The Making of World of Warcraft

Not everything that went into Wrath was brand new, however. One important decision harked right back to the beginning of Brack's tenure at Blizzard. Naxx was back.

"It was one of the most popular dungeons that we've ever made," says Brack of the floating necropolis. "The encounters were awesome, really well done and well tuned, and the players loved it - but so many players didn't get to experience it. Getting that out in front of more players, having more players experience it and being able to have other players have that same kind of shared experience... that's really compelling from both a game developer and a game player standpoint."

Tweaked and updated, and now divided into both 10-man and 25-man versions, Naxxramas was to be the first raid dungeon players would encounter in Wrath of the Lich King. Despite being based on an existing dungeon, Brack confirms that "many, many work-weeks of effort" were involved in getting it up and running - a time commitment which makes the team wary of player petitions to update other old favourites, such as Molten Core, to "Heroic" level 80 versions.

Other ideas in Wrath were the culmination of many years of effort and experimentation - most notably the variable difficulty level of the Obsidian Sanctum raid, where players can decide how difficult they want the encounter to be by killing or ignoring any of three drakes during the battle with the dragon Sartharion.

"The three drakes that we did with the Obsidian Sanctum is something that we've wanted to do for literally years," reveals Brack. "We've wanted to have an encounter that you could beat in different ways, and depending on if you beat it the easy way or the hard way, you would get better loot. We tried once with the Twin Emperors in Ahn'Qiraj, but that didn't really accomplish the objective. We tried again again with the Twins in Sunwell - we learned a lot from that, but Obsidian Sanctum was the time when we really feel like we nailed not only the difficulty, but the reward versus the effort."

Wrath of the Lich King launched in November 2008, and to nobody's great surprise, it became the world's best selling computer game - shifting 2.8 million copies in 24 hours and overthrowing the record set two years previously by The Burning Crusade.

Today, the Blizzard team is working on content updates for Wrath of the Lich King, but is undoubtedly also plotting its next expansion behind closed doors. Five years down the line, you have to wonder if deja vu is setting in - but the team's enthusiasm for creating more WOW seems not to have dimmed.

"Every time out, we want to outdo ourselves," says Metzen. "We're certainly aware of the competition, the amazing games that have popped since WOW came out - just stunning vistas, stunning world visions - and certainly we want to be competitive. We want to provide a vision for our fans that is as good as anything else out there, but really, we have always been our own worst critics.

"As a group of artists and designers, we always want to outdo ourselves, and really stretch ourselves, get outside of our comfort zones and really push this thing, maybe by inches, into new territory."

Art director Sam Didier chips in. "Warcraft is really fun to create art for because anything goes," he says. "We now have motorcycles in World of Warcraft! We have giant guys running around on mammoths next to guys that are on gyrocopters next to guys who are on transparent nether-drakes..."

"With giant crystal spaceships from other planets crashing down," Metzen interjects.

"I don't know that we ever decided to do this, specifically, but what has happened over time is that WOW has become the kind of fictional exercise that can substantiate almost any whim," he continues. "We want to go and chase crazy Cthulu mythology or Egyptian art sets, we can do that. It'll handle it. Like Sam said, if we want to chase gyrocopters and motorbikes and steam tanks, it can handle that. Somehow the fiction has developed into a playground, or a sandbox if you will, that can really integrate almost any goofy idea we want to chase.

"My great hope is that we can continue to push the boundaries, and continue to show players visions of this world and of this franchise that they do not expect, and that we continue to take risks with this world overall," Metzen concludes. "I think that's where we're going to maintain our integrity as artists - and really just take people for a ride."