Rob Pardo Says Farewell To Blizzard 93
motang (1266566) writes Rob Pardo, Blizzard employee of 17 years who has worked on Warcraft and Diablo is leaving the company. "I'm looking forward to new challenges in my career, but I will always cherish the time I spent with you all and the amazing and collaborative teams at Blizzard," Pardo said. "It was both satisfying and humbling, and it made me a better developer and a better person. I look forward to playing Blizzard games as a player for many years to come. Most important, now I have plenty of time to learn how to build a competitive Hearthstone deck."
Re:Sinking ship... (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. When they started selling children's Warcraft building blocks (and by children, I mean five-year olds) I knew I would never go back.
I miss it. I miss spending months getting to the highest level. Now, you get one character automatically set to the highest level just by joining. Or you can spend 60$ to get any other character to the highest level.
Still, I'll miss the game.
Not sure whether to love him or hate him (Score:4, Interesting)
I miss the game so much. I was just watching some of my last avis the other day - my glorious feral bear in Tol Barad. Charge, mangle, swipe - then charge away so they hit air. I loved it when healers and casters stand out of range - always gave me an out when things got hot (bears are quite flammable). Always on the move, running figure 8s thru my victim. 'Hey, bears aren't supposed to do this kind of damage!' Heh.
The feral bear was so badass. I was the first to come out of the 'closet' and tank HoR out in the middle of the room. Only the bear could do that. A real epic move, hard to pull off, was to resurrect my healer while tanking. If you ever bear tanked in Wrath, then you know what I'm talking about.
I started PVPing the bear back in Wintergrasp, back when bears were "not viable in PVP", being tanks and all. I died a lot, for a long time. PVP was hard enough, but to do it with an underpowered class... I was always the only bear (save for dying desperate restos trying to get away - always a mistake imo). It was really really hard, both to learn, and after that, just to play well and not spaz out. Epic battles... It would sometimes take a dozen men to bring me down.
And then to get into rated BGs. That was a hell of a day, when I finally earned the best weapon in game (not counting legendary) that seemed so impossible when the season started. For a few minutes once, we had the best 10 man BG team on the server. The most fun I've ever had while looking at a screen. By far. Realize I'm a 47 year old dude at the time, and had to completely give up TV to do this.
If you've got somebody willing to do that, *and* pay you $15 a month for it; my advice is to not eff that up. I understood that Wrath of the Lich King was going to be hard to follow. They really got the story together for that, and while story has little to do with PVP, Warcraft overall needs the backstory.
So I guess knowing they were going to fuck it up, they actually made that the core of the next expansion. They literally broke the world, and made it part of the story. So they took away feral, my best time, and they took away Ashenvale, my other favorite thing - lost in a magical fairyland as a low level noob... Then they followed that with pandas...
Everything I liked about the game, they changed. It's almost like I wish I had never played. Because now I know what I'm missing.