“It is something we still would like to do. Hopefully before too much longer we can re-announce that,” Pardo told IGN at the recent press event for the Diablo III beta.

“But yeah, it’s still something we’re passionate about, it’s just one of those things that I think we thought was going to be easier to do than it was.”

The SCII Mod Marketplace, announced ages back, will allow players to sell custom game types to other players for a profit.

If it does eventually come, it’ll probably will drop alongside the next SCII chapter, Heart of the Swarm.

Diablo III’s real-money auction interface.

The feature was announced at a preview event in California last week.

According to GameSpy, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo “gave a PowerPoint presentation entirely devoted to this auction house concept. Apparently, this whole idea grew out of the black markets that arose around items, characters, and gold in previous Diablo games. Pardo stated multiple times that the developers added this auction house because ‘people were going to do it anyway, and this way it’s secure.’”

The feature will allow players to take any in-game item – including weapons, armour and potentially even characters – and sell them to other players for real money.

Blizzard will not handle the money itself, although you can choose to keep your funds within the Blizzard universe to spend on the Blizzard store – to get the money you’ll have to use a third-party vendor.

The move has quickly raised concerns about giving legitimacy to gold farming.

Money, money, money

Blizzard said in an official statement on the matter:

“The item-based nature of Diablo game play has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organisations.”

“This has led to numerous customer-service and game-experience issues that we’ve needed to account for. Our primary goal with the Diablo III auction house system is for it to serve as the foundation for a player-driven economy that’s safe, fun, and accessible for everyone.”

Gamespot is reporting that “there will be a single, regional real-money auction house for each type of supported currency. Auto-bidding and instant buyout options will also be available, and you can set your items to be buyout only.”

You’ll be charged a fee to auction an item, as you are on other real-cash auction systems such as eBay. Pardo said this was to stop players flooding the marketplace with unwanted items.

Cashing out with your third-party vendor will cost you fee. Items you buy in either auction house will be sent to your private stash in the game, and players will be anonymous during transactions.

The real-money auction house won’t stop normal trading between friendly players.

Constant net connection confirmed

That’s not all, though. Blizzard has confirmed the game will require you to have an always-on internet connection. You’ll have up to ten character slots in the game, which will be stored on the company’s servers. It’s because of this players will be required to have an constant connection for all modes of the game, including single-player.

“In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I think the intuition for a lot of people when they’re playing the game is ‘I want to make my character offline away from that scary battle net environment. And then once I have this powerful character, I’ll jump online.’,” Pardo told IGN

“But the problem with that concept is we can’t really detect if they’re cheating. They might have the capability to hack their character, things like that, so at that point we can’t really allow that character to be in the battle net environment. Then they’re going to have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate.

“Your character will be online on battle net the moment you start playing. You can play a solo experience like you would in Diablo II, it’s just your character is on Blizzard’s servers and authenticated.”

Diablo III has no release date as yet. The press event last week offered play-time with the game’s beta, which will release this calendar Q3.

Watch Rob Pardo explaining the auction house move in a Gamespot interview below.

Speaking with Kotaku while he was walking the red carpet at the AIAS Awards, Pardo said that Diablo III coming out this year was the “goal,” but getting it right was more important.

“We really, really hope [it is out in 2011],” he said. “That’s our goal. Our goal is to get there. But you know, at the end of the day, we are going to get it right. That’s more important.

“We’re going to promise, we’re going to get it out there when it’s awesome. And, we’re crossing our fingers, maybe it will be this year.”

During a call to investors this week, Activision AFO Thomas Tippl said the firm’s outlook for 2011 did not include a release from Blizzard, and that until it goes into beta, a release date will not be locked in.

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.

Blizzard announced at Blizzcon last weekend that Cataclysm will be the first WoW expansion to be made available for direct pre-loading ahead of the product’s retail release.

“I think you’re just seeing a shift in consumer behaviour, where people are slowly becoming more digitally distribution aware and wanting to get their games in that direction,” Pardo told Gamespot, speaking at Blizzcon.

