World of Warcraft turns five this month, and TheEscapist sat down with Blizzard VP of Game Design Rob Pardo to chat about the biggest triumphs and biggest mistakes of the mega-MMORPG, and why he's not worried that their new MMOG will kill it.
It feels hard to believe, but in just over a week on November 23rd, World of Warcraft will have been live for half of a decade. WoW is one of the most important and influential games in recent memory - but five years ago, nobody could have foreseen just how big it would become, including the man at the helm of the project.
Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design (and one of TIME's People of the Year in 2006) told The Escapist that he certainly did not expect it to have such a transformational effect on his company and the industry as a whole. They thought that WoW would be able to expand [the MMO genre], but he figured that if any game would ever pass the 10 million subscriber mark, it would be in many years, many generations of MMOs, many different evolutions of the genre.
Hoever, Pardo and Blizzard recognize that World of warcraft won't last forever , which is why he isn't too worried that Blizzard's unannounced "next-gen MMOG" will cannibalize the WoW playerbase, leaving the company doing twice the work for the same amount of people.
Original address: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/96113-Blizzards-Rob-Pardo-Talks-Five-Years-of-Warcraft
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