Blizzard Entertainment Interview

Edge Magazine managed to corner World of Warcraft designer Rob Pardo during last weekend’s BlizzCon for an interview about the evolution and growth of the company’s fan event, the lack of “meaningful competition” for WoW, whether they’re collaborating with Bungie on another MMORPG, and more.

Speaking as a gamer rather than a developer, are your recent titles everything that you want them to be? Or do you have to make concessions to newcomers and casual gamers in the name of accessibility?

I think fundamentally it’s pretty hard to make a game that you’re not excited about playing. Even though there may be some elements of more hardcore games that we wouldn’t put in a Blizzard game I don’t really see that as a concession. As a game designer I want as many people as possible to enjoy playing the game. I want it to be awesome, and I want to enjoy playing the game. I don’t really look at that stuff as concessions.

It’s just when you’re making games collaboratively, you want to come up with ideas that everyone on the team enjoys and thinks are great, rather than ideas that just you might like, because then you would just end up with an audience of one. So when you say ‘˜concession’ I would say it’s iterating the game to make it even better than it would be if it was just me.