Blizzard's Frank Pearce Interview Page 3

28 May 2010 at 14:01:17 by

You're taking Battle.net to a very community-like perspective, and a lot of people have been asking if there's any possibility of having a small client, so you don't have to log into the entire Battle.net?

That'd be really cool, and I think it's definitely something that we will be evaluating. It sounds like an easy task on the surface, but it's not something that's really trivial. We have to figure out if we were going to do something like that, which resources we would use, and if using those resources for a stand-alone client would detract from implementing some of the features that we still want to implement and deliver to the fans in the existing scope.

That would obviously be appreciated by World of Warcraft fans and Diablo fans, as well as StarCraft fans.

Yeah. It'd be really cool. It's something we've definitely talked about and we will be continuing to consider.

How involved have you been, in terms of games development?

In terms of...?

The creative process. What would your favourite unit be that's currently in the single-player/multiplayer setup? Do you have one?

No, I don't have a favourite unit in terms of the multiplayer/single-player. I've played through a lot of the campaign. Not necessarily to evaluate the game balance or to look at the units themselves, but to look at the way we're delivering the storytelling experience.

How about a favourite character in the story?

I think the story's really awesome. To pick out a single-character, I dunno... I mean, I think Raynor's got a lot of character development through the story, and we introduce some new characters throughout the story. Tychus is a new character that's really cool. I like to experience it all from the perspective of a fan, and I just think the whole experience overall is really cool.

You take on a lot of feedback from the beta at the moment. How do you go about evaluating different sorts of feedback, from people saying "This unit sucks," or "That unit sucks," and trying to balance it all out? Or do you look more at data?
We have a lot of data that we can evaluate in terms of that stuff. We also have our Quality Assurance department filtering through the feedback, we have our community team filtering through the feedback, trying to summarise it and deliver those summaries to the development team, and then ultimately the balance designers and the game director on the team are responsible for determining how they want to incorporate that feedback. One of our corporate values is "Every voice matters" which means it's actually more about listening than talking, for us, and even though every voice matters, that doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to implement every opinion.

A lot of fans have been asking about a StarCraft expansion unit called the Lurker. It was originally part of StarCraft 2. Are there any plans to bring it back? Why did you cut it?

It's really an issue of making sure that the ideas we have our cool and focused, and there's not enough space to implement every cool unit that we concieve. While you may not see some of the cool units that have been conceived in the multiplayer experience, you'll see a lot of units that are very signature StarCraft units in the single-player campaign. The Goliath is in the single-player campaign, but not multiplayer. The Firebat is in the single-player campaign, but not multiplayer. The Science Vessel. Any of that stuff that we have used and developed along the way that we don't end up incorporating in the multiplayer component, you still might see in the single-player, and then the map editor is really very full-featured and all those units that we've created along the way – even if they're not in multiplayer – are available to the map makers. You might see some really cool multiplayer maps from the community that incorporate those units.

Do you have any plans to incorporate, for instance, some of the 3D models from Warcraft 3 in the map editor?

No plans for that right now. I'm not even sure if the formats would be compatible – I'd have to go back and ask some of the guys if that was even compatible. But even if that's not compatible, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the community finds a way to import that.

There are two expansions to this – or three parts to the actual game. Are you going to add two more units per expansion?

We'll definitely evaluate different ways to incorporate new game mechanics to the different races, whether it's in the form of units or something else. It really depends. We've got some interesting ideas, but I don't think it makes sense to talk about them right now because we might change direction.

When we were talking to you at... I think Blizzcon 2008, you had the ideas, at least, to release the first expansion somewhere around a year after release. Is that round about the same idea you have now?

We don't have any specific schedule for the expansion right now. Our focus is to get everything ready to go for the launch on 27 July. After that, we'll probably take a step back, put together a big long list of the feature set we want to deliver in Heart of the Swarm, and strike a balance between how long it's going to take and the features we want to incorporate. The development team is not going to be held to any specific schedule just as of yet. It's way more important that we deliver a great experience than to deliver a product on a specific timeline.

The other thing said at the same event was that Diablo 3 will probably be released before the first expansion. Any comments?

Anything's possible.

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