“I think it makes a lot of sense for World of Warcraft, because, by definition, everyone who plays World of Warcraft is online already. They’re already receiving very large patches – I think we’re now delivering 4Gb patches to our userbase – and, for them, downloading the game digitally just makes a lot of sense.”

Pardo was guarded on a prediction of retail’s demise, however.

“I doubt if retail would ever go away, or anything. I wouldn’t predict anything like that,” he added.

“But I do think it’s going to become increasingly a way that gamers want to go and get their games.”

The exec explained that, while many PC gamers now prefer to download games rather than buy a disc, having a strong retail presence is still vital for launches.

“It’s really good for us to have lots and lots of boxes on the store shelves because it’s a great way to market the game, and it’s really great for when people come into the store to make an impulse buy,” he said.

“So we’re still really behind the retail chains too.”

“The day’s coming”

Pardo added that day-and-date digital releases are sure to become more commonplace.

“The day’s coming,” he told GamesIndustry in another Blizzcon interview.

“You can definitely see digital distribution all around the industry, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger percent of the market.”

He added: “Ultimately I think it’s a great way to get games. Speaking to me as a gamer and not even a Blizzard person, it’s my preferred way too get games nowadays.”

A future where the preferred method of full game PC distribution is digital now seems inextricable: NPD announced in September that the first six months of 2010 had seem more PC games downloaded than bought on disc.

The US stat-tracker has now promised to start capturing digital and mobile sales.

The subject of digital distribution is becoming an increasingly urgent issue, with Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick saying earlier this month that digitally sales could account for up to 40 percent of the publisher’s revenue within three years, up from a current 15 percent.

Zelnick also said, however, that retail would continue to exist, despite the change in buying patterns.

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.

Pardo, who’s been all over the news from Blizzcon this weekend, told the site it was confused by what Valve was doing following its announcement of a stand-alone sequel to the mod, which originated from Warcraft III.

The team behind the original is now working at Valve on development on DOTA 2.

“To us, that means that you’re really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community, and that just doesn’t seem the right thing to do,” said Pardo.

“Certainly, DOTA came out of the Blizzard community… It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it’s something that’s been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point.

“Valve is usually so pro mod community. It’s such a community company that it just seems like a really strange move to us… I really don’t understand why [they would do it], to be honest.”

Blizzard showed off StarCraft DOTA, one of four new Blizzard-made StarCraft II mods, at Blizzcon over the weekend.

But when asked if this could raise an issue in the future, Pardo only said: “Our response is that they don’t own the term DOTA at this point. It’s something that they’re filing for.

“Our contention is that it should continue to be available to Blizzard and to our community.”

Just so you know, Valve boss Gabe Newell was snapped playing StarCraft DOTA in California at the weekend. Make of that as you will.

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.

The genre of the first game the developer’s making with Activision under a new ten-year deal is unknown.

But with Blizzard under the Activision roof, and if Bungie is making an MMO, Pardo says it’s something it could advise on to the developer.

“There are a lot of ifs there. It would have to be a very specific proposal,” Pardo said over the weekend at Blizzcon.

“Blizzard are very focussed on our own stuff and I think one of the reasons that we’re successful is because we don’t get distracted.

“That said, Activision is in the family and Bungie is doing stuff for Activision. If they called us up and wanted some advice or wanted to have a conversation, absolutely, but I do that with a lot of my game developer friends throughout the industry.”

Pardo added: “As far as something specific, like if they were going to do an MMO would we somehow do customer service for them? Wow, that’s, like, really far out there. I really have no idea – that’s a lot of speculation. It’s possible, I guess.”

Blizzard’s next MMO, according to Pardo at Blizzcon, won’t get a reveal until 2012 at the earliest.

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.

Speaking with Geoff Keighley, Pardo also said the 50-strong development team was playing with prototypes internally.

Not much else was said.

Justin and Nathan are currently on the hunt in Anaheim for news. Stick with us.

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.

“Now that we’ve shipped [Wings of Liberty], we’re just now getting serious about breaking ground on [Heart of the Swarm],” said Pardo.

