Euro gamer has a nice long look at the early days of World of Warcraft, way before Northern and Outland and even Molten Core, back when the question was not just how big the game would get, but whether Blizzard, a company known for their polish rather than their size, could pull off an entry in this new MMO genre about wow gold. They have interviewed some of Blizzards luminaries, and the piece offers a really good look at what it was like at Blizzard even before WoW release, when they were hashing out some of the ideas and mechanics that have now set the bar with World of Warcraft: the stylistic Warcraft look, and questing as storytelling about wow gold (originally, they thought they had only do quests through the starting levels, and then have the game move to a grinding, monster-killing stage towards the end, but players said the game was boring without quests).

There are all kinds of great little tidbits in here: originally, Warcraft III was planned with the over-the-shoulder look that WoW now has, and that is one of the reasons they wanted to create a more straightforward RPG game. Tom Chilton showed up on the team about a year before WoWs release, and to his surprise, the game was almost completely unfinished -- the level cap was only 15, the talent system was not implemented, the AH or mail systems were not in, PvP was not in at all (of course, even at release it was pretty barebones), and endgame raiding was nonexistent. Most of the things we think of as intrinsic to the wow gold-- even things like the Horde and Alliance not speaking to each other -- were debated and almost not in at all as they moved towards release to get wow gold

And this is only the first part of a larger series, so we will look for part two next week. Even before we started arguing about game play and how it should be done, they were fighting the same fights right up until release.