Designer Notes Podcast - Interview with Rob Pardo

Ideas

United States8097 Posts

January 13 2015 16:21 GMT

Hey guys I came across this excellent extended interview with Rob Pardo (the de facto design lead at Blizzard for almost 2 decades) and I thought you guys would be the best people to share it with so I logged on for the first time in like a year to share it.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-part-1

It covers the early days of Blizzard and the development of StarCraft 1 and Brood War pretty extensively and there's some really fascinating stuff in it.

Part 2 covers the development of War3, WoW, and SC2.

Miwyfe

England101 Posts

January 13 2015 16:41 GMT

Was posted here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/general/473471-4-hours-of-pardo-discussing-blizzard-game-design

I posted the following in the other thread:
This is far from comprehensive but will get you started. There are other topics discussed in between the bits Ive tagged etc.
Starcraft 1 relevant bits:

Part 1, Starcraft 1 sections:
00.38 (game balance)
00.46 (Zileas using reavers)
00.51 (fastest game speed)
00.55 (apm)
01.07 (Maps)
01.10 (Broodwar specifically as opposed to starcraft vanilla)
01.18 (Amount of hours he worked)
01.21 (Meaning of balance, Boxer using vultures)
01.22 (emergent gameplay, spellcasters, move and shoot units)

Part 2
01.26 on part 2 (unlimited unit selection for starcraft 2)

Kahanho0

Belize1 Post

January 15 2015 10:52 GMT

--- Nuked ---

Probemicro

3708 Posts

January 15 2015 11:03 GMT

On January 10 2015 19:05 Hesmyrr wrote:
Thanks for the notification! We're actually very excited about this event and already have bunch of threads dedicated to K[H]SL

lol hesmyrr confirmed for bot?

[[Starlight]]

United States1578 Posts

January 15 2015 11:51 GMT

This is freakin' awesome! Thank you!

// for the few ppl who might not remember, Pardo was the lead designer on BroodWar, along with Chris Metzen

EndRoll

Japan116 Posts

January 15 2015 13:51 GMT

Thanks! Subscribed in iTunes will listen later

[[Starlight]]

United States1578 Posts

January 15 2015 16:09 GMT

Heard part 1, good stuff. Some thoughts

– It's too bad the interviewer didn't seem to know much about SC/BW. He kept relating everything back to games he himself helped design (Civ 3, 4). I get why he did that, but still, kinda annoying... the interview wasn't about Civ after all. Perhaps bone up on a bit on BW if you're going to interview its lead designer for several hours?

– Pardo had some interesting comments on game speed: "during development we played one notch above the middle speed [Fast]"... "we didn't think anyone would really play on Fastest"... "I myself don't really enjoy playing on Fastest." Kinda confirms a suspicion I've had for years that Fastest was a fluke speed.

– Some of Pardo's comments on balance are a bit odd, at least at first glance. He talks about how incredibly committed to balance he was during SC's development, but as we all know, SC vanilla got released in pretty horribly imbalanced shape... even several months after release, ladder stats were showing some maps with Zerg win rates over 80%, and that's over thousands of games, i.e a large enough statistical sample.

Maybe it would've been even worse without Rob's efforts (and to be fair, he wasn't lead designer on vanilla, just BW), but still, kinda points to the idea that maybe balance wasn't initially prioritized by Blizzard as a whole so much at first. Or if it was, they sure were bad at it

.

He also doesn't mention the role the community played in helping force Blizzard's hand a bit... Bliz was flooded with balance complaints for months after vanilla's release (didn't really slow 'til 1.04 & BW came out), the Bliz forums were pretty much about imba wall-to-wall, threads with hundreds of posts on it were not uncommon. Have to wonder if that didn't strengthen Rob's hand some as 'Mr. Balance Guy' within Bliz, or even help make him a bit more the logical choice as LD for BW.

– I really like Pardo's design ethos, he wants to keep the cool and challenging stuff in, while still keeping things as fair and reasonable as is practical. He doesn't sound absolutist, but rather a guy who understands that design is about trade-offs and simultaneously juggling a dozen different things at once. I also like his thoughts on offense-oriented gameplay in RTS, namely, that's where it's at, not pointlessly drawing out games between two very mismatched players in terms of skill level.

Of course, Rob/Bliz may've gone too far with this early on... *cough* 4-5 pools under 150 mineral spawning pool *cough cough*.

Chef

10810 Posts

January 15 2015 19:03 GMT

Kinda disappointing; partly because of the questions, partly the interviewee himself.

You get the feeling either his opinions changed a lot over the years, or he had waaay more control over SC2 than he did SC1. Maybe his opinions just got more specific over the years, since SC2 seems to play exactly the way he thinks about it, but there are a lot more viable play styles in SC1 that don't fall under his ideas about what makes a fun game, at least on the community made maps. His ideas actually resonate pretty true in SC1 too for the default Blizzard maps.

tehredbanditt

103 Posts

January 16 2015 20:39 GMT

I wish the interviewer would have asked some more specific questions about bw. Regardless of that, I was still happy to have heard the interview. What surprised me the most was the fact that rob seemed to portray the idea that he got changes to the game pushed through by being [one of the] best players during alpha and closed beta. An example if this being that he would always win with Zerg when they had fast ol"s on hatch tech.

I've always heard that the brood war units were already finalized when original Sc shipped , but Robs comments seemed to suggest otherwise. He also seemed to express desire to keep high skill ceilings in his games on many occasions, which makes me wonder why sc2 turned out the way it did ( he claimed that he advocated for the removal of limited unit selection in sc2). He did state the at the end of sc2 development he stopped working on the project, and during production he had many side jobs as well.

But yea. .. I wanted more questions like, " how did you come up with hit point values for units," or " what are three units / ideas that you liked but were unable to put into broodwar? And why were you unable to put them in?"

It's funny that the games he was a major part if creating are my all time favorite games ( bw, wc3 , vanilla / bc wow) yet up until a year ago I had no idea who he was

Please or register to reply.

Designer Notes Podcast - Interview with Rob Pardo

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming