This week, we speak to Rob Pardo, lead designer of Warcraft III and World Of Warcraft, about Arkheron, the debut game from Bonfire Studios, the company he co-founded in 2016. The fascinating chat covers launching a live-service production in 2026 and the lessons he learned from the glory days at Blizzard.

In addition, today we're launching a dedicated Knowledge website. Knowledge began life as a newsletter-only proposition at GDC 2025, and has since published more than 70 editions. Patrick Garratt talks about the site and how it relates to Knowledge's future below.

Then there's job-hopping for Amir Satvat in Social Commentary, split-screen Elite in Extra, and a summary of Edge 428. Stay strong. It's nearly Christmas.

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."

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."

Today we launch our website, hosted at knowledge.edge-online.com. While Knowledge has previously been published as a newsletter, we're excited to finally have a place for sharing our work more widely. We're now able to make our editorial available to non-subscribers, and our features will enjoy increased exposure, benefiting both us and our interviewees.

Readers are now able to view our weekly issues and the features contained within them as separate entities with unique URLs, we're able to use tagging to collate specific themes (such as Gamescom 2026), and sign-up via the site is frictionless. This represents the second phase of Knowledge's evolution, with more to come.

Knowledge will continue to be published every week via SmartBrief, Future's newsletter subsidiary, so there is no need to resubscribe. The same editorial will be delivered to subscribers to the site at the same time: 2:00pm GMT every Friday.

Phase two

The site also gives us the opportunity to adapt the email newsletter's format. While we've received a continuous stream of enthusiastic industry feedback regarding the quality of our editorial, some readers tell us that the newsletter may be too long to digest easily. As a consequence, we'll be implementing a more condensed version of the news summary from this point, and one feature rather than two, with additional articles published via the site and summarised in the newsletter. This should help us to provide a platform-appropriate experience, whether you're consuming Knowledge in a mobile or desktop context.

In time, the Knowledge site will also expand to host editorial from the pages of Edge, giving a permanent online home to print-origin features such as Collected Works, The Making Of, and Studio Profile.

This feels like something of an inflection point for the Knowledge project as a whole. The newsletter was first published during GDC 2025. We've delivered an issue every week since then, and we're looking forward to bringing our editorial to a general audience outside of SmartBrief signups. If you have suggestions regarding the site's functionality, our editorial approach or anything else, please contact me directly. For all sales and sponsorship enquiries, contact Jack Krarup.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

Almost 60,000 industry jobs lost over five years. Game budgets and schedules out of control. Hundreds of development studios closed. Console prices that have risen since launch. Despite analyst predictions of revenues growing for the game industry as a whole, the story behind the scenes is grim.  

"This is the worst videogame crash, or disruption, that we’ve seen since the 1980s, when Atari fell and was replaced by Nintendo," Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney tells us. "I was just a player back then – I only joined the industry as a programmer in the 1990s – but I’ve not seen anything this bad since then." 

In Edge 428, out now, our special report gathers nine experts, including Sweeney, Shawn Layden and Raph Koster, to comb through the numerous factors that have driven the videogame industry into its perilous position, and we consider some options for turning its fortunes around. 

Elsewhere, we meet with Chinese studio Eclipse Glow Games to discover how it's reimagining the legend of King Arthur in Tides Of Annihilation, and talk to a group of developers about the art of translating movies, TV and books into games, from The Godfather to The Da Vinci Code.  

For Studio Profile, we visit Criterion to track its evolution into its modern role at the heart of Battlefield 6's production, and in Time Extend we dust off our PSPs for a few more rounds of Wipeout Pure. For The Making Of, we meet the founders of Onion Games to discover how they created the delightful Stray Children, and in the magazine's iteration of Knowledge we weigh up how Nintendo is faring in an industry of wide-scale turmoil. 

In Hype, we preview forthcoming games such as Metro 2039, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Guns Of Eschaton, while in Play we run the rule over new releases including Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, Beast Of Reincarnation and Onimusha: Way Of The Sword. 

(Find more extensive details about what's inside this issue here.) 

Buy Edge 428 here. To take advantage of our current subscription offer, you can also get your first three issues for just £5.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.