We’ll be seeing him soon enough, Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design, but in the meanwhile, StarCraftWire.net points out a really interesting and in-depth interview, written in article format over at Gamasutra. They sat down at a GDC Paris discussion board with Rob and have posted a key on the topics, including how his university work in criminology helps designing games as well as the history of StarCraft II and World of WarCraft.
So, how about community? World Of Warcraft has created a massive, vibrant one. How do you do it? Pardo noted: “The first step is to really have a great game, which isn’t necessarily what anybody wants to hear. There’s been a lot of talks at GDC about using web tools, and Facebook and MySpace and all these things.”
“All those things are great, but ultimately you have to make a great game. I think that if you hire all these people, and try to do all these marketing things to draw people in, ultimately that will draw time away from making that game. But if you make a great game, there are things you can do afterwards to support a community.”
Read more here.
Another highlight of this discussion is that WoW was supposed to be free-to-play originally:
Interestingly, Pardo commented on this subject: “When were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported.”
However, the Blizzard exec noted: “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”