“We always have a lot of ideas and there’s been some design work on it, but hardcore art and programming is just now starting to begin. It’s too early to estimate, but as soon as we can get them out there, we’d love to.”

Pardo steadfastly refused to put a date on the game.

“They’re going to kind of feel like sequels”

StarCraft II’s Campaign has been split into three parts: the now-released Wings of Liberty, the zerg-based Heart of the Swarm and the protoss’s Legacy of the Void.

Pardo was clear in the company’s intention to provide value.

“From a single-player point of view, they’re going to kind of feel like sequels. It’s going to be a pretty meaningful amount of content,” he said.

The multiplayer portion may be more slender.

“Multiplayer is going to be more like an expansion set sort of vibe,” Pardo added.

“We’re not going to ship all brand new races. There will definitely be additions to multiplayer, but that’s going to feel like an expansion set.”

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty released in late July to large US sales.

[Pic]

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.

Speaking at GDC, Pardo said:

“It’s something that we’ve definitely always talked about. The problem for us is that it takes a lot of work from our other teams.

“Every time we have the discussion, we try to figure out what’s going to happen if let’s say a Blizzard game was coming out and a third-party game was coming out at the same time.

“Could we be agnostic in that way? Could we offer the same level of support that we offer our games to third parties? We just never know. It just seems like a big job for us.”

Pardo also revealed Blizzard was testing out a sort of map marketplace for Starcraft II.

“I think that will be a really good test-bed for us to see how much support we have to give to mapmakers and how well we can do something like that,” he said.

The new version of Battle.net will be released alongside the release of Starcraft II, which is due for the first half of this year.

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.

If you were waiting for a main Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo keynote announcement from GDC 2010, you can stop holding your breath: there isn’t going to be one.

We can now confirm that Sid Meier’s speech on Friday is the show’s major event.

A Sony session on the PS3 Motion Controller has already been confirmed, which takes place on Thursday, March 11, running from 3-4.00pm PST. This isn’t a keynote, though, and is being sun by members of Sony’s Dev Support team.

A separate hardware manufacture event is happening that week in San Francisco, but details are strictly under embargo at the moment and the shindig is taking place off-site from GDC.

Think Services has declined to comment on reasoning for the lack of an official console manufacturer keynote this year.

Despite the lack of a main hardware speech at the show, many big players will be on-hand for sessions, including Blizzard overlord Rob Pardo.

Fable’s Peter Molyneux and Double Fine boss Tim Schafer are also confirmed for lectures.

Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama is to be another major draw.

GDC has seen some major hardware keynotes in recent years, including Sony’s Home and LittleBigPlanet reveals, Microsoft’s Gears of War 2 announcement and a first look at Zelda: Spirit Tracks last year.

GDC 2010 runs from March 9-13, again at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

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

Titled “Making a Standard (and Trying to Stick to it!): Blizzard Design Philosophies”, the company’s VP of game design will discuss how the Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft franchises were created by “establishing our own core [game design] values in the ongoing challenge to deliver a consistent, epic game experience”. The talk will also highlight some of the successes and failures its experienced along the way.

Also announced was Chair co-founder Donald Mustard’s talk on “Designing Shadow Complex”, which will focus on “ideas on how to embrace the ‘limitations’ of the XBLA platform and use them to streamline your game design, prototype your title, and most importantly, boil your feature set down to its core essence of ‘fun.’”

The Smithsonian’s Gerogina Bath-Goodlander and PastPixels’ Chris Melissinos will also give a lecture titled “A Day At The Museum: How The Smithsonian Is Embracing Games”. It will focus on “how the Smithsonian American Art Museum is using ARGs and other games to engage patrons and how the forthcoming Art of Video Games exhibition was started, its goals and what it means for establishing the validity of video game culture.”

Neato.

It was also announced today that Sony would show off its Arc controller in an hour-long lecture.

GDC runs March 9-13 in lovely San Fransisco.

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.

The answers below were given in response to questions asked by VG247 in a group interview.

