The Universe Behind World of Warcraft
The Austin Game Developers Conference is currently going on in Austin, Texas and Blizzard is attending for keynotes again this year. Today J. Allen Brack (Production Director) and Franck Pearce (Executive Vice President) spoke on the team that keeps the gears turning on such a large MMO. Here's a recap of some of the interesting pieces of information.
- 32 Programmers
- They maintain over 5.5 million lines of code
- 51 Artists
- They've created 1.5 million assets for World of Warcraft to-date; everything from models, textures, logos, etc.
- 37 Designers
- Made up of 3 different teams: Systems Design, Content Design and World Design.
- The design team has created 70,000 spells and 40,000 unique NPCs.
- Content Design - Team Lead: Cory Stockton
- The Content Design team uses assets created by the artists to actually create the zones in the game.
- Systems Design - Team Lead: Greg Street
- Systems Design focuses on classes, itemization and professions.
- World Design - Team Lead: Alex Afrasiabi
- The World Design team is comprised of encounter designers and quest designers who create all of the quests and NPC encounters in the game.
- They've created 7650 quests so far in the game.
- 10 Producers
- They have tracked over 33,000 tasks to-date.
- 218 Quality Assurance
- The QA team tracks 179,184 bugs as of AGDC.
- 2,056 Game Masters
- 1,724 international employees
- There have been over 4.5 billion achievements unlocked by players.
- There are over 27 hours of music in World of Warcraft.
- Over 358,680 localized strings in the game, totaling 3,211,102 words.
- Patch 3.1 delivered more than 4.7 petabytes of data when it was deployed (that's over 4.7 million gigabytes)
- Whenever a patch is ready to be released, Blizzard must create 126 different versions of the patch for various localizations, versions of the game players are at, etc.
- Blizzard Online Network Service ("BONS") - The servers that make up the realms players play on, utilizes -
- 13,250 total server blades
- 75,000 CPU cores
- 112.5 terabytes of RAM
- Blizzard has more than 20,000 computer systems at their offices globally.
- There are already more than 12,000,000 active Battle.net accounts.
- The total global size of Blizzard is now more than 4,600 people.
- Employees have to pay for BlizzCon tickets like anyone else, but even with that (and other ticket sales) BlizzCon still results in a substantial monetary loss for the company.
This isn't all that goes on to keep World of Warcraft running. Blizzard has licensing and legal teams, marketing, public relations, community, etc. It's an interesting look inside of the development of the game for sure, and knowing now that they have to create 126 versions of a patch each time they update the game, the delays between patches make a lot more sense.
