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Tides of Blood was a popular Warcraft III custom map in the AoS genre developed by Kaz, Windigo and Cassiel. This interview was conducted via PM on August 10 2006. Azazel_: What were your motivations of developing Tides of Blood (ToB)? Cassiel: Initially we, or I at least, had none. Windigo and I played Reign of Chaos early on when the custom games menu was dominated by a variety of mediocre Aeon of Strife maps, and we became especially avid players later, when FM_TertiaryEye's Force Majeure Vampire Hunters and No_Pants' AoS: Epic received top billing. (Lately I'm having to remind people that these two maps, which surpassed the popularity of the original DotA by a wide margin during their development, even existed.) But we never considered creating our own map until the end of June 2003, about a week before The Frozen Throne was released. At that point Windigo was fooling around with some terrain (modeled on the terrain of AoS: Epic) using the Sunken Ruins tileset in a pirated copy of TFT's World Editor, the game having been leaked. He showed it to me and said we should make a map, and that's how it all started. From there we had about four days until TFT went into legitimate release, which from our point of view meant we had four days to complete a fully playable version of the map. This was a calculated move on our part, meant to capitalize on the general lack of custom maps that would accompany the release of TFT: everyone would be playing old RoC maps--the first TFT map to take advantage of all the new heroes, abilities and WE features would catch their attention in a big way. So the circumstances motivating the creation of ToB were really triumvirate: a) on a whim, two fans of RoC custom maps decided to create a TFT custom map; b) they realized that if the release of their TFT map coincided with the release of TFT itself, they would generate name recognition and a user base disproportionate to the quality of the map, at least in its initial stages; and c) they were working under a time constraint that essentially made it impossible for them to change their minds once they'd started.  Azazel_: How did you assemble the team which you had to develop ToB? Cassiel: No assembly required. Windigo and I have known each other for about 13 years; we'd been playing RoC together for a year before TFT, and in a way ToB was the natural evolution of our interest in custom maps like FMVH. The rest was organic. Jacinthe was a fan of the map who also happened to be a talented artist. She had a natural gift for skinning--to this day she remains the best skinner Warcraft III has seen--and was equally adept whether working without a prompt (her Disciple of the Moon) or taking direction (her Red Bull). ToB was essentially only in active development for six months, and during that time we three were the team. We did however attract a number of other competent users, whose talents we benefited from in other ways or later on. Nemesis was a professional programmer who hosted and maintained tidesofblood.com free of charge (before Nemesis, Brandon did the same). Yale_homo and Kaz (like Windigo) were both B.A.s in Computer Science (Yale and Windigo are now both Graduate Students). Erwtenpeller and GoldenYak were amazing artists in their own right, Erwt being the reigning king of current skinners and a prominent member of the modding community in general. And then of course there was TertiaryEye, whose FMVH gave us endless hours of entertainment and inspired us to work on ToB in the first place. Azazel_: Many Warcraft III maps are chiefly solo efforts due to complications in team design, direction and philosophies. How did your team run ToB's development successfully without any paralyzing conflict? Cassiel: I think many Warcraft III maps are chiefly solo efforts more out of necessity than anything else. A few people in the community get things done; the rest...don't. That's the politic way of putting it. So, if you really want to accomplish anything you have to do it yourself, because relying on other people is impractical in this community. For example, I originally agreed to work on ToB in a design capacity, creating heroes and spells and working in the Object Editor; but within a few weeks of our initial release I became an MDL expert, starting with minor things like Call the Moon and the Blood Elemental, and then during the version N revival I became a JASS expert as well. I found that there were certain things I wanted to add to the map, and nobody else could do them, so I took it upon myself to get them done. That's the mentality you have to have. (Note that Blizzard is actually responsible for a lot of this. Their conspicuous lack of support for modding meant that the community had to do all the work of deciphering MPQs, MDLs, MDXs, BLPs, SLKs etc., and of developing tools to work with these things, itself. When I started working with MDLs very few people understood them, whereas today the skill is in much wider circulation and is supplemented by things like Oinkerwinkle's tools and Magos' Model Editor. But we're past the heyday of Warcraft III modding now, and it's pretty much the case that Warcraft III modding, as a whole, was a failure. Hopefully Blizzard will do better with their next moddable game--which should have been and still should be World of Warcraft.) Anyway, the organic way in which the ToB team came together was a sort of contraceptive against differing design ideologies, so keeping people on the same page wasn't an issue for the most part. After Windigo and me, everyone who worked on the map was already a fan, so already receptive to what we were doing and to where the map was going. We never asked for help or advertised team openings at modding sites, as projects that do this tend not to work out. In fact we declined hosting at wc3modforge.com, who recruited us rather enthusiastically, in favor of our own forums. Azazel_: What was your reaction to ToB's popularity and its fans? Cassiel: Fans are a double-edged sword because they're like any other group of people: you're going to like some of them, regard some of them with indifference and dislike some of them intensely. The ones I liked made ToB worthwhile; the ones I disliked made it increasingly tiresome. In the long-term the cool fans are the ones you remember though, and really I stopped thinking of these people as fans and started thinking of them as friends a long time ago. Internet friendships have always struck me as being rather silly, but I have to admit I've always wanted to do a "ToB Across Americanada" tour to visit some of the people I've met through ToB, especially the Ciaoderheads. ToB attracted the coolest, most intelligent and talented people on Battle.net, which ultimately I think is far more interesting than anything else about the map.  