VG247: You said in a recent interview that you build in-depth for the hardcore first, then work backwards in terms of making the game more accessible for more casual players. Is that design philosophy you employ across all of your products, or is that a product-specific thing?

Rob Pardo: Absolutely, it’s something we do across all of our games. I’m a big believer that that’s the right way to develop a multiplayer game, a game you really want to last for years and years. It’s a little counter-intuitive, I think, in the games industry, in that more other companies tend to tack the multiplayer on at the end.

Just think from an hours-of-play standpoint. I think it’s logical that if you want a game to last for 500-plus hours, which is something we strive for in all of our games, that you have to spend a lot of time making sure that your game has that much depth to it. And then you really want to put in that single-player element, read that story through, once you have those fundamental foundations of gameplay.

If you consider that single-player lasts anywhere from 20-50 hours, depending on the game, people go through it once, twice, maybe a few times, but multiplayer is really what has the longevity. It makes the game last for years and years.

VG247: Throughout StarCraft II’s development, there’s been a constant thread of questions about how to balance the needs of the hardcore and your need to bring in more casual players. To be blunt, do you even care about the “casual player”? It’s a core RTS, right? Surely it’s going to be a core player that’s attracted to this game, whether or not they’re a new StarCraft player?

Rob Pardo: Well, I think it depends on your definition of “casual player”. I feel that “casual player” in general is a term we throw around to explain everyone from ourselves, as the every-gamer, down to the people that play PopCap games, down to the people that play Bejeweled on [the internet], so it really depends on your definition. Are we trying to get the moms to play? No. That’s not really the market for StarCraft. But we certainly feel like we should be able to capture the gamer audience, even the people that are more on the casual gaming side, that maybe only buy two or three boxed products per year, all the way to the side of the player that plays five RTSes per year. We definitely want to get the entirety of that market.

VG247: You also said recently that single-player development started about halfway through the entire dev cycle. In hindsight, do you wish you’d started a bit earlier?

Rob Pardo: I don’t know that it is possible to start earlier. Yeah, purely from a production point of view that’d be great; it’d be totally awesome if we could start single-player and multiplayer at the same time. But the reality is that we have to figure out the units. We want to be able to figure out what’s fun. And a lot of our early development on all of our games is to get the multiplayer up and running really quick. We want to be able to play against each other as soon as possible in the dev cycle. Then we start designing the units, we start figuring out what’s fun. How do we build a single-player campaign when we don’t even know what the units are going to be in the game? We have to get a certain amount into the game so we can feel we can trust what’s going to be there. If we start single-player too early then we’re going to be throwing out mission constantly, which we still do even when we do start playing [multiplayer early]. The units change so much early in development, until we’ve got that multiplayer foundation in, that we can’t really, seriously start work on the single-player.

Of course, we do lots of things like story development, and we talk a lot about the design, we come up with ideas like Story Mode and what we want to do with that, but we physically implement the levels until multiplayer’s at maybe a 70 percent state of the unit design.

VG247: To put you on the spot specifically, what are you sales expectations for the game?

Rob Pardo: Sales expectations?

VG247: Yeah.

Rob Pardo: To do awesome. Is that too specific?

VG247: Do you expect sales of Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void to hold up after Wings of Liberty? Do you expect them to be as successful as the main game?

Rob Pardo: I certainly hope so. In the past we’ve had a really good success rate with our expansions and add-on products. 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. With WoW, because of the subscription model and the nature of the game, it’s way beyond that.

VG247: Will they be priced as expansions?

Rob Pardo: Yeah. They’ll be priced appropriately to the content. Right now the plans are to do something along the lines of full single-player campaign and some additional features on the multiplayer side, but obviously using the same engine. That to me is an expansion price point. If we decided to put in three new races, and a bunch of new technology and features, maybe that would be a standalone product. But right now I think we’re looking at being much more like an expansion feature-set.

VG247: Have you made any final decisions on how you’re going to recoup some of the investment you’ve made in the new Battle.net?

