Tag Archives: J Allen Brack

World of Warcraft patches will soon be released in various sizes, depending on the content, according to the game’s production director J. Allen Brack.

More »

Cataclysm’s chief project manager, J. Allen Brack has said Blizzard is trying to make World of Warcraft the “best it can be” and is not focusing on subscription numbers.

More »

Look, consoles, it’s not you. It’s Blizzard.

Well, ok, it’s also kinda you.

More »

Blizzard’s told G4 that the company talks about bringing World of Warcraft to the console “all the time”, but “technical challenges” are standing in the way.

More »

Blizzard production director J.Allen Brack has said that those expecting just an update to World of Warcraft with Cataclysm should be prepared for a “shake up”.

More »

Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack has told Gamasutra that a console game from the firm is a certainty. When? Keep guessing.

“I have two consoles at home,” said the WoW developer. “Sam has consoles. We’re a culture of gamers. We will definitely work on a console game at some point. I have no doubt about that.

“It’s just [a matter of] what game. What makes the most sense?”

What about an MMO? More through there. Thanks, Kotaku.

During J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce’s keynote at GDC Austin, the Blizzard guys revealed its canceled suqad-based sci-fi title, Nomad.

Apparently, some ten years or so ago, Blizzard put loads of hours and tons of work into it, but then decided to scrap it and go straight into work on WoW.

Joystiq has what little information there is on the title along with some artwork.

You should go have a look.

During a keynote delivered at GDC Austin, Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce dropped some numbers regarding what it takes on a daily basis to keep World of Warcraft running.

The game needs 20,000 computer systems, 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and over 4600 staffers to keep it going.

“Operating an online game is about more than just game development,” said Pearce. “World of Warcraft has completely changed the organization”.

And then some – the game has 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code.

For more astonishing numbers, Gamasutra has the full thing, and and so does Gamespot.

Blizzard bigwigs Frank Pearce and J Allen Brack are to keynote GDC Austin on World of Warcraft this year, Blizzard said today.

The talk, entitled “The Universe of World of Warcraft,” will tackle the challenges faced in creating subs-based MMOs.

The event takes place at the Austin Convention Center in Texas from September 15-18.

PR after the break.

More »

World of Warcraft production boss J Allen Brack apparently confirmed at BlizzCon session this weekend that paid character customisation is on the way to World of Warcraft. From this Warcry report:

When asked to expand upon a button found by sifting through the Lich King beta’s data files named “Paid Character Customization,” Brack initially hesitated to give any answer at all. Several questions later, he went back to the matter, saying that he could, in fact, confirm that World of Warcraft would eventually have some form of paid character customization, though they themselves hadn’t yet worked out any details.

There’s a full report of the panel through there.

Speaking to IGN at BlizzCon 08, World of Warcraft production director J Allen Brack’s said the WoW team has been humbled by the success of the game, and that the initial benchmark for success was 1 million subscribers.

“Our big thoughts about what the game would eventually be internally was, ‘Well, one day we might have one million subscribers,’” he said. “And that would be just really successful; [the] pinnacle of success with one million subscribers. Now we’ve got more than ten times that.

It’s really forced the company to change, the team to change… it’s really humbling.”

Blizzard is on the verge of releasing Wrath of the Lich King, the MMO’s second major expansion.

More through the link.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, World of Warcraft production director J Allen Brack and Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that having the most “technologically advanced” graphics in Blizzard games has never been a “hallmark.”

“It’s really never been a Blizzard hallmark,” said Brack. “I mean, our games look good, but they’ve never tried to be the best looking game out there.”

“Or at least not the most technologically advanced,” added Chilton.

“The way we’ve approached the unveiling of new features in terms of graphics,” Brack continued, “is much more organic than just releasing an expansion that has a set of graphics upgrades.

“With this expansion we’re releasing a new shadow system that’s pretty different to what we’ve had before, and we’ve got a new technology that allows us to create better looking terrain, better looking dungeons: it’s just continual improvement.”

Wrath of the Lich King has no fixed date as yet, but appears to be moving quickly towards launch, as it was announced last night that the expansion’s major pre-release content patch has now gone live on the Public Test Realms.

Speaking to VG247 at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King design boss Tom Chilton told us that new aspects to the play style of the expansion’s Death Knight class have been born from the team’s intrinsic methodology for the entire game.

“One of our core philosophies for World of Wacraft in general is class distinction,” he said.

“We feel it’s very important that each time you play a different character class it feels a little bit different because the class mechanics are a little bit different.

“Also, with Wrath of the Lich King and the Death Knight being a hero class, we want to make sure that it feels a little bit different right from the start, to make sure it feels like becoming of a level 55 character, for example. We don’t want it to just feel like another level one character that just happens to be level 55.”

J Allen Brack, the game’s production director, added that meta-story elements had also influenced the way the Death Knight turned out.

“It’s also the story aspect,” he said. “Lich King has been a big part of the WarCraft universe for many years, and to have players start out aligned with the Lich King then work out how to become a free agent is a big part of the story.”

There’s no date on Wrath of the Lich King as yet.

Speaking to Videogamer at Games Convention, Wrath of the Lich King lead designer Tom Chilton said that the firm doesn’t hate consoles: but don’t be expecting WoW on a pad just yet.

“It’s really not that we have anything against consoles,” Chilton said. “I mean we love console games also. And I’m sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It’s just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn’t designed with that in mind.”

J Allen Brack, production director, added: “World of Warcraft is designed as a PC game. It’s designed to have a keyboard and a mouse. So the controls and the control scheme that you have are very PC centric. If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it’s a very challenging proposition.”

More through the link.