Blizzard's Pardo: WoW, Long-Running TV Series Face Similar Challenges

It sometimes seems like nothing could ever unseat World of Warcraft from its reign over the MMO marketplace, but then, nothing lasts forever. Blizzard has an interesting challenge in the maintenance of its title as it enters its sixth year: how to keep the game engaging and evolving. "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," suggests Blizzard EVP Rob Pardo in an interview with Edge. Pardo says that the comparison is even more apt when you conceive of WoW as a product to which Blizzard can continually add new elements, and where expansions act much like "seasons." "The trickier challenge is that eventually people are going to want to move onto new types of entertainment," he concedes. "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," Pardo adds. It wouldn't be as simple as a content update or a graphical upgrade, either: "Consider we have ten years of development of WoW today," he says. "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." "You can always imagine more than you can create," Pardo reflects.