While you’re exploring the lands of Azeroth and Kalimdor, you’ll be treated to a multitude of different regions, each with its own visual style. Vast, varied, and beautiful, many of the regions were recreated from their appearances in prior Warcraft games, while others introduce heretofore uncharted lands in the Warcraft universe. This variety and detail can be seen in the lush forests in Ashenvale and Feralas, the snowy mountains in Dun Morogh, the savannah of the Barrens, the plains of Mulgore, and the deserts of Tanaris. Swamps in Un’Goro Crater, jungles in Stranglethorn Vale, farmland in Elwynn Forest, and even deforested hills in Stonetalon Mountains are even more of the many regions you can explore. Terrain that has been vastly altered by magic and the ravages of war also appear in the game. The razed city of Dalaran, encased in a protective magic shell, is a painful reminder of the devastation of the Reign of Chaos, while the infested Eastern and Western Plaguelands are filled with diseased animals and plantlife, courtesy of the Scourge’s plague.

This long list of landscapes doesn’t even include the underground environments and dungeons of the world. There are dungeons available for all ranges of mid- to high-level players, and they offer many rich quests, fearsome foes, and powerful rewards.

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You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain. Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their race’s capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of Go’Shek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

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Morhaime begins by laying out how much the world has changed in a century. How without cars or planes it was “like WoW before you get mounts, with no flight paths.” He flows into a discussion of how the rate of technological progress increases exponentially. Moore’s law, the fact that if the airline industry progressed as quickly as semiconductors have since the year he founded Blizzard, we’d be able to fly from L.A. To Paris in two minutes. And just when I start to think he’s become a Singularitarian evangelist, he makes the point. Blizzard has gotten big, but they began back in the good old days when “a couple programmers, a couple artists, and maybe a sound guy…they could make a game.”

“I started Blizzard with two friends,” he said. “My friend Alan… it was really his idea. Alan and I each contributed $10,000. I borrowed the money from my grandma.”

That’s not the company now. The number of employees at Blizzard had grown since the beginning, of course, but that’s nothing compared to what WoW necessitated. “World of Warcraft has really transformed the company in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine at the time.”

There are a lot of lessons to be taken from his stories. Firstly, not to underestimate the importance of appealing to a hard core of users without alienating a wider audience. “The mass market doesn’t have systems that early adopters have. If you purchased a system in the last three years, Blizzard games should run on it.” I don’t know how many MMOs have needed a whiz-bang rig to be even remotely playable at the time of launch. It’s one of the many things WoW did right.

It also follows that there needs to be deep, nuanced gameplay for the hardcore, but accessibility for the majority of players. “Guitar Hero is one of the best examples. You can spend a lot of time mastering that game, but anyone can just pick up that controller and play.”

More important than anything, however, he stressed one simple message. Put bluntly: finish your damn games. No amount of money you earn back from a quick release will be worth turning your name into poison.

“We view our brand as our most important property. We want it to stand for high quality games, fun, polish…there’s always pressure to release a game before it’s ready. But we think that shipping a game early is a very risky thing. It can do tremendous damage to a brand or franchise.”

It was a lesson they best learned when Diablo missed its holiday release date in ‘96. It didn’t suffer for it sales-wise. Certainly not as much as it would have had it shipped without the extra polish. “Nobody looks back on Diablo and says ‘if only it came out three weeks earlier.’” A similar situation occurred with The Burning Crusade. It missed its date, yet became the fastest selling PC title ever, moving 2.4 million copies on the day it hit.

“It’s in the interest of everyone, even the finance guys, to make sure that a game is ready when it comes out,” he says. Blizzard’s willingness to sacrifice the short term bottom line in the name of quality and image is admirable and nearly unique in the industry, but hasn’t always gone exactly to plan. World of Warcraft’s launch wasn’t without its screw ups. The greatest of them being that the game was just too damn popular for its own good. Just in case you forgot those early days of waiting in server lines for ages. “Our first big challenge was estimating how many people would want to play a game like this.” And Blizzard overestimated how much a monthly fee would put people off. “We know that we’re not going to sell faster than Warcraft III… Definitely not out the gate. We’re safe if we think of WCIII as the ceiling.”

That bar was just way too low. They had an excellent game that was playable about half the time. “We needed to scale up the entire business overnight. By scale up the entire business I mean everything. Development staff, IT staff, community management, customer service, human resources…when we launched World of Warcraft I don’t even think we had a recruiting department. We were not prepared. At all. We had to shift our mindset that we were not just a game publisher or developer. We were now a service company.”

And that’s how an outfit of a few dozen guys swelled into a company with about 2,500 employees.

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It’s a question that’s been raised with the developer on numerous occasions previously, only to see Blizzard say nope, no console plans for WoW. And the company has re-iterated such in response to a post on the official forums questioning the arrival of the game on PS3.

No plans “at this time?” That clearly means WoW on consoles in the future. Right?