With the opening of Blizzard 2008 Worldwide Invitational, players have largely focused their attention on any announcement from Blizzard. Rob Pardo, SVP of game design at Blizzard, gave the keynote speech at the Game Developer's Conference this week. According to the report from gamasutra,some WoW-related tidbits are revealed from his talk. 

1. World of Warcraft Originally Planned to be Free to Play

WoW was first conceived as free to play, being supported by advertising. However, the non-subscription business model couldn't support Blizzard's goals for the game.

Pardo said: "The first step is to really have a great game, which isn't necessarily what anybody wants to hear. There's been a lot of talks at GDC about using web tools, and Facebook and MySpace and all these things."

Asked how about the move to free-to-play worldwide when it comes to online games, Pardo commented: "When were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported."

"It affects us quite a bit. We've been successful in Asia for 10 or 11 years now, so we're more savvy with the Asian business models than most. But what's difficult for us is that what's acceptable and popular in Asia is so different from the rest. We're a global company. And it works very well over in Asia, but not so well over here. And subscriptions work great here, but not so well in Asia. It's really hard to make something that works in both places." He elaborated: "If you make it subscription here, and free to play in Korea, that doesn't work, because it's a global community, and the other regions wouldn't like it, because everyone knows what everyone's doing. And the game design might not support it."

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2. Starcraft 2 is at A Playable Stage in Its Development

Starcraft 2 is at a fun stage. There's lots of stuff happening. The game is playable, and it's quite fun. We're now really starting to make ground on the single player.

When the discussion moved on to the upcoming RTS Starcraft 2, Pardo said that they wanted to make a real-time strategy game but were "tired of green-skinned orcs" so they moved away from Warcraft to Starcraft.

"The first thing is that everyone playing the game has an opinion. And you can't take opinions as right or wrong, because for that person it's true. And you can't take it personally." Pardo answered.

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3. About Game Design

At last, on a completely different subject, Pardo was asked what kept MMOs from consoles. He answered: "Lack of hard drive space, and difficulty in certifying patches. Basically just that... another problem is that they want a piece of the subscriptions (laughs)."