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Rob Pardo leaves Blizzard
In a rather surprising move, Blizzard's Executive Producer Rob Pardo announced today that he is leaving the company. At this time he has announced no immediate career plans or subsequent goals, although he mentions a desire to spend the summer with his family and consider his next move. Pardo's forum announcement thanks the design teams for all of their hard work and notes that he has immensely enjoyed his time with the company; he expresses great satisfaction at the growth of the company and all of the changes that have come about during his tenure there. Pardo mentions that he began working with the studio during development of the original StarCraft, having since worked on titles including Diablo III, World of Warcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. He has promised fans that he will attempt to be communicative about his next move via Twitter. [Thanks to Dystopiq for the tip!]
Rob Pardo is leaving Blizzard
Rob Pardo, currently Blizzard's Chief Creative officer, announced on the forums that he's parting ways with Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo has been a fixture of the company for 17 years now, and though he isn't saying -- yet -- where he's headed next, he did offer a thank you to Blizzard's fans and community: Rob Pardo The Blizzard community is ultimately the reason why we come to work every day and pour our souls into every world and experience we create. Blizzard's players are the most passionate in the world and your commitment and dedication are truly awesome to behold. Creating entertainment for you has been an incredible opportunity, and I know that you will continue to grow and become even stronger as a community over the years to come. It has been so meaningful on a personal level to help create joy for all of you. source Thanks for the games, Rob -- we'll be keeping our eyes open for what you're working on next.
Blizzard: Arenas were a mistake.
John Funk of WarCry recently interviewed Blizzard's VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, about WoW's five-year anniversary, and he shed some light on a number of topics, including their total subscriber numbers (twice to three times as much as its current 12 million), what audience their new MMO is meant for, and what he thinks WoW's greatest successes were. But some other very interesting information came up when the interviewer asked what he thought WoW's biggest mistakes were. He begins by saying that he wishes that the servers had been more stable at launch, and that there had been more of them, but he says that in terms of design, Arenas were the single biggest mistake in WoW's history.
Rob Pardo talks about free WoW, Starcraft, Activision
Rob Pardo, SVP of game design at Blizzard, gave the keynote speech at the Game Developer's Conference held in Paris this week. Here are some WoW-related tidbits from his talk and the Q&A session held afterward.About WoW WoW was first conceived as free to play, being supported by advertising. However, the non-subscription business model couldn't support Blizzard's goals for the game. Pardo suggested that Blizzard approached the MMO genre "very naively, or else we might not have done it." He once hired a WoW player who sent him a 16-page diatribe about the game because, even though the guy was wrong, "he was passionate" about improving the game. About Starcraft 2 Blizzard has no problem putting intellectual properties on hold for a while, hence the wait for a Starcraft game. Pardo says that they wanted to make a real-time strategy game but were "tired of green-skinned orcs" so they moved away from Warcraft to Starcraft. Starcraft 2 is at a playable stage in its development and he's having a lot of fun with it. Read more about Rob Pardo's keynote speech.
Beckett names Rob Pardo most influential person in MMOs
Beckett's July-August issues of Massive Online Gamer magazine (which went on sale yesterday) names what they think are the 20 most influential names in the MMORPG business today, and as you might expect, a World of Warcraft figure topped the list, namely Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design for Blizzard Entertainment. Interestingly enough, Rob Pardo is the only current Blizzard figure that appears on the list. It seems to me, at the least, that Tom Chilton (If only for the Esports thing) or Jeff Kaplan should have been considered for the list as well, and I'm sure most of my fellow old school gamers are noticing the glaring absence of Lum The Mad, the grandfather of all MMO critics. Still, most of us can agree, I'm sure, that Pardo deserves the top spot. It's hard to argue with the success of Blizzard's games, especially WoW, and it doesn't look like it's going to flag anytime soon with WoTLK on the way. You can check out the complete list here, and see how much you agree with it. [Via Massively]
Blood Sport: Is WoW turning into a PvP game?
V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.Looking at some of the upcoming class changes in patch 2.4, I can't help but feel that many of them are driven by PvP - particularly Arena - issues. Blizzard is undoubtedly trying to level the playing field for the classes before the 3v3 Arena Tournament, tentatively set to begin in April. That's a very short time to iron out problems and further imbalances that the patch will bring.A design philosophy that Blizzard has insisted on from the beginning is that each class should play similarly in both PvP and PvP. Tom Chilton (Lead Designer, or Kalgan) said at last year's Blizzcon that the game "shouldn't have significantly different rules for spells in PvP vs PvE.""Slower" water in Arenas is the latest change that depart from this philosophy, in addition to PvP-only diminishing returns, and PvP-oriented stats like Resilience and Spell Penetration. However, since many class changes apply to both PvP and PvE, PvE players seem to be "dragged" along by changes meant to tune their classes' PvP performance. Shamans and druids seem to be most affected this patch with changes to Nature's Swiftness, Elemental Mastery, Call of Thunder for shamans, and Lifebloom for druids.
