

ANAHEIM – Blizzard's executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo has his hand in just about everything the company does, so though I was scheduled to speak to him specifically about Diablo III, our conversation meanders a bit.

We start off discussing the newly-revealed Wizard class the firm had only that morning revealed as a part of the latest Diablo title, but soon we're covering everything from Blizzard's efforts to stem the tide of cheaters in their online games to the company's efforts to bring their games to the silver screen.

This marks the third interview in my series of talks from Blizzcon 2008 which includes chats with World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack and StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder. The final part, an interview with Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime on the company's current and future plans, should appear soon.

Wired: You guys just announced the Wizard. Can you tell us about that?

Rob Pardo: [Laughter]

Wired: Ok, how about a general overview of the class. What does it ... ok, say, what in Diablo II would it most closely relate to?

Pardo: The Wizard’s probably most analogous to the Sorceress. Yeah, so the Wizard is definitely our most traditional mage, magic class. The Wizard, you’re going to see – this is the class that’s going to cast the Magic Missile, have the Chain Lightning abilities. He also has kind of "time manipulation, reality distortion" abilities. Things like that.

Wired: You’d say this is a more area-attack-focused class than, say, the Barbarian?

Pardo: Well one of the things about Diablo is that every class has to have area effect abilities, because it really is a game of “you against many creatures.” So I’d say that all the classes really have target abilities and area effect abilities because it's really important – its not a game like WoW. **

WoW is a game that really focuses on interdependency, so we assume, especially in a dungeon, that classes will have other classes to kind of work with. In Diablo we have to take the paradigm that “you're on your own.” So every class has to be self-sufficient. Of course we have synergies and ways that we can play co-op, but every class really does have to be self-sufficient.

Wired: So there isn’t going to be ... a lot of people have been concerned that because World of Warcraft has been so ridiculously successful for you guys that Diablo III is going to push towards becoming more of an MMO where you’re going to see more of a focus on playing the online component, having parties of people, that kind of thing. Is that the direction you’re going with it?

Pardo: We wanna make Diablo III even better for online play for sure but that doesn't necessarily mean we want it to be an MMO. I mean, we’ve been a company focused on multiplayer gameplay for a really long time now, so its something like WoW is just an expression of that philosophy and belief.

With Diablo III we certainly want to make co-op a lot more fun, we wanna make PvP a lot more fun, but its not an MMO in the sense of WoW at all.

Wired: Speaking of it being online, with Diablo II and the first Diablo, really quickly after the game was released and, again, after every patch, there is this huge amount of people who hack the game, find ways to work around the system. What are you guys doing in Diablo III to prevent that? Obviously that makes playing less fun for people who aren’t cheating.

Pardo: With online games it’s definitely challenging to keep people from modifying the game, or hacking the game, but it’s something we take very seriously. It’s something that, you look at a lot of our efforts in our other games and – we have a full-blown Hacks Team now at Blizzard – we’ve developed our own kinda anti-hack software called “Warden” which we use in World of Warcraft to try to detect a whole variety of known hacks. We’ve put technology in all of our games to help with a whole variety of those sort of hacks and to detect those sort of things. We keep it pretty serious.

There’s nothing specific that we're doing just for Diablo III, it’s kinda more of a Blizzard effort to prevent cheating across the board.

Wired: Is it going to be the exact same “Warden” software in Diablo III as in World of Warcraft?

Pardo: It will be adapted, but it’s something that was made for all of our games.

Wired: Along with that, there’s a huge segment of the fanbase and a huge segment of the media who came down on EA recently when they released Spore and it had that ridiculous DRM system that only allowed you to put it on three computers. There was a huge uproar. Obviously you need some kind of DRM otherwise people would just blatantly pirate your game over and over again. What kind of solutions are you guys looking at for Diablo III?

Pardo: The thing that I think helps us, is that since our games have such a huge multiplayer component, Battle.net really is our most effective DRM.

If you wanna play online on Battle.net with other players you’re going to have to have a legitimate copy. That’s really kinda been the thing that’s always saved us from a lot of the PC piracy that I think hurts a lot of other single-player-only games.

Wired: You’re not going to have something where the game has to phone home every time you turn it on?

Pardo: No, there’s no particular plans for that. We do now have the online store where we’re doing digital distribution on your account. In those particular cases you have to be online to actually download the game, but once you have it, you're fine.

I think our approach – if you want to use an analogy – we take an approach that’s more similar to Steam than EA, let’s say.

Wired: Speaking of which, Steam has been a huge success. Do you have any plans of releasing your games through their system, or is it going to be one of these things where you say: “We’re a big enough company, we can do it ourselves?”

Pardo: I think we’re probably currently in the mindset that we’re going to digitally distribute just on Battle.net. I don’t know if our strategy will change in the future. I think it’s something that we’re just trying to get really good at doing ourselves for now.

Wired: When Diablo II came out, I remember, I first bought it and the computer I had had like 128MB of RAM, which was over the system requirements, but I didn’t really feel like I got the full experience of the game running perfectly until I had something like 2GB of RAM.

It seems that the Diablo series is very RAM-dependent, traditionally. Is that going to be the case with Diablo III? Are we going to need 6GB of RAM to run it at full everything?

