Rob Pardo Leaves Blizzard Entertainment

Every ending is a beginning and today marks a new beginning for me.

After 17 years at Blizzard, with long and careful contemplation, I have made a difficult and bittersweet but ultimately exciting decision to pursue the next chapter in my life and career.

Before I even joined Blizzard, I was already a huge fan of the company and its games. In particular, I was extremely passionate about the emerging genre of real-time strategy games. It was a dream come true when I was given the opportunity to work on StarCraft, which at the time was being created by a very small team by today’s standards. It was tremendously fulfilling to get to know everyone on the team personally and to contribute our energies toward a shared goal in such a creative and engaging environment.

Blizzard Entertainment has been simply the best place in the world to be a game designer. The best aspect of designing games at Blizzard is that the entire company is passionate about the gameplay within each and every product. From the executive team to customer service to our global offices, every single person is a player and contributes to making the best possible games. It’s for very good reason that the first credit on every Blizzard game is “Game Design by Blizzard Entertainment.”

I’m really proud of the contributions I was able to make to Blizzard’s accomplishments. From building lasting games, to supporting the growth of eSports, to extending the Warcraft world into a feature film, and of course to being able to celebrate our shared passions with the Blizzard community online and at BlizzCon.

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.

I’m looking forward to new challenges in my career, but I will always cherish the time I spent with you all and the amazing and collaborative teams at Blizzard. It was both satisfying and humbling, and it made me a better developer and a better person. I look forward to playing Blizzard games as a player for many years to come. Most important, now I have plenty of time to learn how to build a competitive Hearthstone deck.

As to what I will be doing next, I don’t have an answer for you yet . . . but I will “when it’s ready.” My priorities are to enjoy the summer with my family, play plenty of games, and think about what’s next. The game industry is such an exciting place right now with PC gaming thriving, the new consoles, mobile games, and virtual reality becoming an actual reality. It’s like having an empty quest log and going into a new zone for the first time.

In the past, I haven’t been the most avid Twitter user, but I’ll strive to do better and keep you updated there—@Rob_Pardo. Please stay in touch!

Rob

On July 04 2014 17:49 paralleluniverse wrote:
Rob Pardo leaves behind an impressive legacy at Blizzard. As chief creative officer, his role was to supervise the game directors for all of Blizzard's games, so he was ultimately responsible for basically everything, both the good and the bad. In particular, he was lead designer on WC3, arguably Blizzard's best game, and also lead designer on WoW and the first few expansions. Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.

Pardo strongly rejected microtransactions and gold buying in WoW. But unfortunately, that has failed to translate. Microtransactions are all over WoW. Gold buying was legalized with the guardian cub, which I argued against, and is now gone. But I laud them for retaining the $40 expansion model, despite the industry moving decisively towards the model of selling worthless DLC and microtransactions. As Jay Wilson's supervisor, Pardo was also ultimately responsible for the RMAH that destroyed D3. I also argued against that, and it's gone too.

Amongst his most major failures was the disastrous launch of Battle.net 0.2 that came with SC2. It was the biggest regression of any online platform ever. It launched without chat channels, without even whisper functionality, it gutted all the amazing game features and social features of the 2002 WC3 Battle.net, it had one of the worse and most meaningless ladder systems, it was lifeless and barren because you didn't know if anyone was online and it was impossible to interact with anyone not on your friends list. And he got up at Blizzcon, and announced Battle.net 0.2 as if it was the greatest thing ever, when in fact, it was worse in every single regard, with not one single new or innovative feature... other than Facebook integration, obviously. While, over a very long time, Battle.net 2.0 improved, there's still nothing--not one feature--new or innovative about it.

So under Pardo, the game design at Blizzard has been set at an extremely high level of quality and polish. The gameplay in Blizzard's games is the best in the industry, and has only improve because of Pardo. Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2. WoW's game systems are better than ever. And for this reason, Pardo will be greatly missed. But Blizzard's business model has gotten more greedy and unfair over time, for example, D3 launched with a RMAH and Hearthstone uses an unfair "buy advantages for real money" model. But it's not entirely clear whether Pardo was fighting for or against this distinctive and indisputable shift to more greedy and unfair business models. I suspect, to a small extent, it was the latter.

I wish Rob the best of luck for the future.