The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it. Blizzard's design philosophy follows some key elements:

Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun. Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: The concept here is to keep game play simple in terms of mechanics and objectives, but design the game in a way that the challenges scale with the ability of play. Pardo stated that Blizzard is focusing more on designing for multiplayer games first now, rather than single player, so they design for the multiplayer aspects, giving games a lot of depth so that players won't get bored with it. He also said that WoW is a pretty hardcore game, but the key is that it's accessible to a lot more gamers -- endgame content like raiding and arenas are a lot more hardcore than leveling itself.

He cited the Diablo II death penalty as a failure in this aspect -- the death penalty was simply 'you die, you lose half your gold', but this was easily circumvented by dropping your gold off in town and not accessing it unless you wanted to buy something, which inflated the economy to the point that gold was meaningless, leading to players bartering and trading items rather than just using gold. They took those failures into account with WoW, not only designing the death penalty as a 'tax' of sorts where you'd have to pay to repair your gear, but by introducing money sinks that would make you want to spend your hard-earned gold like fancy mounts. The auction house was developed so that the player economy would revolve around gold, rather than simple bartering. What is the Fantasy? In other words, what should the game look like -- Pardo talked a little bit about the UI system, and how they intended for it to be simple to use and intuitive. He said the UI system was something that he considered a failure -- not because it was bad necessarily. But from a development standpoint, if the majority of your player base is using addons to modify the existing UI, that's a clue that something wasn't quite right with the way the UI was originally designed.
Make Everything Overpowered: Every unit, every class should feel unstoppable, overpowered and epic -- because it's just more fun that way. Pardo told a short story about Designer Island, an area that used to exist in game for designers to play with landscapes and NPCs. He said he was given two abilities on his bar that you don't see in game – a grow button, and a shrink button that would either grow or shrink the target by 10%. After bringing in Nefarian, he said he must have hit the grow button about twenty times before he finally stopped and said "That's the size we want him." Afterward he noted "I don't even know why they gave me the shrink spell, I've never used it to this day!"
Concentrated Coolness: Less is more when 'less' is concentrated into one simple, overpowered and fun class to play. Rather than having 27 different classes in WoW, they took the best elements from units in Warcraft III (Thunderclap from the Mountain King, Critical Strikes from the Blademaster, Shockwave from the Tauren Chieftain) and combined those into one 'super-concentrated cool class' with many fun abilities -- the warrior. Other classes were approached with this 'concentrating' concept in mind.

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