Campaign Creations

James Brightman, 8/17/2007, 10:47:44 AM wrote:Blizzard's Pardo Hints at Warcraft RTS; Not Interested in Consoles

Blizzard's vp of game design Rob Pardo has revealed to GameDaily BIZ that a new Warcraft RTS will be "one of the ideas on the table" after StarCraft 2 ships. He also said that to bring WoW to consoles "would be a Herculean effort that would only take away from our ability to serve our current customers."


MMOs have yet to really take off on consoles. NCsoft is looking to change that with its exclusive deal on Sony's PS3, but if there's one MMORPG that most gamers would scream for on consoles, it would have to be Blizzard's phenomenally successful World of Warcraft, which now has over 9 million subscribers.


That said, in an interview to be published on GameDaily BIZ in the very near future, Blizzard's vp of game design, Rob Pardo seemed to shy away from the idea of developing WoW or other MMOs on consoles. He also took issue with our assumption that there's a "theoretical ceiling" to growth on Mac and PC platforms.


"I think you'll see a console MMO that's popular one of these days. It's quite likely, not going to be WoW. WoW was really never designed for the console experience and for us to try and put it on a console would be a Herculean effort that would only take away from our ability to serve our current customers," he said. "I also kinda disagree with the 'theoretical ceiling' comment on PC games. I mean, what's the PC install base in this day in age around the world? It's got to dwarf the install base for any of the consoles or all them combined for that matter. It's just that a lot of people don't necessarily use their PC as a gaming machine and PCs themselves... you just have to jump through a lot more hoops to install and play PC games, whereas consoles are just dedicated gaming machines."


GameDaily BIZ also asked about the possibility of Blizzard creating a new Warcraft real-time strategy title. Of course, the franchise started out as an RTS and so did StarCraft, but now that Warcraft has leaped out of the RTS genre and into MMOs would Blizzard bring it back to its RTS roots? Pardo would certainly appear to be open to it.


"Yeah, of course there's a chance," he confirmed. "The way that we develop things, each time a development team becomes available, because they're done with creating the games that they've been doing, they have a lot of say over what their next game is. So what it would take is for one of our teams to decide that they want to make Warcraft RTS and of course, there'll be some talk about doing that and I'm sure after StarCraft 2 ships, it will be one the ideas on the table for that team to do, but that's pretty far off in the future and it would really be determined by a combination of the dev team and the company leadership."


Pardo continued, "I think that one of the things that makes us ultimately successful as a company is that we're more lead by our game-making decisions and not so much by business decisions, which is one of the reasons why this question used to be the StarCraft question. Back when we did StarCraft, we did Brood War, and everyone thought they were amazing games; they were successful and I used to get all these questions like, "Why are you doing another Warcraft RTS, shouldn't you be doing StarCraft?" Well Warcraft was what the team wanted to make, they were burned out on the StarCraft universe, that was the game they wanted to make and as far as Warcraft goes, we love the universe – it's an amazingly successful universe. If we want to go back and do it, maybe we will, maybe we won't."



by James Brightman

Warbringer87 wrote: This isn't starcraft in tristram, its much more -- OHSHIT ITS DIABLO!!!1111!

Marine 382BB wrote: They should for now stick with SC, and Diablo, they have so much stuff for now with WarCraft why jump RIGHT to a new RTS with WarCraft?