GamesIndustry.biz published today the second part of an exclusive interview with Blizzard's creative director, Chris Metzen and VP of business operations, Paul Sams.
Part Two: Ghost In The Machine covers various topics that touch the future of Blizzard development. The future that we, StarCraft fans, like to debate about, because at the moment, sequel to StarCraft RTS is just a fantasy far, far away.
StarCraft Ghost is at the moment the only ray of light on the future of StarCraft universe. Console game, whose development has been in progress for some time now. Blizzard, known for their perfectionism when it comes to development is not yet ready to publish:
Paul: We've kind of gone back and reassessed certain of the elements of the game that we felt needed to be refined. A lot of companies, and fans and the press know, Blizzard doesn't release products until Blizzard believes they're done. We didn't believe it was done, and as a result we went about trying to find another solution to bring the product to fruition.
Future plans for development are the next logical question that pops to mind when SC Ghost is mentioned. Will Blizzard develop games that run across multiple platforms (console and PC alike), or will the systems and titles be separated? Or, to translate that into something close to us, what are the chances that in the future StarCraft 2 will be a Real Time Strategy, and not an FPS or RPG or some variant of those two? (or perhaps even StarCraft: ZergBall pro!)
Paul: Well, I would say that we'll do cross platform from the perspective that we'll do Mac and Windows products, and that we'll do PS2, Xbox and GameCube products, but crossing from console to PC? I think that there's still a bit of time before that's potentially going to work very well.
So, they won't succumb to the now popular greedy trend in the game industry to make one game for every possible type of system, and with that, cripple it with each systems shortcomings.
Relation between Blizzard and Vivendi Universal Games gave some insight on the freedom they have at work,
hiring philosophy and perhaps explains the reason why all their games turn out to be a big hit amongst the hardcore gamers and last
for such a long time.
Paul: The people who decide what games Blizzard is going to do are the developers at Blizzard. It's not even the management at Blizzard. We hire only gamers, and whenever we're ready to do a new product, we go to them and we say, "okay, what is it that you want to play next?" ... We believe that if we hire only gamers, and we ask them what they want to play next, it's very likely that what they want to play next is what other gamers want to play next, and if they have the ability to make those choices, and they're able to go down roads for which they're very passionate, we think we'll get the best games. ... So, Vivendi does not get involved in our day to day business. They provide a lot of support to us - they take care of a lot of things that allow us to keep our eyes on the prize. We want to make games - we don't want to spend time figuring out how we manage our financials, we don't want to worry about whether we run an accrual or a cash business. Let them handle that!
Final set of questions about "professional" gaming discovered something interesting to thoughtful readers about inside-Blizzard treatment of competitive play, tournaments and their look on games being involved in some hi-level
professional gaming.
We just hired a person to be in charge of tournaments in our company. We want to do more support of tournaments, and we want to build more tournament capabilities into our products, and to have tournaments and competitive play more in our thought process as we're creating our games.
Blizzard, we wish to welcome you to year 2005.
Now they hire "a person" to be in charge of tournaments. That is as funny as is reassuring and gives some hope to new movements in the scene. Not to be harsh on them, we must heartily applause the organisation of "Mystery-Map Invitational" and wish that their "competitive play support" extends to more than just Warcraft 3. In the rest of the interview Paul explains Blizzards approach to making games that are "easy to learn and hard to master" as well as their intent to provide better support for B.net gaming, which perhaps might be a glimpse of future changes in SC B.net? Or just a dreamers wish? The future will show.
Article made by » Petar "RayOfLight" Jager.
Links
Interview - Part one
Interview - Part two
Blizzard - Mystery Map Invitational