Azazel_: What were the key factors in your decision to cease active development? Cassiel: A brief behind-the-scenes history of ToB: We created the map in late June 2003, and in August, less than two months later, I started Graduate School. This made it increasingly difficult to justify investing time in a hobby project like ToB. I'm interested in literature and philosophy, and while I find many elements of game design fun and rewarding, my goal isn't to work as a game designer. Add to this the fact that ToB was already the most popular map on Battle.net, and I couldn't find much of a reason to continue. The attitudes of some of the fans certainly didn't help. In the summer of 2004 ToB was briefly revived when TertiaryEye joined the team. He was sick of working on FMVH 3.0, which had been stuck in development hell since RoC due to Blizzard's constant mod-paralyzing patches. We were huge fans of his work, and he was a huge fan of ours, so we teamed up to start version N. After a few months Eye disappeared, and nobody's heard from him since. He vanished from his clan's forums, from Battle.net, from AIM, and that was that. Soon afterward I lost a chunk of version N to a catastrophic hard drive failure. Demoralized by these two events, I let the project sit until winter break later that year. I finally came back to it when Blizzard was readying the 1.17 patch, which allowed us to pioneer 6v6 play and HATS (Hero Assist Tracking System)--two things we'd been working on since the beginning. Of course, there was a discrepancy between the 1.17 test server and Battle.net proper that allowed a desync issue to slip into our code. At the same time, some of the beta testers leaked the map to the public, so once again I left. Nobody else was able to fix the desync, so despite the leak there was no playable version of N until around March of 2005, when I ran a blitz of open beta tests to fix the desync and, together with Kaz, released the version N that people, amazingly enough, still play today. So ToB went into hibernation on multiple occasions for a number of philosophical and circumstantial reasons. I think, philosophically, my biggest issue was that the modding community never received much support from Blizzard (and in fact Warcraft III isn't really meant to be modded so much as superficially edited; the game supports a very limited level of deviation from its core game play). This still baffles me, since there are powerful commercial reasons for games to support modding communities. Offhand I can think of at least three: i) Mods are made by volunteers and provide quality content free of charge to your paying customers. You make money off of modders without having to pay them. ii) Modding potential provides a powerful incentive for people to buy your game in the first place, since it attracts modders as well as new players in both the short- and long-terms. The caliber of the modding community a game attracts rises in proportion to that game's modding potential, and a game's lifespan rises in proportion to the caliber of its modders. iii) Modding provides a built-in talent funnel for potential hires to your company, Team Fortress and Counter Strike being the obvious examples. Because Warcraft III modding is so limited, its ability to gauge the talent of Warcraft III modders is similarly limited. Azazel_: The PC game market is largely dominated by simple, adrenaline rush DOTA-style games. How do developers who want to create intelligent games earn a living? Cassiel: The key is this: simplicity is the enemy of complication, not the enemy of complexity. Go is an amazingly simple game, an amazingly complex game, but by no means a complicated game. Anyone can learn to play Go in a matter of minutes. It's simpler than Chess, yet far more complex. There's no Go AI that can beat an average Go player, never mind an expert, whereas the highest rated Chess player in history once lost a match to a Chess AI, and Chess AIs are generally capable of defeating the vast majority of Chess players. I think that DotA, in fact, is only simple inasmuch as it rewards rote play with an artificial sense of accomplishment. It's actually rather complicated and non-intuitive as a game, whereas it's very simple as a task one memorizes and repeats like a catechism. I've talked about this before on our forums, and I think it's one of the primary reasons many DotA players are so conservative, even fundamentalist in their take on the game. They automatically reject game play alterations that would make DotA a more dynamic and interesting game: changes like an assist system, or the elimination of "denying" as a foundational element of play, or disabling experience for tower kills. DotA players reject these things not because they would make the game worse but because dynamic game play elements would threaten their personal investment in a rote game. If the game becomes more dynamic, their rote skills are devalued. They might lose games to more strategically or tactically savvy players, even when those players have less experience playing DotA. And that's a scary thing for a DotA player. So, I think you can create a simple, adrenaline-fueled game that's