AGC: Rob Pardo’s keynote

World of Warcraft's Deus Ex Machina Rob Pardo finally talks about the game as a whole.

I read it but I didn't find anything particularly interesting or unexpected as he points out all stuff we have already discussed and analyzed ad nauseam. Often even before WoW, unheard.

These are the parts I liked more:

The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There’s this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we’re successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It’s a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it’ll be mor difficult.

You’ll get a lot of “why does it matter that this feature is polished? it’s so small.” But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature.

Polish starts in the design process.

Control is king. Game control is taken for granted a lot of times. I remember on Warcraft 3 I could feel a little bit of lag on the mouse cursor, and I kept saying it to the programmer, but he kept saying he couldn’t see anything wrong. Finally he coded in a hardware cursor so we could run both cursors at the same time, and lo and behold there were three frames of lag. And that matters, it’s important. People will leave over that, but you’ll never know that is the reason.

I hope we turn this genre into something special. The thing I think is really unique about MMO games — you look all the other genres, and the genre depicts a very specific type of gameplay. But massively multipayer, this genre has the biggest frontier, it has the most we can achieve, and we should be pushing at all kinds of differnet directions.

The rest was pretty much obvious to whoever has kept the eyes open in the last few years.