Tag Archives: Rob Pardo

Blizzard producer Rob Pardo has insisted it’s still looking to bring the Mod Marketplace for StarCraft II to consumers.

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The cat’s no longer in the bag. Multiple reports are confirming that Diablo III is to have an in-game auction house, through which players will be able to sell items acquired through play for real money.

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Blizzard vice president Rob Pardo has said the developer still hopes to release Diablo III by the end of the year.

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Blizzard boss Rob Pardo has given clear indication that he expects full game PC downloading to become more important in the near future, saying we’re now seeing a “shift” away from brick and mortar retail.

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Valve’s attempts to trademark Defence of the Ancients – DOTA, for short – “doesn’t seem the right thing to do,” Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s told Eurogamer.

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Blizzard EVP of design Rob Pardo’s told Edge the company is open to sharing insight with Bungie if the developer is making an MMO.

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Blizzard’s EVP of game design Rob Pardo has just revealed at Blizzcon a reveal of the company’s next MMO is not likely to happen until 2012 at the earliest.

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Development of StarCraft II’s second part is swinging into proper action, Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo’s told MTV, now Wings of Liberty has gone to seed.

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Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo has told The Escapist that while Battle.net will remain with the company for the foreseeable future, he doesn’t rule out licencing it out to third-parties.

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There is to be no main hardware manufacturer keynote at GDC this year, VG247 has learnt, with Sid Meier’s Friday speech the show’s biggest in-house event.

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Think Services has announced that during GDC next month, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo will give a lecture on design philosophies.

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Blizzard has reiterated that Diablo III does not currently have a release date, and that the RPG will not be out any time soon.

“[ Diablo III] is not going to be out next year,” said bossman Rob Pardo told Techland. “We always announce all of our games too early. We realize that and go, ‘You know what? Next time we’re not going to do that.’ And then we always fail at that.

“We’ve been wrong (on release dates) for as long as I can remember. So that’s why don’t do release dates anymore.”

Expect it sometime after the Rapture, then.

Via BigDownload.

It’s not every day you get flown to Blizzard’s HQ in Irvine, CA, to see StarCraft II. And it’s not every day you’re given a chance to grill Rob Pardo, the firm’s executive VP of game design, on the most anticipated strategy sequel of all time, Blizzard’s development strategy, the new Battle.net, Natal, and an embarrassing amount more.

July 21 wasn’t “every day,” evidently.

Hit the link.

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Blizzard will release “trial versions” of StarCraft II, Blizzard’s confirmed, although you’ll have to wait until the game itself’s shipped to be able to try before you buy.

“We’ve got lots of different SKUs planned,” said lead game designer Dustin Browder, speaking at Blizzard’s HQ on a recent press trip.

“I don’t even know what they all are right now, but there are trial versions planned, and all kinds of stuff.”

Added design boss Rob Pardo: “We’ll do those after release, though. We always do those after release. ”

The sequel’s planned for a 2010 launch.

We got to play StarCraft II’s single-player component in California last month. Impressions here, Rob Pardo interview here, Campaign screens here.

Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo has said that should the company ever decide to enter the console space, he’d be looking at the same sort of leadership Blizzard games have achieved on PC.

” If we wanted to make a good console game, I’d hope that we could dominate there too,” he said, speaking at Blizzard’s HQ in California last month.

Don’t hold your breath though, console fans.

“No, not today,” Pardo said when asked if Blizzard has plans to create console games.

“It’s something that we always think about, because we’re all big console gamers.

“I play tons of console games, and I would love to make a console game, but we really try to come up with games that we really want to make, and then try to find out if it makes any sense to put them on console versus PC.”

And it clearly doesn’t.

Pardo was talking at a StarCraft II single-player event. Impressions here, Rob Pardo interview here, Campaign screens here.

LAN in future Blizzard games? Really not. Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s given a very solid indication that offline networking for the hoi polloi in the firm’s games is no more.

“I think LAN will be a great footnote in our history, just like DOS was,” said the exec, speaking at a StarCraft II single-player press event in California last month.

News that StarCraft II wouldn’t support LAN play resulted in internet outcry in June. More than 100,000 have now signed a petition to get the feature reinstated.

“It was a very tough decision, and I’d say we’d been talking about it back and forth for well over a year before we finally decided that this is more the direction for the future for us, and actually for the industry,” said Pardo.

Pardo was talking at a StarCraft II single-player event. Impressions here, Rob Pardo interview here, Campaign screens here.

“Well over” half of World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Warcraft III players buy add-ons for the games, Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo has told VG247.

“I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I know that back when you look at Brood War and Frozen Throne, we had well above 50 percent of people that bought the original bought the add-on,” he said, talking as a StarCraft II single-player press day in California last month.

“With WoW, because of the subscription model and the nature of the game, it’s way beyond that.”

Pardo was talking on the subject of expansion sales as StarCraft II will be released in three parts, the first of which, Wings of Liberty, hits next year.

Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo’s claimed Microsoft motion-sensing unit Project Natal might not be the wonder-box the 360-maker would have us believe.

“I’ve got to play with Natal a little bit, and it seems like the difficulty with it is still spatial recognition with moving your hands and doing things,” said the exec, speaking at a StarCraft II single-player event in California last month.

Pardo went on to say that recent ideas for Natal-based strategy games lofted by Ubisoft’s Michael de Plater may not be possible thanks to the system’s “imprecise” nature.

“You’d actually still need an interface that you could do that with, and Natal is still going to be pretty imprecise in the way Wii is today,” he said.

“I mean, I could see the future one day [allowing it], but I don’t know if Natal’s it. Maybe it’s a step towards it.”

It’s worth noting this is the first time Pardo had ever thought about Natal in this sense before.

“I’ve thought about it for all of five seconds right now, so there could be some genius there that I don’t immediately see,” he added.

Natal’s expected to release in late 2010.

Content from the event: impressions here, Rob Pardo interview here, Campaign screens here.

Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s told EG that work on World of Warcraft is to blame for the fact StarCraft II’s taken so long to finish.

StarCraft II dev started in 2003, but Blizzard didn’t even announce the game until 2007. Apparently Blizzard’s had a playable version of the game since late 2005.

“One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off,” Pardo said.

“They had a lot of really great experience to bring, with their knowledge of how they approached the map editor problems, how they dealt with balancing – which we could then leverage into class balancing.”

Beta very soon. Hit the link for more.

Console MMOs clearly aren’t easy. Which is probably why there are hardly any of them. Why? Blizzard’s Rob Pardo reckons the main culprit’s the pad.

“I’d say challenge number one is the input device,” he told IndustryGamers.

“So if you’re going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue.”

Pardo said that advances in Cloud gaming may overcome some of the lesser tech issues involved.

“The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we’re always pushing out more content. That’s something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that’s a lot to deal with.

“You’d have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don’t have hard drives. So that’s a big issue,” he said.

The next major console MMO is likely to be Cryptic’s Champions Online, releasing for 360 later this year.