When Diablo 2 entered development years earlier in 1997, the team had debated whether to stick to the true isometric 2D perspective of the first game or create a fully rendered 3D world.
"And so we felt like there was a space in the market where we could improve upon the design they had and we could make it a much more approachable experience."īut MMO features weren't to be the only major change for the series. "A lot of the stuff did was kind of hacky and crude rather than user-friendly," Brevik says. "We were all playing EverQuest and were like, Jesus Christ this game could be so much better." As the Diablo team's counterparts at sister studio Blizzard South set to work aping and honing EverQuest's template into what would become its own mammoth MMO, so too was Blizzard North cherry-picking from its more inspired concepts. "That was the premise for making World of Warcraft," Brevik says. More oddly, it operated a highly profitable monthly subscription model. Its colorful environments stood in stark contrast to the many darker, low fantasy roleplaying games that were common at the time, and it boasted an extensive collection of playable classes and fantasy races. The fantasy MMO had released in North America in 1999 and quickly rocketed in popularity for its cutting-edge open world that could host thousands of players.
"We were giant EverQuest players," Brevik says. (Image credit: Daybreak Games, Keith Parkinson) EverQuest proved to be a big inspiration.
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