14 DAY TRIAL // We've all pretty much got the idea that World of Warcraft is the biggest thing out there. The MMORPG is the stuff fears and nightmares are made out of for any company that wants to release a new MMO on the market. Everything is pitted against WoW: how close it will be to dethroning it, how it will survive in its shadow, how good it is, compared with WoW. But it's hard to understand how big something is when there's nothing out there to compare it with. To give a hand in better understanding just how big is "big," Blizzard Entertainment Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Product Development Frank Pearce and Production Director J. Allen Brack came at the Austin Game Developer Convention to discuss "The Universe of World of Warcraft."
They opted for numbers to overwhelm the audience and, considering the counting involved, one way or another, they impressed. The first number brought up was also the biggest, World of Warcraft having over 11 million subscribers. If Blizzard ever decided to take over the world, few things could stand against 11 million people with a vast raid experience and epic gear.
From here on, the numbers kept flowing: 5.5 million lines of code, 1.5 million unique assets for the game, like weapons, armor, environments, animation and props. 37 designers are responsible for the over 70,000 spells and nearly 40,000 non-player characters. There are 7,650 quests included in World of Warcraft and the two add-ons, the burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, each with several pages of text description that almost nobody will ever read.
As for the people involved in supporting the online game, the question-and-answer team is formed by 218 people ready to cast away any doubts of probably millions of newbs. As for the Blizzard Online Network Services, 13,250 server blades and 75,000 CPUs keep it running and 150 people are on the team responsible for Battle.net that maintain the 12 million active players and help them keep persistent friends lists across games when Starcraft II launches. Overall, Blizzard has more than 4,000 employees and 600 licensed partners to keep the title on top of the charts. If there were only this many people working on Diablo III or Starcraft II, they would have probably been released a few years ago.