On July 04 2014 10:44 zlefin wrote: Has blizzard's stock price been affected by this? Losing one of their top people seems like it should yield a minor reduction at least.
lol.Of course the stock price hasn't been affected. Why would it?
Contrary to what people believe Blizzar isn't run by 5 people. Just like David Kim isn't the guy who balances SC2.
They may be leading work, but rest assured they are working in big teams where a lot of talented people do work. Rob and David are just the faces of Blizzard in media.
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.
On July 04 2014 07:18 Pegas wrote: Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
what a record WOW this guy owes me YEARS of lifetime
Over almost 10 years of WoW, the game has progressively gotten better.
Heroes of the Storm fixes the many fundamental game design mistakes in Dota 2.
Snowballing and 50 minute games that are already decided 10-20 minutes in. And the things that cause this.
out.
Purposefully lowering skill cap by removing mechanics might work great to attract the casual and therefor biggest market to your game, but claiming this model improves upon other designs because "you can't lose in the opening minutes" is outright delusional. Also the VAST majority of people who played WoW will tell you vanilla and TBC were easily the best era of the game. So again..
On July 04 2014 07:18 Pegas wrote: Rob Pardo has been credited on the following games:
Lead Designer
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos StarCraft: Brood War
Designer
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Diablo II Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition StarCraft Diablo III
This isn't just some guy leaving blizzard. This is pretty much like Miyamoto leaving Nintendo. I have no idea how Blizzard can recover from this. This is truly the end of the road.
what a record WOW this guy owes me YEARS of lifetime
Yeah he owes me too, forgot to add two more :
Design Director StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010)
Executive Producer Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Seems every single success title that Blizzard ever made was tied to his name and contribution.
First Greg Street leaves now Robert Pardo, something tells me something big will happen @ Blizzard soon. What it is we can only speculate.
This guy pretty much ruined the diablo franchise and from what I've been hearing from my buddies at blizzard (3 of them lol) he has/had final say on a lot the stuff that goes on and he ruined b.net as well. Not to be a hater because I'm sure he had his hayday and did a lot, but the negatives are what I will remember most about this guy.
I'm trying to find links that directly link Rob Pardo to BNet 2.0, but to no avail. Can anyone show me something that suggests he worked directly on that?
On July 04 2014 19:59 Spaylz wrote: I'm trying to find links that directly link Rob Pardo to BNet 2.0, but to no avail. Can anyone show me something that suggests he worked directly on that?
One of the best game designers ever, and by far the best RTS game designer. He is the one that should have been in charge of SC2...
On July 04 2014 06:26 Excalibur_Z wrote: This is tremendous news. Rob Pardo was extremely influential in design and had an simplistic, elegant approach that made his credited games immensely popular. I have my own personal theories about why he's leaving, and I think he probably disagrees with the path Blizzard is taking in their recent games. Dustin Browder made a blog post about the design of Heroes of the Storm earlier today and through reading the entire thing I kept thinking "Rob Pardo would never sign off on something like this, he prefers the 'make everything overpowered' approach rather than baby-stepping and keeping things flat." Now this news comes out that Pardo is leaving. The design decisions for games like D3, SC2, Heroes, post-TBC WoW, Hearthstone have been widely criticized by many of Blizzard's "classic" fans, the ones who grew up with BW, War2, War3. That's not to say that their new design philosophy is bad, it's just different from where they were 15 years ago. Perhaps Rob believes that as an executive he's too far from working day-to-day in the trenches with the rest of the design team, and will be looking for a smaller studio where he can be more directly involved with the nitty gritty details.
- Disorganised chat (chat was amazing and had great functionality?) - Disconnected from single player experience (wat) - New players got pwned (define new) - Ladder system served only the elite (errrrrrr lol?) - Can't find a custom game except for DotA (not true again?)
Is that actually real? They just listed all the reasons that made WC3 fucking amazing but think they're the highest priority negatives? LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL BLIZZARD (Y)
EPT