GDC08: Pardo and others on the future of MMOs
This afternoon gaming luminaries Rob Pardo (Blizzard), Min Kim (Nexon), Ray Muzyka (Bioware), Jack Emmert (Cryptic), and Matt Miller (NCsoft) got together at GDC to exchange their thoughts on the future of the industry. Sister site Massively was there live, no doubt typing furiously in order to catch every crumb of information. Want to know what's going to happen to your favorite game (or games!) in 10 or 20 years? Check out Massively's live coverage. Gallery: GDC08: The Future of MMOs
GDC08: Live from Rob Pardo talks about Blizzard's approach to MMOs
Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Game Design, is speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this afternoon and WoW Insider is here live to catch it all. Though the auditorium is just filling up, Pardo should be out in a few minutes to tell us all about Blizzard's approach to multiplayer game design. Catch the full details after the break.%Gallery-16546%
Blizzard still holding out hope for Starcraft Ghost?
Well, even if Blizzard as a whole doesn't, Rob Pardo certainly seems to. At the Hollywood & Games Summit, when asked about canceling projects, Pardo responded with his thoughts on Blizzard's ill-fated Starcraft Ghost:Our most recent one was Starcraft Ghost. With that game we were very stubborn. I still believe in that game and the characters but we were not able to execute at the level we wanted to...Rather than work on that we had to focus on our other games. We're hoping one day to return to it.So March 2006's indefinite postponement of development on the project may not mean cancellation -- perhaps they're just saving the best for last.
Rob Pardo on development at Blizzard
Even if you don't know the name, you're familiar with Rob Pardo's work. He is, after all, the Vice President of Design over at Blizzard, and he's responsible for the game design decisions you see whenever you venture into the World of Warcraft. Next Generation sat down with Rob Pardo to ask some of of everyone's burning questions on the future of World of Warcraft. First up, what exactly does a VP of Design do? Pardo explains:With the teams as big as they are I don't get as much time to write design documents myself. There's a lot more meetings, a lot more collaborative stuff that happens. Let's take one small component of WoW, let's say quests. We have a team of quest designers and we all sit in a room everyday and jam up ideas. I'll follow up with each individual quest designer. I'll play their quests and iterate through it. But there's some stuff I get to design too. I also try to fill gaps that need filling. I'm trying to provide the big picture vision and philosophy and also helping out where it's needed.Pardo is happy with the way the Burning Crusade has turned out. But what about the future? Are regular expansions a matter of survival for Blizzard's hit MMO?Calling it a matter of survival makes it sound grim. It's more a matter of entertainment. Of course we want our gamers to stay in the world for as long as we can. But I look at this from the positive angle of us trying to entertain them. We're trying to give them new experiences. One of my favorite analogies is how much an MMO is like a TV series. We're developing episodes just like Lost or Seinfeld. We're always trying to come up with something that's true to the theory; that's true to the content that people love; but that is new. From the moment that the series starts re-treading the same ground over and over again... well, that's what we're trying to avoid.
The Hollywood Reporter on Rob Pardo
I've got to admit, parts of this Hollywood Reporter interview feels like a rehash of Pardo's keynote at the Austin Game Conference back in September. New and interesting tidbits include an officially increased subscription count at 8 million worldwide and an interesting discussion of microtransactions. Pardo tells us that while such microtransactions might work for some games (he uses the possibility of extra songs in Guitar Hero as an example), it doesn't work for MMO's, or at least not World of Warcraft:What's fun about "WoW' is going into a dungeon and completing a particular quest and then being rewarded with a really cool item that your character can wear to show the other players that you've accomplished something. If you could suddenly buy that item, it would really cheapen that idea of accomplishment.[Via Joystiq]
Rob Pardo's keynote at the Austin Game Conference
Elizabeth Harper is covering the MMO-heavy Austin Game Conference for Joystiq and our WoW-obsessed friends at WoW Insider.Haven't heard of Rob Pardo? Well, you might want to familiarize yourself with him. Not only is he Blizzard's Vice President of Game Development, but he recently was put on Time Magazine's list of the top 100 people, which points out that Pardo didn't invent the MMO, he just perfected it.So Wednesday morning, when the Austin Game Conference started out with a keynote from Mr. Pardo on the game design philosophy behind World of Warcraft, it wasn't to be missed. Read on for the highlights of the keynote.
Rob Pardo at the Austin Game Conference
Haven't heard of Rob Pardo? Well, you might want to familiarize yourself with him. Not only is he Blizzard's Vice President of Game Development, but he recently was put on Time Magazine's list of the top 100 people, which points out that Pardo didn't invent the MMO - he just perfected it.So Wednesday morning, when the Austin Game Conference started out with a keynote from Mr. Pardo on the game design philosophy behind World of Warcraft it wasn't to be missed. Read on for the highlights of the keynote.