Rob Pardo: Yeah, we’re still finalizing that. I know the big question out there is whether there’s going to be a subscription to Battle.net or anything like that, and we certainly are not doing that for StarCraft II. Our approach on monetization and business model for a game is really what’s right for the game. Just because something worked well on World of Warcraft doesn’t mean we’re going to put it on StarCraft II, because it’s an entirely different sort of game. As far as what we do for Battle.net, we have a lot of different ideas, some other things that we’re going to talk about, but nothing we’re going to talk about here other than we’re definitely not going to… I don’t want to put the scare out there that it’s going to be subscription-based. We’re not going to do that.

I think what I’ve said previously is that we’re going to take an approach that is a little bit micro-transactiony. You know, we have value-added services on World of Warcraft, where you can do paid character transfer, you can do the re-customization of your character, things that you really don’t need to play the game. You can get pretty much anything you want out of World of Warcraft without any of the value-added services. I want to try to take more of that approach with StarCraft II and Battle.net. So it’ll be things like if you want to rename your character. Things like that will be probably where we do the business model for Battle.net.

VG247: I’ve got to ask you about the LAN-exclusion, because that was a hot internet potato for a little while there. I checked this morning and almost 80,000 people now have signed that petition.

Rob Pardo: I still don’t think that’s up to the Diablo III art direction [petition].

VG247: Do you take note? Do you actually care, to be blunt?

Rob Pardo: Of course we care, but it’s not like we’re surprised that there’s a petition about LAN in Star II. It’s not like we went, ‘D’oh. People care about that?’ Clearly, we knew, 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.

If you look at LAN, that goes back to the War II days, with Cali and stuff like that. I think LAN will be a great footnote in our history, just like DOS was. It’s just something that, with broadband and with the connections and the things that we can do on Battle.net, and having to support LAN in addition to that… It’s the sort of decision we have to make that has to be the lowest common denominator for both. I don’t necessarily thing that’s going to be the way of the future. And that’s going to be the best thing for Star II and our future games.

I think we’re going to support the real legitimate cases for LAN users. Like, in e-sports and the tournament community, we’re really going to look into ways to have Battle.net work really well for those groups that have previously really needed LAN play. But outside of a couple of little niche groups that I think we can come up with other solutions, I think people are going to be really happy with this in the future.

VG247: I want to ask you about consoles for a moment. EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft have all made pretty high profile RTS pushes onto consoles in this generation, with varying levels of success. How would you view what’s happened, because almost to a man they’ve retreated.

Rob Pardo: I think the reason is that it’s hard to make a great consoles strategy game, and I think what they’re trying to do is take great PC strategy games and turn them into consoles games rather than developing consoles strategy games from scratch. I think there’s lots of designs out there that can do it, I just don’t know… There’s apparently no developers out there with the passion, talent and desire to do it right now.

VG247: So you think that the people who developed Halo Wars didn’t have passion or talent?

Rob Pardo: No, I think they took what’s a great PC game and tried to turn it into a console experience, and I think they had varying levels of success. And I think you see the same thing when you take , let’s say… The classic game example is fighting games on the PC. Have you ever seen a great fighting game on PC?

Other journo: Yes. Street Fighter IV? Guilty Gear X?

Rob Pardo: You think that’s better than on console?

Other journo: It looks better. It’s difficult because it’s a point on gameplay, but let’s say it’s very similar.

Dustin Browder: As long as I can hook up a control pad I guess it would be the same. At that point I don’t know what the difference is. I wouldn’t want to play it with a keyboard, but I would with a nice six-button controller.

Rob Pardo: I don’t think that’s a valid argument, and I’ll tell you why. You can take a keyboard and a mouse and you can play it just fine on console; that doesn’t mean it’s not a great game. What we’re talking about is commercial success, right? And when you’re talking about the big console groups, they’re not really focused on MetaCritic. They’re focused on commercial success. And having a commercially successful game on console that plays better on keyboard and mouse is a no-go. Just like having a commercially successful fighting game on PC that requires a game-pad to be as good. It’s a no-go, right?

VG247: So what is actually stopping strategy working on consoles?

