A new interview with Blizzard's Rob Pardo is up at GameSpot, discussing the recent departure of Mike O'Brien, the project lead on Warcraft III, as well as the recent changes that the game has undergone. Rob says the changes were all decided on prior to Mike's departure, and goes on to explain in detail just what (and why) they are. Here's an excerpt:

What we wanted to do, at the most basic level, was to take a game - a fun RTS game - like the Warcraft series and add in the concept of heroes, quests, items, and a more interactive environment.

Once we had that as our vision, we had to decide what technology supported that and what user interface to use, and that's where we started going down a different road. Since we had a 3D engine, we talked about different viewpoints and different angles, and we chose one that was fairly flat. You could see a lot of the horizon, and it was almost more of a first-person perspective.

It really showed off the engine at a beautiful angle, but what eventually ended up happening to us was that we got to a point where we had to take the design in one of two different directions. We either had to make it even more RPG-like and cut back on the scale of units, how many characters there were, and things of that nature, or we had to go the other direction and move the camera up, allow free scrolling, and go more toward what we've done previously in our real-time strategy games. That's the easiest way to explain the difference between the two [directions].

Yes, we are moving back toward more of an isometric view. You can still see a lot of the 3D terrain. You still get the sense of the 3D engine. We're using all that. But we wanted to get the camera up high enough, where free scrolling becomes an option for us.