By Patrick Garratt

Rob Pardo's been around. After a 17-year career at Blizzard Entertainment, during which he rose to chief creative officer and stacked up credits such as lead designer on Warcraft III and World Of Warcraft, he left in 2014 to co-found Bonfire Studios two years later. 

The aim of the studio's sole project, Arkheron, is to build a live-service PvP offering durable enough to earn the kind of community Blizzard spent decades building. Arkheron is an isometric-viewed, battle-royale-style team PvP game built around Ascension mode, in which 15 teams of three climb a haunted tower, looting relics that reshape their skills until the pool shrinks toward a final summit battle.  

Nearly a decade on from Bonfire's foundation, however, Arkheron still has no firm launch date, though a cross-play beta was confirmed at Gamescom for September, bringing PlayStation, Xbox and PC players together for the first time. 

Speaking to Knowledge in Cologne last week, Pardo was candid about breaking into a live-service market far less forgiving than that of Blizzard's heyday, showing a level of honesty and humility difficult to imagine during the heady days of WOW. 

A decade of patience and iteration 

Despite questions over release dates and the tumultuousness of the current live-service market, Pardo firmly believes in Arkheron. 

"We are very confident in the game," he says, pointing to the "hundreds of hours" its community has put into playtests. He concedes, though, that confidence doesn't translate automatically into success. 

"It is also really challenging to break through. Showing our game, even as a video, can be misleading, because it has so much of that MOBA or RPG look. 

"We found even in the last closed beta that a fair amount of the audience thought it was more a PvE game first. So it showed us we need to do a much better job of communicating what the game is."

That self-scrutiny runs through the studio's entire design process, which Pardo frames as heavily iterative. Combat, for instance, went through several overhauls before landing close to its current form. 

"We tried a combat model that was a little more Diablo-esque at first," he says. "As we were iterating, there's just lots of things where you find, 'OK, that wasn't fun – let's try something else.'" 

Ascension mode followed a similar path. Bonfire started with a more conventional, shrinking-circle battle royale, before finding that most teams survived to the top floor, producing one chaotic final fight. The format lacked sustained tension. 

"What if, instead of one big circle, each floor ends with a bunch of smaller circles?" Pardo says, recalling the internal conversations that resulted in the final mode. "Those kind of little inspirational moments kind of happen, and we were like, 'This feels way more fun. Let's double down on this.'" 

Pardo is equally frank about Bonfire's own missteps. He doesn't dodge questions about Arkheron's relatively secretive design process. 

"If there's something I could go back in time and do, it would be trying to build the community earlier on," he says. Early competitive playtests, he says, used paid testers rather than functioning as a community-building exercise. "We did validate the game, but I kind of wish that was more of an organic community in that phase." 

Mirroring the current narrative around pre-launch community in the double-A space, he adds: "The games that are breakout successful, they don't have the mammoth marketing budgets. It's usually because they've been slow, grassroots building their community, sometimes for years."

Great partners, global ambitions 

Bonfire's backers include Riot Games and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, partners chosen, Pardo says, for their patience rather than a tendency for quick shipping pressure. 

"We were very honest from the beginning: 'Hey, it's going to take us a while to really create a game'," he says. "We ended up with partners [for whom the] vision worked for them in their ethos. Andreessen Horowitz, they really believe in long-term, founder-led companies, and the Riot guys, it's not like they knock out games every year or two either." 

That thinking extends to Bonfire's Japan and Korea publishing deal with DRIMAGE (the Seoul-based publisher formerly known as HYBE IM), a deliberate bet on two of the toughest, most saturated live-service PvP markets in the world. The play may seem odd, but Pardo based the decision on his own track record rather than naivety about the risk: "A lot of the games I've worked on in the past have done exceptionally well, especially in Korea," he says, nodding to StarCraft's indelible connection to Korean esports. "One of my co-founders, Min, he [was] a long-time person over at Nexon. We felt like this game really had an opportunity there." 

Japan, he adds, has already outperformed expectations: "It's actually been either the second or third most popular country out of all the countries."

Lessons from the Blizzard days 

Regardless of international optimism, today's saturated live-service PvP market is undeniably brutal. At the suggestion that Bonfire's chasing a dream of Blizzard-like success based on a rose-tinted vision of previous conditions, Pardo pushes back.  

"We weren't exactly going into a blue ocean back then either," he says. "There were always other competitors, and generally we weren't the first ones into the genre." 

What has changed, he argues, is not design but distribution. Blizzard's advantage was an audience built over years. "We built Battle.net. We had our community come to a place like BlizzCon. We had such an aggregation of players we could reach with our new games." This was a base that later titles such as Overwatch and Hearthstone could tap into directly. "The bigger challenge a new studio like Bonfire faces is we don't have any aggregation of community. We're starting from scratch." 

That absence of a ready-made audience is why Bonfire is still resisting a launch window. The studio treats its beta programme as a diagnostic tool, not a marketing countdown: a Next Fest run exposed rougher-than-expected onboarding and prompted the lower-concurrency Spires mode. September's cross-play beta is the next checkpoint: "If that goes really well, then the road to launch gets pretty simple. If we run across other challenges, then we'll figure out what we have to do from there." 

It's a philosophy Pardo sets against a pattern he sees elsewhere in the market. "There's just been a fair amount of live-service games doing, 'We're going to plan for this beat, that beat, and then we're out,'" he notes. "I'd rather learn and gain confidence than put it out there and hope for the best."