GDC '08: Blizzard spills game design secrets

[Spitfire]

Blizzard's presentation at the Game Developers Conference 2008 was spearheaded by Rob Pardo, the lead designer of World of Warcraft. As you would have guessed, he discussed the formula of creating video games that players will keep coming back to. During his GDC speech which lasted an hour, a lot of interesting tidbits caught our attention.

Countless of companies are trying to venture into the online gaming scene in hopes of establishing a stable user base which will keep pockets loaded with money. What most MMORPGs fail to do is actually feed the hunger of gamers looking for new worlds to explore because of many unfriendly issues. However, Blizzard managed to dominate the market. How?

Pardo noted a few things that developers should be wary of. According to the major creative force behind WoW, Blizzard wanted to see these in its MMORPG:

• Solo to max level
  
• Have an important role in a group
  
• Have an important role in a raid
  
• Competitive in group PvP
  
• Be fun!

On the other hand, the highly-competitive real-time strategy game StarCraft 2 has other criteria to meet. We can expect these from the much-awaited sequel to a classic RTS:

• Each race totally different
  
• Better players can win games fast -- this is also a skill differentiation issue
  
• Offense over defense -- you shouldn't play SimCity in an RTS!
  
• Creative strategies
  
• Every unit has a counter
  
• Be fun!

Pardo brought up other fun factoids pertaining to player psychology. He pointed out that perception of fairness is not set in stone, so a game may seem balanced but opinions will differ when a million of players are involved. Another facet to consider is that players hate losing - an hour spent on futile attempts to achieve victory may be bearable, but going beyond doesn't seem to be a good idea to Pardo.

After the very informative speech, Blizzard entertained questions about game design among other things. You can find the Q&A by clicking on the via link below.