Blizzard's senior vice president of game design, Rob Pardo sure doesn't talk like a suit. With design credits on StarCraft, Diablo II, Warcraft II, Warcraft III and the wildly popular World of Warcraft, Pardo recently talked about his visions on how to deal with movie rumors, what happened to StarCraft: Ghost (and how to bring it back), along with insights into his company's untraditional way of creating hits.

GameDaily BIZ: While expansion packs are good to sustain players, what efforts is the company making to gain new users?

Rob Pardo: A lot of the growth in the user base happens naturally by continuing to work on the game. It also happens through word of mouth, like the content, if you look at World of Warcraft (WoW), I don't think that we need to go through a lot of effort to pull in this new group of players; it's more of that "long tail" of players. You see this with a lot of games that are popular over time like people playing The Sims today are not necessarily the same people that bought it when it launched years ago. I think that we're always trying to polish the UI � we're definitely trying to make the user experience better across the board � so I think that any new players get the benefit of that. But I think that they're just as well-served by all the new content, the newbie-zone content or what have you as well as the hardcore players.

BIZ: With growth on the PC and Mac platforms, there's a theoretical ceiling to that growth and a lot more growth on the consoles. When do you bring WoW to consoles?

RP: I think you'll see a console MMO that's popular one of these days. It's quite likely, not going to be WoW. WoW was really never designed for the console experience and for us to try and put it on a console would be a Herculean effort that would only take away from our ability to serve our current customers. I also kind of disagree with the "theoretical ceiling" comment on PC games. I mean, what's the PC install base in this day and age around the world? It's got to dwarf the install base for any of the consoles or all them combined for that matter. It's just that a lot of people don't necessarily use their PC as a gaming machine and PCs themselves... you just have to jump through a lot more hoops to install and play PC games, and consoles are just dedicated gaming machines.

BIZ: What is the one thing that you helped work on that WoW players still don't use?

RP: I guess I can use an example of a feature that we designed more specifically for the Korean audience. When we were first developing the game, and we really try to think globally with our games, we're always trying to pay attention to how this game would work in Korea, how it would work in Europe, and so on. And during the midst of that, during our beta, we got a lot of feedback from our Korean office and Korean community that they wanted to see a "click and move" interface in the game. An interface that's a little more "Diablo-style." There were a number of reasons why they requested this, but predominantly it was because their most popular MMO at the time, Lineage had that interface. [Lineage] had a very similar look and feel to WoW and they felt like it would be easy, that if they were already used to that UI convention, they'd like to see that in WoW. So we actually did put that in as an optional UI movement methodology and it really didn't get used much.

It was something that was good in a lot of ways for us, because we felt like the UI we had in WoW was superior to the one in the other games but they wanted something that, in our minds was a little more inferior, but it was what they were used to. Since they actually adopted the WoW UI convention, it was more of a positive than a negative but it was something that we put some time into and it was interesting to see how users did or didn't use it. It just proved the theory, "just because you're used to a UI in another game, doesn't mean that you won't be interested in a new game with a different UI."

BIZ: Blizzard's skill at creating storylines through amazingly detailed video sequences has turned into an industry compliment when one says "that looks like Blizzard did it." With games crossing over into mainstream entertainment, and the rumors that talked about a Diablo and WoW movies... any official announcements?

RP: It's an obvious transition until you realize that you have to hire 500 artists to do it. Yeah, of course it's something that we've talked about many times over the years. But number one, we're a game company and one of the things we look at the Blizzard film department as doing is really enhancing the gaming experience. That department has grown, just like the gaming groups have grown because the games themselves have gotten bigger. We've grown to multiple development teams now so cinematics has grown just to keep up with what we're doing now, along with the fact that they continue to increase their own artistic fidelity. So I just don't see us in a position anytime soon that we're really ready to talk about something like that seriously. For us to realistically do it would mean that we'd pretty much have to stop doing films in our games, which isn't really acceptable to us. Maybe someday but probably no time in the near future and we certainly have nothing remotely close to being in development like that.

BIZ: Warcraft started out as an RTS and the same with StarCraft. Now that Warcraft has leaped out of the RTS genre and into MMOs... any chances that Warcraft would come back to RTS?

RP: Yeah, of course there's a chance. The way that we develop things, each time a development team becomes available, because when they're done with creating the games that they've been doing, they have a lot of say over what their next game is. So what it would take is for one of our teams to decide that they want to make Warcraft RTS. Of course, there'll be some talk about doing that and I'm sure after StarCraft II ships, it will be one the ideas on the table for that team to do but that's pretty far off in the future and it would really be determined by a combination of the dev team and the company leadership. I think that one of the things that makes us ultimately successful as a company is that we're more lead by our game-making decisions and not so much by business decisions, which is one of the reasons why this question used to be the StarCraft question. Back when we did StarCraft, we did Brood War, and everyone thought they were amazing games. They were successful and I used to get all these questions like, "Why are you doing another Warcraft RTS? Shouldn't you be doing StarCraft?" Well Warcraft was what the team wanted to make; they were burned out on the StarCraft universe. That was the game they wanted to make and as far as Warcraft goes, we love the universe, and it's an amazingly successful universe. If we want to go back and do it, maybe we will, maybe we won't.