Frank Pearce and J Allen Brack of team Blizz have revealed some big facts behind World of Warcraft, and did so during their GDC Austin speeches. Stuff like WoW’s 1.5m assets.
And that’s just the art department, which has 51 peeps. Game cinematics alone employ 123 developers, with music now ”over 27 hours” worth. The MMO originally had 2600 quests.
”Operating an online game is about more than just game development,” noted Pearce, reports GamesIndustry.biz.
The programming department is staffed by 32 people who oversee 5.5 million lines of code now in World of Warcraft. While the classic World of Warcraft had 2600 quests, Burning Crusade added another 2700, and Wrath of the Lich King sprinkled another 2350 into the mix.
Since the MMO’s launch way back when, the Quality Assurance drones at Blizzard have tackled over 180,000 bugs - with some even getting fixed! Okay I’m just messing, honest.
What’s that? You want World of Warcraft in your native tongue? The game now tracks over 360,000 text strings, which equates to more than 2 million words. It could take a while. Blizzard employs an army of around 4600 people to keep World of Warcraft running.
They use over 20,000 computers and store around 1.3 petabytes of data. Scared yet?
