Into World of Warcraft's future, with designer Rob Pardo

With Blizzard's world-changing WOW update, Cataclysm, launching early next week, Azeroth may never be the same again. We sat down with executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo, to discuss how much longer WOW can stay at the forefront of MMORPG's, the relative benefits of intuition over metrics and where the world can go next.

Do you think WOW has the potential to define the next decade as it did the last? Can it maintain that influence?

Rob Pardo: I certainly think that WOW, like a lot of similar games, has been influential. Just like FPS games of today are still influenced by Doom and Quake. But it's more about games that are built on top of those principles. So I think that's where you're going to see the influence of something like WOW or Everquest. There will be similar games definitely influenced by those genre-defining titles. You'll definitely see WOW's influence in bigger MMOGs in the future, and WOW will then fade into the past as just being another of those similar games.

WOW has changed a great deal since its launch. Do you think it can be continually added to and tweaked in order to maintain that level of influence, or does it take a whole new reboot like Cataclysm to do that?

I certainly think you always have the opportunity to keep an MMOG going for a very long time, and I always compare it to how most games are like making a feature film, whereas an MMOG is more like running a TV series. Some series last a few seasons and some go on for 26 seasons. Now can WOW become more like that? I hope so. We do have the ability to continually add to the game and evolve it, but the trickier challenge is that eventually people are going to want to move onto new types of entertainment. And simply from a graphical point of view, as time goes on WOW will come to look increasingly dated. I think it's very resistant to that due to the style we chose, but five to ten years from now there's going to be some amazing looking games.

Would it be possible to create a patch to update that side of WOW, like Eve Online did?

Eve has a lot less content, but for us I don't know how reasonable it would be to, say, upgrade the graphics engine and replace every single piece of content of the game. Consider we have ten years of development of WOW today. And most of that is creating art content. So if we want to replace art content we can't just do that in a year. We're always tweaking it but I don't think you could do a full graphics reboot.

Given infinite time and resources would you like to implement more changes?

I think that's always the case. If I could just wave my production wand and make something happen then we'd do X, Y and Z. But you're always more bound by production realities than you want to be - that's just part of making games, and any other entertainment. You can always imagine more than you can create.

After a recent boost following Wrath Of The Lich King's launch in China, WOW's player base has reached a fairly static 12 million players. Is Cataclysm a response to this levelling off?

I think it's also that the economy has an effect, but for us it just caused us to plateau, but we haven't shrank - it's just affected our growth. There's multiple factors involved in the economical aspect to it. I feel we're really happy that we've maintained our subscriptions. Everyone wants expansion at the end of the day, but it's not that Cataclysm uniquely is.

The thing it's definitely aimed at is to try to bring up that old level one to 60 experience to the same quality level that we evolved to with Wrath Of The Lich King. We've evolved WOW through Burning Crusade and Lich King and learned so much as content creators. We're so much better at creating quest content, learning how to bring players through the zones, how to direct them to really fun experiences and because we're always adding on to the end game, when you look at the old world, which was a great experience when it came out, it pales in comparison to what we have now. And I do think it'll have a big effect on new players that have never played WOW before, and that will help us grow.

Mike Morhaime recently made the comment that only players that get past level ten tend to stick with the game for a long time, and the figure that do go beyond level ten is 30 per cent. That's actually quite high for an MMOG, so are you pleased with this figure?

I don't ever pay attention to numbers like that. Sure, that sounds great, but I'm not very metrics driven. I guess a better way of looking at it is to ask why people quit the game. I guess the way we look at it is this: we're the opposite of Zynga, in that they would always take the perspective of looking at that number and how they can inch it up a few percent by implementing changes; then they'd look back at the number. We don't really measure ourselves like that. We do look at numbers occasionally but it doesn't drive us all the time. Our design is driven by what we think is going to be fun. Then we put it to the company and out to the public, and whether we feel that we've been successful. We look at larger numbers like how many players are playing.

Do you think games lose a little from being so metrics driven? Does it take more intuition?

I think metrics are an awesome tool and in some ways I do wish we used them more, but I don't think it should be the thing that drives your creative decisions. Games that are driven entirely by metrics might have some success, but all you're really doing with that is giving players what they want now. Metrics never predict what players want tomorrow.

Where do you find yourself applying most of your efforts at the moment, or is it all one continuum?

With WOW, we work on so many things simultaneously, but I think there's less time we think about bringing in new players.

As the game grows, are you finding you need more time to put out the same amount of content?

Not really - as long as we have good dev tools we can still do things fairly fast. I'd say on the art side there's more of an effect than on the design side. As long as we don't get carried away on the design side, we can still make content pretty fast. The art side is where it gets tricky, because as we do up the graphics quality and it becomes the new standard, it takes longer to do that.

Do you feel as a designer that in the world of WOW you're pushing up against the limits of what you can express?

Not really. Obviously you're not going to design a brand new game using WOW, but there's so much opportunity within that world to do different things - for example, the jousting and tournament stuff we recently put in. I think WOW is a really cool place for a team to push the boundaries.

Also read our interview with Cataclysm's lead systems designer Greg Street and game designer Dave Kosak and our Cataclysm deep dive.