I don’t envy the position of being a game developer—especially not an encounter designer in something as complicated as an MMO. You might have an idea of how a mechanic’s gonna go, but there’s just absolutely no way it survives contact with 40 motivated, mid-2000s era hardcore WoW players.
Former game director at Blizzard Wyatt Cheng, whose delightful TikTok channel has been giving free wisdom and anecdotes for some time now, says that exact agony happened to him around 20 years ago with the release of Ahn’Qiraj. Particularly with The Prophet Skeram boss, which splits into illusions at 75%, 50%, and 25% health.
“There’s one part I never got right,” says Cheng. “I really wanted the only way to tell the difference between the real Skeram and the copies to be that the copies have half the health. So under even DPS rates, the illusions would drop in health faster.”
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“I pictured raids spreading their DPS and calling it out on [Ventrilo]: Which two are going down quicker?” The idea being, if you didn’t kill the illusions first, you’d knock the main Skeram over into his next health threshold and take on additional copies before you’re ready: “Now there are five Skerams, and you wipe.”
Alas, “that is not how it went. There were so many easy ways to spot the real Skeram. My first version literally had ‘Pet of Skeram’ written under the copies’ names. Oops! In testing, we found more, like UI mods reading creature IDs, or mismatched localisation strings.”
While Cheng doesn’t remember the exact play-by-play, what followed was an arms race where he was “constantly trying to describe the real Skeram.” However, “looking at guides online now, I see sending a hunter pet after Skeram before the split results in the pet staying locked into the real one. Or some people mana-burn him, because the copies spawn with full mana, and he doesn’t! Ugh! All that work, and there was still an instant tell.”
Still, he’s humble about it, saying that while “if it’s a real bug or an exploit, sure, we’ll fix it. But players outsmarting the designer? That’s just one for the history books.”
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