The Starting Zone - Interview with Gary Platner, Principal Exterior Level Designer

Blizzard 由 perculia 发表于 2018/03/31，05:26

The Starting Zone podcastinterviewed Terran Gregory

In WoW's early development, Allen Adham was keen on having day/night cycles in WoW, similar to Animal Crossing. The area around Shadowfang, in which the inhabitants transform in the evening, was an attempt to show this cycle. The world was meant to feel more dangerous at night, however, it was difficult to implement on a large scale.

The WoW team expected to make a game and then move onto different games after shipping. They hoped WoW would do as well as StarCraft.

The team finds it useful, when designing zones, to point to real-world places as inspiration. Grizzly Hills was based on a Redwood forest.

The Blood Elves were initially added to be a pretty race for the Horde, as more players were interested in the Alliance and the available Horde models were more grotesque. The Pandaren race was meant to be the Alliance race added in TBC but that was changed to Draenei.

His favorite expansion to work on overall was Mists of Pandaria.

Gilneas was a fun zone to develop and the inspiration for the zone a dark and gothic Victorian aesthetic. The Battle for Azeroth continent of Kul Tiras feels like a spiritual successor to Gilneas in terms of a dark aesthetic with whimsical buildings.

Gary has been on the WoW team longer than most everyone else. In the past few years, he's moved from a manager role to directly working on the game as a Level Designer.

Blizzard's tools team continually innovates, providing the Level Design team with better and better tools each expansion. The process of creating textures, as well as the amount of detail on each texture, has greatly improved through WoW's history.

Outside of WoW, Gary enjoys a variety of hobbies. In WoW's early development, he also taught art and practiced stand-up comedy, a useful skill that led him to emcee BlizzCon 2005. More recently, he was a skipper on Disney's Jungle Cruise.

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