Rob Pardo: Designing games around a game controller.

Dustin Browder: I dunno. I love Civ Rev. It’s not real-time strategy, but it’s still an example of a game that was modded specifically for a console. And it made a successful translation.

Rob Pardo: It’s still modded though.

Dustin Browder: It is.

Rob Pardo: The example to go with – and again, this wasn’t hugely commercially successful – but it’s great example of a game that was designed for console, is Pikmin. Another really good example on the PlayStation in PixelJunk: Monsters. Games that are basically designed around having a controller. It’s a strategy game around a controller, and I think that’s what needs to happen if you want to see great consoles strategy games.

I think a lot of this is because typically, strategy requires more complexity, so that tends to lend itself to a keyboard where you have lots of hot-keys and commands. There just hasn’t been a lot of simple strategy games that go to console. I think it’s totally doable, it just that it would require a lot of risk and innovation. Typically, your bigger publishers only do so many of those plays. They would rather stick to their franchises, and make a couple of bets on innovative products.

VG247: I had a chat with Michael de Plater [dev lead on Ubisoft's Endwar – Ed] last week, and he was very excited about Natal. He thought that the pad-less interface could really help RTS on console come into its own. Have you got a view on that?

Rob Pardo: I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe he’s seen something I don’t see. 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. And it seems still the precision of a strategy game is being able to type on a keyboard, because I have, like, 30 commands that are instantly available. I’m not sure how Natal helps with that. It seems that if Natal was going to be opening up the market then the Wii would be opening it up too for strategy.

VG247: He was talking about a Minority Report-style experience, where you drag and select with your hands.

Rob Pardo: Yeah, but 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. 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. But again, 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.

VG247: Do you think that, ultimately, it’ll be the multiplayer or single-player that determines the final success, in your eyes, of StarCraft II?

Rob Pardo: Hopefully both. I mean, they kind of have different measures of success. Certainly, single-player is a shorter burst. Long term I think people are going to look at the multiplayer, because that’s what’s going to stand the test of time more, because most time when you read a book, or do a single-player experience, you do it once or twice. But that doesn’t mean they don’t influence each other quite a bit. I feel like one of the reasons StarCraft has been successful is because it had that story, and it had those strong characters, and you identify with it and personalize with it much more than other RTSes that only focus on multiplayer.

I really think they become very interwoven with one another, and I don’t really think you can break them apart. When you start looking back in time, right, when you start looking at the game, like Warcraft III: is that game defined by the mod scene, is it defined by multiplayer, is it defined by single-player, is it defined by all the story that WoW’s been built upon? It’s all of the above.

Interview by Patrick Garratt.

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.

Blizzard’s flattened a GI report from GDC, which claimed that Rob Pardo said the firm’s in talk with Microsoft regarding the next Xbox. He didn’t say anything of the sort, apparently.

“In the Lunch with Luminaries discussion, Rob said that Microsoft occasionally bounces ideas off of us, with no specific reference to any possible future consoles,” a rep told Gamespot.

“This should come as no surprise, as our games run on Microsoft’s PC operating system. We aren’t in discussions with Microsoft regarding any future consoles.”

Whoops. The original story said, “Blizzard’s Rob Pardo has confirmed that his company has had talks with Microsoft about the successor to the Xbox 360.”

No Xbox 720 for you, Mr WoW fan. Thanks, Shatner.

Blizzard’s Rob Pardo has said that the company has been in talks with Microsoft about Xbox 360′s successor, Eurogamer writes.

Although no quote is given, Pardo reportedly said that Blizzard is actively in discussions with the Redmond giant whilst at the Luminaries Lunch at GDC yesterday.

The piece goes on to say that other developers attending the session have not had any such discussions with Microsoft.

Bombshell. More through the link.

We’re about to go live with coverage from David Perry’s Luminaries Lunch, this year featuring Will Wright, Warren Spector, Nolan Bushnell, Rob Pardo and, the man himself “Big” Dave Perry.

The session is the biggest of the big guns waxing lyrical on dev issues. You may well be in for some surprises, so keep those peepers peeled.

