Greg Street, the former lead system designer of World of Warcraft, is now at League of Legends and is mocking a bit about the casualization of World of Warcraft.
Greg Street, known in forums and social media as “Ghostcrawler,” served for a long time as a sort of spokesperson for Blizzard to the community. In his position, he was primarily responsible for class balancing and was thus always in a controversial position. However, during his time at World of Warcraft, he also became one of the most well-known figures of WoW. His departure in November 2013 received some attention.
World of Warcraft is designed so that even grandmothers can successfully play it
Now Street is in a leadership position at Riot and is working on League of Legends. Last week, he spoke about his time at World of Warcraft and Blizzard. He talked a lot about balancing; the decisions he and his team made, and the differences between working on League of Legends and on World of Warcraft.
While most of his statements were moderate and showed a lot of respect for Blizzard’s work and the people there, he did let slip a sentence that was more sharply formulated. The crucial sentence, over which some fans were puzzled, concerned the pesky topic of the “casualization” of World of Warcraft. Some players accuse WoW of becoming easier and catering to as many players as possible, thereby alienating veterans and core gamers.
In this context, Street said: “Different games require different approaches. Let me just say: After 16 years at Age of Empires and World of Warcraft, I find it really refreshing to work on a game where I don’t have to worry about whether someone’s grandmother can play it or not.”
Later, Street qualified this statement, explaining that he didn’t mean “grandma” disrespectfully, but as a representation of players who are not “traditional” gamers.
Would World of Warcraft be better off if some specs were simply left unused?
Even today, he still thinks quite often about World of Warcraft and his decisions there, Street said. Balancing fell under his responsibility. The fact that each class has three specs always posed a challenge to the team. Sometimes it was the case that one spec clearly dominated PvE, another was superior in PvP, and the last one was simply dead. Time and again, they strived to make all three specializations playable. This meant they had to balance World of Warcraft for 30 classes and not just for 10. “Maybe,” Street said, “it would have been better to leave some specs unused.”
Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is currently working at Riot as the lead game designer for the MOBA League of Legends. LoL is known for its steep learning curve and huge amounts of information, making it not particularly “casual-friendly.”