Pardo: I don’t know if my memory serves me well enough to speak too intelligently on that, but I don’t think there’s anything actually about Diablo that’s particularly RAM-dependent. I think all of our games ... one of the philosophies we have is to always try to cater to a pretty low system spec. We really wanna make sure that as many gamers as possible can play our games, and I think that’s really the trick to being successful on PC anyway. If you’re only catering to the upper two percent of systems then you’ve really narrowed down your userbase. We always try to appeal broadly.

Now, at the same time, we want a lot of our graphics and all of our features to look good, so it really depends on what features you're gonna enable and what kind of system you have for what kind of experience you’re going to get.

Wired: Do you guys have any idea what the system requirements are going to look like?

Pardo: Ohhh ... Why do I forget the answer to this question? We do. I’m not sure what we’ve released. I can totally get that information to you in the future though.

Wired: That would be great.

Pardo: But I can’t remember and I don’t wanna misquote.

Wired: Absolutely, yeah. Diablo II introduced the Horardric Cube. It was a big success. Everybody likes the crafting component.

Pardo: Mmhmm.

Wired: Is Diablo III going to have an equivalent crafting system?

Pardo: I wouldn’t say “equivalent.” I mean there’s things that were cool about the Horardric Cube, there’s things that were kinda silly about it, but we certainly want to have some features in the game that allow people to do some sort of crafting.

I wanna leave that intentionally vague because it’s kind of a ... there are some features that we’ll be going into in the future. We’ll talk more succinctly about “what are we doing instead of the Horardic Cube?”

Wired: I was just at the StarCraft II panel and they revealed that StarCraft II is going to be released as a trilogy ...

Pardo: “They?” It was me!

Wired: Yeah! You can see what the scheduling is doing to my memory.

So, it’s going to be released as a trilogy. The Diablo series has always had expansions. Are you guys going the same route? The trilogy? At least one expansion? I’m assuming at least one expansion.

Pardo: We haven’t decided those sorts of things yet. I would probably assume the same thing. At least an expansion or something, but we haven’t, to be honest, decided anything like that yet.

It’s a similar sort of development in StarCraft II. We didn’t decide out of the gate that we were gonna do the trilogy idea. We haven’t really got to the point yet with Diablo III to discuss what future products are going to look like.

Wired: And are you guys worried that the fans are going to see – specifically with StarCraft II – that they’re going to see it and say “Oh! They’re coming out with an expansion so they must’ve held back content from the original release to put in the expansion!” Is there a concern that you’re going to be upsetting your fans that way?

Pardo: With StarCraft?

Wired: Yeah.

Pardo: Well I guess it’s really the way you look at it: If you really think that we could do a 90-mission campaign then, I guess you could view it as we’re holding something back, but if you look at the fact that we’ve never done a campaign of that size before within a shipping product ... I mean, the Terran campaign is gonna be as big as any of our full-blown RTS campaigns with all the races from the past. So, I really definitely don’t look at it as holding back anything. We’re really just trying to deliver a bigger story across three games.

Wired: I’ve got my MacBook Pro here, as I already told you, I love it, I’m totally down with the whole Apple zealotry.

Pardo: [Laughter]

Wired: You guys have been huge supporters of gaming on the Mac for a long time. You’ve been one of the only computer gaming companies that supports this stuff. Diablo III? Going to be Mac and PC? Released at the same time?

Pardo: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Wired: And also, do you guys have any plans to do iPhone stuff?

Pardo: We have no concrete plans right now to do anything on the iPhone. We are starting to talk about doing some things on mobile but it isn't something that’s a big primary strategy of ours right now.

Wired: World of Warcraft, when it was released ... obviously people saw a lot of parallels between that and the Diablo series, for instance, the entire item system. A lot of ideas that originated in Diablo then carried over into World of Warcraft. Is there going to be any crossing back over from WoW to Diablo III? Are you borrowing ideas from the World of Warcraft system for Diablo III?

Pardo: I don’t know if I would look at it quite like that. Yeah, they’re both within the RPG genre which is typically a very item-based sort of game.

I think with each of our games, we always look for ideas from our games, we look for ideas from other games; a lot of times we even find ideas that don’t even come from the obvious game genres. I can’t think of anything specific that’s carrying over from WoW into Diablo III’s item system, but ...

Wired: You guys aren’t going to have Murlocs popping up as enemies? That kind of thing?

Pardo: [Laughter] That’d be cool actually. That’s a cool idea. Murlocs could fit within the Diablo universe.

Wired: They fit everywhere! Absolutely!

Pardo: Yeah, you’ve just gotta make sure you get the sound right.

Wired: Exactly. That’s key.

I have no idea if you guys are even remotely close to knowing this, but when – broad, ballpark estimate – can we expect to see Diablo III on retail shelves?

Pardo: When it’s ready.

Wired: Ok ... alright ...

Pardo: [Laughter]

Wired: Is that like 2 years from now? A decade from now?

Pardo: I don’t ... I don’t know how far out it is, but it’s still fairly early in development. I think when people see it, it feels so polished and so finished, but the reality is we have a very small portion of the game done right now.

