Interviews

Five Years of Warcraft: Speaking With Blizzard's Rob Pardo

For years Blizzard had been saying "We won't let you switch between factions, we won't let you transfer from a PvP server to a PvE server," why was the decision made to change that?

Honestly, there's a whole bunch of changes like that, that we... well, part of it comes from the hardcore mentality we used to have, and the increasing changes we see in our playerbase. If we rerun all the way to previous we shipped WoW, [Former WoW Lead Designer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan] and I and some other people - even though we were making the game much more accessible, we'd all lived the hardcore MMO life, so we held some things to be "truths self-evident." Like, you had to have large raid sizes to make them feel epic, you needed to gate content by making players attune themselves to different tiers of content. On the PvP side, we said "Oh, you can never let people have a character on both sides of the PvP game."

We had all these suppositions, and as the years went on and we had more and more experience living with WoW as a live game, we realized that they weren't just truths. They might affect a hardcore minority, but the people we saw weren't really as hardcore as we thought they were. If we reduced raids from 40 to 25, we saw, it makes it more fun. You might have some hardcore players who get upset, but keeping people out of content isn't right for the game overall. We mellowed sometimes, and realized we were wrong.

The other piece is that the WoW playerbase is becoming more casual over time. People who were hardcore into MMOs, they joined us first, but the people we're acquiring over the years are casual. They heard about the game from a friend of a friend, and maybe it's their first MMO - maybe it's their first game. The game has to evolve to match the current player.

We're making really serious changes in the newbie game to help those players get into it. Our tutorial back in the day served core gamers pretty well, but now we need to redo it. There are lot of changes in 3.3, we'll actually be posting some stuff soon. There are quest tracking changes that you'll start seeing that will help new players, how to assist them from the map on the M button. Look on the website, we'll be previewing it soon.

There are small features and medium features to help new players, there's a whole organized approach. Some things we'll do in [the upcoming patch 3.3] but others will have to wait until Cataclysm. One of these things that we've been featuring on the test realm is the new cross-server LFG tool - it's that sort of thing.

That segues in nicely to this question: Cross-server gameplay. It's convenient, but do you think that it runs the risk of destroying server communities?

To be completely honest, [the Looking For Group tool] is a feature I wanted in the game when we launched the game. I was really unhappy when we didn't have it when we first shipped, so it's been 5 years coming. Maybe it wasn't the number one thing I wanted in, but it's definitely one of the top 5 things that I wanted in the game. It's actually our third try at a proper LFG tool, and this one gets it right. With the Meeting Stones, we didn't put enough attention into it, we just tried to jam it in, and people didn't use it. The second tool, it ended up being compromised feature - we tried to cater to too many different audiences.

As for the community question, I used to ... I think that 5 years ago, I would have answered this question differently than I would today. I was all about preserving the small realm communities, but already... Well, look at Battlegrounds, it's a good case in point, because it doesn't diminish social relationships that matter on a realm. Sure, everyone can bring up "that one guy" that they know, the ninja looter who stole his stuff. But I think your real community isn't the whole realm, but it's your guild and the friends you group with, and the cross-server LFG won't undermine that at all. The Dungeon Finder - by the way, I think we just renamed it the Dungeon Finder last night - We designed it in such a way that it serves the need for guilds and groups and friends. You don't have to always [join a Pick-Up Group]. If there are four guildies in a group who just need a fifth, they can do that. You can also use it if even you have a full five-person party.

Or, you can do it if you're on your own and just want to run something, so I don't think it diminishes it at all

Planning on playing anything interesting over Thanksgiving break?

Oh, there's so many games right now that I need to catch up with. I really need to tell everybody to stop making so many awesome games! There's a copy of Modern Warfare 2 on my desk, I really want to play that. I've been playing lots of DJ Hero, I actually just finished Brutal Legend, I've been playing Borderlands. I still haven't played Arkham Asylum or Uncharted 2. There's way too many great-looking games that I want to play!

WoW has all types of people who play it - a politician in Guam, lawyers, teachers, etc. Who do you think was the most unusual person you've ever encountered playing WoW? A "I would have never pegged you as the type" moment?

I don't know if I have a singular person, but the ones that always surprise me the most are the really elderly ones. The people who are not only new to games, but then here they are in Battlegrounds - 70-year-old ladies in BGs. They surprise me the most. We usually think that that generation doesn't play games period, let alone something that's on the PC, online.

Thanks, Rob! Stick around for an interview with WoW Production Director J. Allen Brack and Blizzard's Art Director Samwise Didier!