World of Warcraft Pets Interview

MTV Multiplayer notices an obsession with pets that World of Warcraft users seem to have, and a tendency from Blizzard to hand them out at conventions and in special editions. So they question lead content designer Cory Stockton on where pets came from.

“We requested a seagull from the character art team and my seagull came in. I got some basic animations on it. Like it being perched, it flying around in circles. I thought the seagull looked really great, so I wanted to make a pet out of it. At that point I just requested a couple extra fun animations, so we have an animation of the seagull flying in a loop and we have an animation of it pecking around in the ground…it ended up looking so cool, once we got it from the character team.”

Stockton went on to explain that most of the pets tend to come as an after-thought, but in a good way. “A lot of times, an asset will come in and we won’t even know that we’re going to make a pet out of it. But when it gets in a designers hands, things like that can end up becoming much more than we originally envisioned.”