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"The first thing we always do is we design depth first and accessibility later,"

After focusing on the depth, the team went back and made the game accessible, starting with the user interface.

"There were a lot of other games we saw where your newbie experience was trying to find your way out of your starting town, and we wanted to avoid that," Pardo said.

The team's next mantra was "killing with a purpose," an idea that dictated the quest design philosophy.

"With a lot of the other MMOs, you would just go out and the whole reason for playing the game was just to see that little experience bar move," Pardo said, adding, "That's actually really fun gameplay, but it's not particularly accessible to people."

"Once you have all those deep, interesting game features in your game and you've done the accessibility, you need to get people from that newbie experience to the core experience," Pardo said. "It really becomes all about pacing."

"concentrated coolness."

For instance, Pardo said the Mountain King, Blademaster, and Tauren Chieftain from Warcraft 3 were essentially combined into the Warrior class, which was given the thunder clap, critical strike, and shock-wave abilities of its predecessors.

By preventing players from teleporting instantly to wherever their friends were adventuring or wherever their next quest was, the gameworld carries with it a sense of scale.

There's this big assumption with polish that it's something you do at the end,

We do the polish right from the beginning. It's a constant effort. You really have to have a culture of polish. It's something that everyone has to be brought into; it's something you really have to preach."

"Don't ship until it's ready."

I found myself simply avoiding most of the dropped treasure when I played the game, which defeats the whole purpose of this type of game in my opinion.

I also enjoyed the fact that this game isn't too wordy, I'm sick and tired of Diablo-clones that spend ten minutes explaining a story you honestly don't care about.

The one thing Arkadian Warrior does manage to get right is the actual hacking and slashing mechanic.

While I'm sure that most dark dungeons would be dirty and ugly, the fact is that you're spending most of your time in these levels, so part of me kind of wishes that these segments looked more appealing. To top it all off, the various monsters are pretty boring and they are repeated over and over with different colors (to represent their difficulty, I have to assume).

Arkadian Warrior isn't a bad game by any means; it's just a boring game that doesn't stand out in any way.

In total there's about six hours of this back and forth in the single-player campaign, all of which feels perfectly at home with this generic dungeon crawler.

From the get-go you will have a choice between a soldier (who is good with blade weapons), an archer (who is good at long distances) and a sorceress (who floats around, looks good in a skin-tight blue costume and throws a mean fireball)

When it comes right down to it, the most important part of making a dungeon crawler is giving gamers interesting dungeons to explore. This is the biggest problem with Arkadian Warrior; none of the levels are all that interesting. It doesn't help that most of the levels look the same, level after level you're asked to fight your way through the same boring caves fighting the same boring enemies. To make matters worse, all of these different levels start to blend together after awhile. The fact that there are slightly different textures and a subtle change in color doesn't alter the fact that you're essentially doing the same thing over and over for very little reward.

Polish has been taken up as the banner, the rallying cry of game designers both in and out of the MMO genre. Meeting the high quality standard World of Warcraft has set requires an enormous amount of polish; so much so that WoW's success is often said to hang on the game's polish.

there's even a magic globe that you can use to see a far-off locale you won't reach for another dozen levels or so.

World of Warcraft's quest journal was a revolution. This system of directed experiences is another well-referenced reason for the game's success.

Quests act as landmarks and signposts in what would otherwise be (and was, in previous games) aimless wandering and meaningless grinding for rewards.

Designers know that the player will have to travel to one specific area of the map to carry out the task, and will end up in yet another part to turn in the quest. By seeding the hunting zone and the hamlet around Bob with further quests, interesting challenges, beautiful landscapes and a sense of danger designers are assured that players will have a certain level of quality in their gaming experience.

Going back to the lowering of barriers to fun, WoW’s low system spec, the incredibly forgiving requirement it places on computers, is another pillar on which the game’s success rests. Despite this, many player cite the game’s pleasing presentation as a compelling reason to play

The key is that Blizzard solved the ‘issue’ of graphics through artistic presentation instead of raw horsepower.

There was a lot of interest in the genre, but nothing accessible enough to reach a truly mass market.