still intelligent, and I think that if you do, your game will outsell games comparable to DotA by a wide margin. The original Super Smash Bros., which I would argue is one of the most strategically sophisticated video games ever made, is a great example. In terms of Warcraft III maps, I'll reiterate something I've said before: Warcraft III will punish you if you take your game play too far from its core elements. The controls and the game in general will become increasingly counterintuitive, and counterintuitive games are tedious to play. This means that you have to embrace Warcraft III's core game play instead of fighting against it; you have to develop modular elements you can overlay on that core game play, systems that increase play possibilities without adding play complications. Assists and the removal of "denying" are minor examples of this. Vexorian's InvX inventory system is a more substantial example. The change in how ToB handles hero deaths is another. These are all simple systems that attach themselves to Warcraft III's core game play like one lego on top of another. None of them makes the game more complicated, but all of them make the game more dynamic, more complex.  Azazel_: What is your opinion on NOTD Aftermath and how we can improve on our design and gameplay? NOTD Aftermath is also starting to venture into the PvP market with a recent development in Deathmatch mode. These sorts of ventures usually aren't taken seriously, fail or lose momentum. What do you feel is required to build a concrete position in the PvP market for a game like NOTD Aftermath? Cassiel: I'd actually like to see NOTD:A really develop its modern aesthetic and move away from the "countryside" look it currently has toward something more urban, either by working directly with, say, Punisher_X, or simply by taking advantage of all the modern/future resources now available at places like wc3sear.ch and wc3campaigns.net. Because of Warcraft III's limited game play options, a prominent aesthetic is one of the chief ways maps can differentiate themselves from one another. Outside the vein of basic fantasy, which is already clogged with the likes of ToB and DotA, there is a definite slice of the pie waiting for a solid urban-themed map to claim it. NOTD:A is actually perfectly poised to capture this audience because it has a marked genre distinction from other PvP maps. By capitalizing on its aesthetic and game play differences from the default Warcraft III fantasy mold, NOTD:A could go far. Play-wise I think NOTD:A has a strong infrastructure, good use of stock abilities via the spellbook (though I'm occasionally distracted by minor things like the "Distance too great" message on the Jump ability), and some nice visual effects. I would imagine a PvP mode should focus on tactical team play with a variety of strongly differentiated classes that each support the others in some way. Rather than the standard fantasy distinction between tank and support characters, give everyone a lot to do. I'd also like to see the strong visual element of the game turned up in creative ways, for example by disabling automatic target acquisition and implementing a doodad transparency system that allows units who enter buildings to see themselves and see outside without allowing units outside to see in (thus facilitating ambushes and other stealth-oriented game play). Azazel_: What are your views on an open source development culture, specifically for a Warcraft III map? Cassiel: Open source can mean a variety of things. I'm in favor of a community where people share their knowledge with one another, especially in the case of Warcraft III's modding community since, without much help from Blizzard, we've had to figure almost everything out for ourselves. I was always open with the techniques I used to achieve various effects in ToB, and protecting that kind of information was never a factor in it being a "locked" map. I'm not in favor of a community where one person makes a map and then another person takes it, changes a few things--usually for the worse--and replaces or supplements the real author's name with his own. It's fine to be inspired by someone else's map. Windigo and I were inspired by AoS: Epic and FMVH, FMVH was inspired by Varys' Vampire Hunters, and now other maps, like Blades & Billiets, Advent of the Zenith, Terror's Threshold, Beyond Good and Evil and more have been inspired by ToB (curiously, DotA doesn't seem to inspire anyone). This much is great--I even helped a little with Blades & Billiets once when I had some free time, and had hoped to help a lot more. But it's not fine to be inspired by someone else's map, copy all its functionality and even steal some of its custom content, slap a new name on it and then act like you're a genius. This is what vile did with Age of Myths. One of the main reasons I haven't released any of the content I've created since work on ToB halted is to prevent vile from getting his hands on it. He's the low point of the entire Warcraft III modding community. Azazel_: In hindsight, was there anything about the ToB development and marketing process which you would have done differently? Cassiel: I definitely would have learned JASS sooner. Early on I swore, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to my background in the arts, never to learn any form of triggering. It was almost a point of pride: "I made the most popular map on Battle.net and I don't know my ass from a function." If I had learned JASS, though, ToB's development would have advanced much more quickly, and the thought of updating the whole thing now wouldn't seem like such a monumental undertaking. Beyond this I probably would have managed the community a little differently and decreased my role in it, since I spent far more time playing ToB online and being a presence in the forums than actually working on the map--but this is just another testament to the quality of the user base ToB attracted. |
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