Project Lore

The Escapist of the Warcry Network had the fortune to interview the VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, in a sort of retrospective look at the past five years of design of World of Warcraft. Its a great interview, and Blizzard has been doing a lot of these sort of things recently, perhaps to hype up WoW's upcoming fifth anniversary on November 23rd. One question that was just asking for trouble was "What are you most proud of over the last five years? What was the biggest mistake you think you made?" Its not an easily answerable question, and there might have been a slight PR disaster with its answer. When addressing the "biggest mistake" portion of the question, Pardo responded:

As for the biggest mistake? There's a lot of them that I think, were ... they just "fell out" of things. One example: I wish the servers were more stable when we launched, of course - there's a lot of that sort of thing. We have a lot of excuses for that - we didn't expect nearly the response - but we can't say it wasn't a mistake. If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I'm not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game. We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I'd go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn't make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we're trying to figure out how to guide it. It's tricky, now that we've gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it - the Arena, the e-sport - so we can't just chop off that head. We can't just say, "We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before," because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game. If I could go back in time before we shipped WoW, I would have either made serious changes to basic class balance to facilitate that type of play, or if I went back to when we had the idea two years later, I would have said, "Maybe we shouldn't go there."

This was really a baited answer. Pardo really highlighted a lot of the incredible design that made WoW so successful, but his brutally honest answer here is a bit of a surprise. He comments later in the interview that as far as PvE goes, they have given up a lot of their preconceived notions of what an MMORPG should do. They stopped catering to "hardcore players" as much as they used to by reducing raid sizes and making content more accessible, among other changes. Going the "e-sports" route doesn't seem to fit in with the philosophy of recent PvE changes. Look at the players that get all of the attention. Guilds that get "world firsts" and "server firsts" get a lot more attention than players who get 2200+ rating. The arena reward system seems to get revamped and redesigned every season. WoW doesn't need to be a competitive PvP game to get attention or longevity. Its already extremely competitive on a PvE front. Arenas have failed to be accessible or rewarding to new and average players. Talent and class design is now all over the place, with buffs having to be carefully implemented and thought through to obtain balance in both PvP and PvE. Complaints would be quieter if the only PvP mediums were world PvP and battlegrounds, where winning conditions are much less dependent on the intricacies of class balance. For more, read the interview. Its a very good read and makes you realize how well-designed WoW really is.