battlenet團隊。我們三人彼此認識已經很長時間了,而且一直希望能夠共同參與一個大項目。
So that was one of our motivations. But we also had two visions. We had been working on the Battlenet, and at that time it was being just used to provide online connectivity for retail games. We had a vision of making a gaming infrastructure for games that would be specifically designed for the Internet.
What could you do if you could assume that everybody had to connect to the Internet in order to play the game? How much more compelling and dynamic would that game be! You wouldn’t have a CD full of static content that could never be changed again, but would stream just the files player would need as they go from from place to place.
Mike O’Brien: The second vision was about breaking with tradition. Jeff and I wanted to be a lot more innovative than we could be at Blizzard. Jeff was working on a role playing game and tried to get strategy elements and competition into it. When players spend hundreds of hours to build up their character, what do they want to do?
They want to compete against their friends! But a game like Diablo was not remotely set up to allow for competition. And I was looking at the strategy side and wanted to get more role playing in. If a strategy game feels dead, if it feels like you’re just moving pieces across a board, than it’s boring.
他們希望同朋友比賽!但Diablo之類的遊戲根本就不是為比賽設計的。我就研究遊戲的戰略因素,希望加入更多的角色扮演。如果戰略遊戲感覺毫無生機,玩家感覺只是moving pieces across a board,那麼這個遊戲就特別無聊。
You need to feel like you’re fighting over something that you care about! It needs to feel like a world, which you can connect to, which you are defending. So we wanted to create a game that would cross the boundaries between those two genres. But we had no idea how to achieve that at that time.
Mike O’Brien: A role playing is about your strength depends on how long you play it. That’s the complete opposite to a strategy game, where your strength depends on how well you play the game.
GG: Jeff, you were heading World of WarCraft from the beginning – why was it not possible to include Mike's and your idea into that upcoming game at Blizzard?
GG: Jeff,你從一開始就主管魔獸世界,可為什麼不能在暴雪未來的遊戲中加入Mike和你的想法呢?
Jeff Strain: Companies often find themselves in a situation where they have to make products that meet what their players’ expectations are, based on what they’ve done in the past.It’s very difficult for a company with an entrenched history to make radical changes or take big risks on something that is highly innovative. Mike and Patrick and I spend a lot of time talking about what could be if we were able to do something that was built from the ground up as a completely new experience.It became quickly apparent to us that because of Blizzard’s established history with its existing franchises, that they were not in the position to try something radically new. Blizzard has always done a great job of taking an existing play mechanic and polishing it up, and that works well for them. BBut we really wanted to push harder and take some chances. That was the reason we felt we should do that in the context of a brand new company instead of try to make an existing company change it’s course.
Jeff Strain: It gave us the opportunity to just explore where we wanted to explore. And I think Guild Wars reflects that, mainly in good ways, but also in some ways that didn’t work out. Anytime you’re being innovative and make bold decisions to try new things, sometimes things work out spectacularly well for you.
Social Game, not Social Life? ArenaNet on Guild Wars and the “Casual” MMORPG
在1999年,暴風雪已經開始讓SC資料片上架 ,但Mike O'Brien/ Patrick Wyatt和Jeff Strain心裡想該是做新的事物的時候了。Mike O'Brien當時為WC3英雄工作,最後將變成更傳統的扮演角色策略遊戲魔獸爭霸三 . Patrick Wyatt正主導Battle.net。 Jeff Strain在WOW上面工作 ,試圖讓多人線上網路遊戲(MMOG) 概念並試著將wow變成一場戰略遊戲。 到2000年,他們從暴風雪離開,建立他們屬於自己的公司並開發GW。
But what are the circumstances under which this alternate view of MMOs has appeared? In 1999, Blizzard had shipped StarCraft: Brood War, but for Michael O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain, it was time for something new. Michael O'Brien was working on Heroes of WarCraft, the role-playing strategy game which eventually transmuted into the more traditional WarCraft III. Patrick Wyatt was ruling over Battle.net. Jeff Strain was working on a little something called the World of WarCraft, which at that point was trying to take the Massively-Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) concept and push it more towards a strategy game. By 2000, they turned from being Blizzard employees to Blizzard alumni, founding their own company to create a new, more “casual” MMOG: Guild Wars.