Warcraft III Interview

Blizzard’s official website has been updated with a new Insider interview, this time with lead designer Rob Pardo. In it, Rob answers a whole slew of questions about the upcoming expansion for Warcraft III, The Frozen Throne. A snippet:

BI: How do you balance between the needs of the pro gamer and the beginner player? With these two different groups seeing and doing different things, how do you reconcile these two camps in the expansion?

RP: We feel that both types of gamers are important, so the solutions to different problems are often very complicated. Pro gamers would have been happy with us all but removing creeps. But of course there are a lot of people that really like creeps, and I would argue the majority of people do. That’s why we attacked it the way we did–by looking at maps that are overcreeped and by putting in an experience barrier that still allows everyone to creep and makes it an integral part of the game while also staving off a lot of the excessive use of this game mechanic.

Balancing the needs of several types of players is the goal every time we make a game. We certainly listen to the pro gamer, but the other members of our audience have a strong voice as well. Sometimes we’ll make a change similar to the one they are suggesting, other times we will make a different change to get at what they are really trying to voice, and occasionally we won’t make a change at all because it would be too harmful to the gameplay or because we don’t agree that it would improve the experience.