It’s scheduled to start at 1.00pm PST, or 8.00pm GMT. Get all the updates after the break.

The Iwata keynote may be over, but don’t you dare touch that dial. We’ll be liveblogging the Luminaries Lunch at 1pm PST today, and the line-up’s stellar.

Will Wright, Warren Spector, Nolan Bushnell, Rob Pardo and David Perry will all be on the panel: you’re guaranteed to get some monster quotes.

That’s 1.00pm PST, 8.00pm GMT and 9.00pm CET. See you then!

It’s so on. VG247 has learned this morning that Will Wright, Warren Spector, Neil Young, Rob Pardo and Phil Harrison are all confirmed for Dave Perry’s Luminaries Lunch at GDC next month.

The chat takes place on March 25 at 1.00pm PST.

The inaugural event at last year’s GDC bore witness to some spectacular quotes from Harrison, who openly criticised Sony’s approach to gaming as a whole. He quit the firm days later.

The addition of Wright and Blzzard boss Pardo to the line-up for 2009′s panel will only add weight to what was dubbed “GDC’s best session” last year by some.

Discussion will be about the future of the industry, new concepts in technology, recent non-gaming related developments and entertainment trends.

It’s invite-only, Ringo. We’ll be there, obviously, which means you will be to. See how that works?

Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s claimed in a PC Gamer interview that single-player-heavy games are the most susceptible to piracy.

“For many companies, the most compelling part of their product is the single player, or the only part of the product is the single player,” he said.

“At that point, they’re forced to use some sort of heavy-handed DRM solution. It’s difficult right now for them.”

Compelling multiplayer features were instrumental in keeping Blizzard products relatively pirate-free, said the exec.

“The reason we’ve been successful on PC is because we offer extremely compelling multiplayer elements to our games, WoW being the most obvious, of course,” he said.

“But all of our games, a lot of the longevity in the games are the compelling multiplayer, and if you want to play on Battle.net – which I think is one of, if not the best gaming service on the planet – then you have to have a legitimate CD key, so that just cuts out all the piracy right there. That’s what’s unfortunate about the PC business.”

So there you go, game-makers. Stop making single-player games and you’ll make more money.

Thanks, Evil Avatar.

Speaking to MTV, Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo has echoed the sentiments of many of late, saying that the current global financial situation is unlikely to harm the games industry in general.

“Historically for us, the game industry hasn’t been affected by recessions like a lot of other businesses,” he said. “I think the reason for that is [that] games really offer some of the best entertainment value on the market.

“People might not want to go out to the movies and spend $100 for a couple of hours and then go to a restaurant. You can go home and pay $15 a month for 100 hours of entertainment if you’re staying at home more — and I think that’s one of the reasons why you don’t see games really go in the same recession as the rest of the economy a lot of times.”

More through the link.

Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo, speaking to Joystiq, has said that a Diablo III beta is likely, although it doesn’t sound like anyone else is going to get to play the demo shown last week at BlizzCon in California.

“I’m sure it will have a beta at some point,” said the exec.

“I think this is the only place we’re going to show [the demo],” he added.

“We’ll probably do something similar for a future show, but we’re definitely not going to release it on the internet or anything like that.”

There’s a full interview through the link.

Blizzard’s boss Rob Pardo has said that although Diablo III looks very polished and possibly nearing a release, the RPG is still a way off.

“I don’t know how far out it is, but it’s still fairly early in development,” Pardo told Wired when asked as to a potential release date.

“I think when people see it, it feels so polished and so finished, but the reality is we have a very small portion of the game done right now.”

Full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking to Joystiq, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo has clarified comments made at BlizzCon over the weekend about seeking to “monetize” the new version of Battle.Net, assuring that charges will only be made for optional extras, and never for core game elements.

“With Battle.Net we’re definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money,” he said.

“We’re not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We’re not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren’t core to the game experience, they’re really just optional things that some people want.

“It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you’ll have to pay extra.”

The new Battle.Net will launch alongside StarCraft II, or the first part of it at least.

More through the link.