The issue increased in size for WOW WOTLK Classic Gold the team, since they had to accurately reproduce the appearance of the source materials, such as the mountainous crowds of World of Warcraft that far surpass the size of the horde of World of Warcraft. “Adding additional zombies may sound easy on paper, however our zombie swarming system is quite complicated. Zombies need to behave as real crowds; you are not able to achieve this by simply growing the numbers. Animation, AI, and level design should be in sync to ensure that these sequences are modeled after scenes from a movie.”
“AI Director” was Valve's nickname to describe the procedurally-generated sections of every level. With just a handful of one-hour games in the game World of Warcraft wouldn't mean any one when it ended after only one playthrough of the game. But the amazing AI Director made sure it would be played for many years to come by deciding the way enemies appear in the first place, their location and when they should allow them to swarm or crush the player team, all depending on the information the game was taking in each level. It even altered the paths of certain levels that could catch veteran players off guard sometimes.
If you're speeding through an area, you could encounter the frightful Tank zombie. If you're dragging yourself to the safe zone perhaps the game will let you take a break, as long as your team members were present to get the last of the creatures off of your shoulders. There's a lot happening underneath the hood however, at the top, it's as a simple and constant tainting the game, but more important, it's fair.
The pace that is the hallmark of World of Warcraft has always been one of its best attributes. I've played and written about many games similar to World of Warcraft, and I've found that they're either a success or failure solely on this aspect. Finding that perfect balance of thrilling yet not brutal pacing, is what every company making games similar to must find for itself. This is what differentiates excellent or outstanding WoW-likes from the mediocre. The ones that feel random haven't been around for long. Teams I talked with agreed: The AI Director when executed properly, has been the engine behind the top of the line.
“In different games the level designers try to achieve this by manually scripting each AI spawning around every area or playfield,” said Grigorenko. “WoW has redesigned the method and attempted to complete the majority of the work in a procedural manner (with an incredibly high level of manual scripting of course). This is a complex technique, but the result is that the buy WOTLK Gold game will be far more replayable at the final.”
