Former Blizzard game director Wyatt Cheng told how twenty years ago his idea with the boss Prophet Skeram in Ahn’Qiraj fell apart at the first contact with the raiders.
The developer leads TikTok channelwhere he regularly shares stories from his time working on World of Warcraft and other observations about game design.
Prophet Skeram, the first boss of the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj, creates doubles of himself at 75%, 50% and 25% health. According to the original plan, the only way to distinguish the original from the illusions was by the rate at which the health bar dropped.
There is one part that I never got right. I really wanted the only way to tell the real Skeram apart from the copies was that the copies had half as much health. That is, with uniform damage, illusions would lose health faster.
It was assumed that the raid would distribute damage across all targets and shout out via voice communication which two targets were dying faster. A mistake in choosing a target was punished harshly, because a hit to the real Skeram would break through the next health threshold and lead to the appearance of a new batch of copies before the group had time to deal with the previous one.
I imagined raids divvying up damage and calling it out – which two go down the fastest? Now there are five Skerams, and you are wiped.
In practice, everything turned out differently. In the very first version, under the names of the copies, “Skeram’s pet” was literally written, which instantly gave away the original. Further testing revealed several more information leaks, including interface addons that read creature IDs, and mismatched localization strings.
Everything went wrong. There were too many easy ways to spot the real Skeram. In my first version, it literally said “Skeram’s Pet” under the names of the copies. Oops! During testing, we also found, for example, interface addons that read creature IDs, or mismatched localization strings.
After the release, an arms race began, in which the designer tried over and over again to describe the real boss so that the game would not give him away with technical details. Cheng no longer remembers the exact chronology of the edits, but he can clearly see the result in modern guides.
One technique is to set the hunter’s pet on Skeram before splitting, as the beast remains attached to the original. Another method is even more elegant, because copies appear with full mana, and the boss himself has already spent part of the reserve by this point, so the mana incineration spell immediately points to the target.
Looking at the online guides now, I see that if you send a hunter’s pet to Skeram before the split, the pet remains assigned to the real one. Or some people burn his mana because copies spawn with full mana and he doesn’t have any! Eh! So much work, and still there was an instant clue.
The developer treats the situation itself calmly and shares the errors in the code and the ingenuity of the audience. According to him, bugs and exploits are subject to correction, but the victory of players over the designer’s plan deserves a separate place in history.
If it’s a real bug or exploit, of course we’ll fix it. But the players who outsmarted the designer? This is just a story for the textbooks.
The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj opened in 2006 with the game’s massive Gates of Ahn’Qiraj event, which required entire servers to spend weeks collecting resources together.
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A raid of forty people became one of the most difficult activities of the early World of Warcraftand Prophet Skeram served as a test of the raid’s ability to coordinate targets.