A lot of the way we develop is: We wanna make sure the game is really fun and the visual fidelity we want ... we wanna make sure we have a small area that feels really done so we know what to build. So even though it looks really complete a lot of the content is just not there. We have a long ways to go to build each of the different acts in the game and put in all the quests and all the different monsters. We have a lot of development ahead of us before it will be something ... It will definitely be out after StarCraft II.

Wired: [Laughter] So “sometime in the future” is what we’re looking at.

Pardo: Yeah. It’s too far out to really say for sure. It’s a ways out.

Wired: Speaking of these "acts," are we going to be following the traditional Diablo II "four acts" system?

Pardo: We’re definitely doing an acts system ...

Wired: With entirely new worlds?

Pardo: Yeah. I don’t think we’ve announced how many there are because we’re still talking about it.

Wired: And total gameplay? What are you guys shooting for? 40 hours? 60 hours?

Pardo: It’s really hard, I think, with a lot of our games to look at it like that.

With Diablo particularly, how long is it going to take you if you do it all in one sitting and don’t replay with all the optional stuff? I don’t know. Hopefully it’s a similar scope to Diablo II, whatever that mapped out to. With that much content. But the thing about Diablo is: We really want it to be replayable. We don’t want it to feel like “oh, it’s a 25 hour experience” we want it to feel like “it's 25 to 500 hours depending on how much you wanna play.”

Wired: Yeah, I’ve got hundreds of hours in Diablo II.

Pardo: Exactly. That’s really how we wanna look at it.

Wired: The first Diablo was released on the original PlayStation. It was ported to the original PlayStation.

Pardo: Oh that’s right! It was huh?

Wired: Yeah, it was a while ago since you guys have done any console stuff, but with these new consoles, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it's theoretically possible for you to port these new games, and there’s good money in that. Are you guys looking at that?

Pardo: It’s definitely something that we’re evaluating. It’s something that ... right now we’re really focused on making the game on PC. It’s something that I do think – just kinda talkin’ – Diablo, out of our different franchises that are currently in development, would be the one that probably could actually go to consoles, but we don’t have any current plans right now to do that.

Wired: There’s been a big push in Hollywood lately to ...

Pardo: Really? [Laughter]

Wired: Yeah, I know. ... to take games, make them into movies. They’re never good movies ...

Pardo: Yeah.

Wired: ... but they make money, apparently. There’s been talk of a Diablo movie and a WarCraft movie, just murmurings about this, for years ...

Pardo: Murmurs? You haven’t heard about the World of Warcraft movie in development?

Wired: Well, I’ve heard, but until I see something concrete I’m still going to consider it sorta “out there.”

Pardo: Ok.

Wired: Are you guys actively looking to go in that direction?

Pardo: With World of Warcraft absolutely. That’s what I mean: It’s not really a murmur with that one. With that one we ... as a matter of fact, at our last Blizzcon we even did a panel on the World of Warcraft movie that had Legendary Pictures up on stage talking about it. So it’s something we’re actively developing right now: To try to get a World of Warcraft movie.

One of the reasons, I mean we’ve had opportunities to do movies way before now, people will pay us the money to do it, but ...

Wired: Like a Lost Vikings movie?

Pardo: [Laughter] Yeah. We don’t want to make a “videogame movie.” We want to make a great movie.

Until Legendary came to us we didn’t really feel like we had the opportunity to do that. We felt like, before them, we had the opportunity to make a “videogame movie,” and that’s not what we want to make.

But with Legendary in the picture, I mean, they’re a really great group. This is a group that makes some phenomenal movies that are out there, and they're very geeky movies. I don’t know if ... you’ve seen The Dark Knight, right?

Wired: Yeah. Totally.

Pardo: That movie was amazing. That’s the group that’s making our movie, and we’re really excited about it.

Wired: That’s your benchmark for quality? The Dark Knight? You’re setting the bar kinda high.

Pardo: That’s where we start. [Laughter]

Wired: [Laughter] Fair enough.

Pardo: No, I mean, I would be thrilled if it was to that quality. For sure. That movie was probably the best movie of the last five years or so, at least. They obviously know how to make great movies. They also did 300, they did Superman Returns, they did Batman Begins, so they’ve got a great track record not only making great movies, but making movies that really sing to us.

Wired: Right.

Pardo: We really feel like these are the guys that could make a great movie in a videogame license.

Wired: Why not – you guys have been known as the masters of CGI cinemas in your games for years – so why not just do that? You’ve obviously got the team who can do that.

Pardo: Um ... we’ve got a fraction of a team that could do that. [Laughter]

Our Blizzard film department is a fraction of, let’s say, a Pixar. We have some really talented guys, but if we wanted to make a movie we’d have to make a movie studio which would be very different from making a game studio.

And on top of that, if they’re going to do that, who’s going to make the videos for our games?

__Wired: __That’s a good point. How many people do you guys have working in your video department?

Pardo: I think we’re about 100 people.

Wired: Really?

Pardo: Yeah, but I think Pixar employs up to 3 to 400 people to make one movie. We’re very small by comparison.

Images courtesy Blizzard Entertainment