EPTOn 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.
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.
This seems to be a very good post, and I think that I overlooked some of the great things Pardo did for Blizzard Games.
