Recently, a PC Gamer journalist interviewed the creator of DOOM. During the conversation, John Romero talked about the game in which he spent the most time.
In his opinion, his No. 1 game in terms of hours played is World of Warcraft. And the developer didn't just "play" it, he literally lived in Blizzard's MMORPG:
I think I spent over three thousand hours in WoW. God, I literally lived in that game every day for five years. Usually six hours a day. And on weekends — as long as I could stay awake. At that time, I was working on an MMO myself, so studying this game was extremely important for me — to understand why I want to do this, why I'm ready to endure all the difficulties, and what you're even thinking about every second while playing.
John Romero was a member of a raiding guild and did "everything":
I had five main characters with gear of different classes. And a total of ten characters. When you create a new one, you're essentially starting the game over, but I already knew how to optimize the playthrough. I could reach level six in half an hour.
According to Romero, developers should pay attention to projects like World of Warcraft and study the solutions used in them:
It's very important to look at such successful games and their systems as "battle-tested" solutions. The way they implemented it has been played by millions of players and has been maintained for years. It works. And for design, it's extremely important to consider such examples — not for direct copying, but to understand why it's done this way and how it functions.