World of Warcraft Still Has Lots of Potential, Blizzard Says

Right after Blizzard released the third expansion, Cataclysm, for its hugely successful World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online role playing game, Rob Pardo, one of the co-designers of World of Warcraft talked about the game and how it could still reinvent itself in the future.

World of Warcraft is still growing in terms of subscribers, reaching 12 million a few months ago, and no doubt increased that amount two days ago, when it successfully deployed the Cataclysm expansion all around the world.

Now, in order to shake up rumors that World of Warcraft is reaching the end of its lifecycle, Pardo revealed that there was still a lot of innovation and potential in the venerable game, provided the right team is working on it.

"Obviously you're not going to design a brand new game using WoW, but there's so much opportunity within that world to do different things.

"For example, the jousting and tournament stuff we recently put in. I think WoW is a really cool place for a team to push the boundaries."

With numbers like 12 million subscribers, one can think that Blizzard is extremely careful to please all of them and keep the subscriber count increasing every month.

That's not exactly true, as Pardo reveals that the fun factor is the most important one when designing new things.

"We do look at numbers occasionally but it doesn't drive us all the time. Our design is driven by what we think is going to be fun. Then we put it to the company and out to the public, and whether we feel that we've been successful. We look at larger numbers like how many players are playing."

World of Warcraft was originally revealed back at the end of 2004, and is now the largest MMORPG in history, making it the benchmark by which every other new title is measured.

Even if contenders appear almost every year, no other game has managed to even dent the popularity of the Blizzard title.