When you get on the phone with Blizzard Vice President Bill Roper, its clear that he loves talking about all aspects of one of the most successful developer/publishers in PC gaming. HomeLAN got a chance to chat will Roper last week and even though our conversation was relatively brief we got to hear his views and thoughts on pretty much everything about Blizzard.
Of course, the biggest current news event concerning the company is Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the expansion pack to their hit RTS sequel of 2002. The expansion is due to be shipping to stores worldwide tomorrow with a whopping 2.5 million copies heading to retail store shelves. Even though huge shipments of games are now normal for Blizzard, Roper still seemed amazed at the sheer numbers for Frozen Throne. I remember when we shipped our first PC game and we came out with 200,000 copies, Roper said of a number that would still be a respectable figure for most PC games today. We asked ourselves, Can we really sell that many copies? Frozen Throne has turned out well, according to Roper, We got it all in, he said, referring to all of the new content and features they have included in the expansion. Im amazed with the sheer work and content the team put into it. When asked, Roper would not completely discount Blizzard putting out a second expansion pack to Warcraft III, saying they will make that decision after evaluating the success of Frozen Throne.
Another release of a somewhat smaller scale is due out soon but is still important to millions of players: the 1.10 patch to their action-RPG Diablo II. Roper told us, We are down to a few bugs.. in testing the patch, which will likely be the last that will add new content to the game. As far as the patchs release dates, Roper will only say that it will be soon after the release of Frozen Throne in order to give some distance between these two major releases on Battle.net. We want to make sure the two products dont collide, he said.
Speaking of Battle.net, Roper said that Blizzard will continue to go after hackers and cheaters on their servers that service the multiplayer games of their products. Blizzard recently disabled the accounts of a large number of players because of hacking and cheating and may even disable CD keys of persistent cheaters. We want our players to be as secure as possible, Roper said, Players know that we are constantly striving to improve our security.
Discussion then went over to the upcoming tactical sci-fi action game Starcraft: Ghost, Blizzards first major console game in many years. While the game, which is being co-developed by Nihilistic Software, was well received at E3 last May, Blizzard announced just a few weeks later that the planned release date of the game would change from late 2003 to some unspecified time in 2004. Roper told us of the decision to delay the games release, We just didnt feel that it was going to be right in that timeline. Roper did say that the delay shouldnt be a huge one, saying , I dont expect that it would add another year. Its more of a case of months.
Roper also confirmed a couple of open questions for us about Starcraft: Ghost. While in our previous email interview with Roper about the game he hinted that there would be some type of multiplayer options, Roper told us last week that the decision was made not to have any multiplayer elements at all in order to concentrate on the single player experience. Roper said that Blizzard and Nihilistic did try to come up with a number of different ideas but ultimately, We really didnt find anything that was fun, adding that they wanted to avoid a tacked on multiplayer experience. Roper also shot down a rumor for us that Starcraft: Ghost was going to be an Xbox exclusive title. I have no idea where those rumors came from, Roper said, assuring us that the game will be released for Playstation 2 and GameCube consoles in addition to Xbox, although they are using the Xbox as the primary development platform and porting the GameCube and PS2 versions from it.
Our discussions soon turned to World of Warcraft, which with the release last week of Star Wars Galaxies has now officially become the single most anticipated upcoming massively multiplayer RPG currently in development. We are very happy with the progress of the game, Roper said. He added that they are now in an alpha state of the games progress and internally testing the game at their offices. Roper said that they will soon have a very, very limited alpha test with employees and their family and friends testing the game outside the Blizzard offices. Roper expects that official beta testing for World of Warcraft with outside testers will begin fairly soon, in about three or four months and like most tests will start with a small amount of testers and grow as the beta tests evolve. Roper said. He also said that unlike LucasArts, who kept its beta testers under a non-disclosure agreement until a few days before the end of the test, testers for World of Warcraft should be able to talk about their experiences long before the test ends.
Of course, the massively multiplayer genre continues to get crowded but Roper said one of Blizzards big goals is to get people who have never played these games to play World of Warcraft. I think that if we are only going to fight over the same million people then we are going to be in trouble, Roper said of the current pool of players for the genre, pointing out that the strategy and RPG genres were turning into hardcore game experiences until Warcraft and Diablo helped to make them more of a mainstream genre.
We were running out of time in our chat with Roper so we quickly got his views on other Blizzard topics. Roper said that the company was happy with the sales of their Game Boy Advance ports of their classic game The Lost Vikings (their second GBA port, Rock N Roll Racing was just released a couple of weeks ago and a third, Blackthorne, is due out later in 2003). Roper also said he is enjoying reading the feedback from players of the GBA ports as well. The companys skilled CGI unit is busy making cut-scenes for Blizzards upcoming games and some have even suggested that Blizzard make a full-length feature film a Blizzard property. While Roper admitted its something they have thought about, he said that ultimately it was a question of manpower. We have about 22 or 23 people working on these things, he said. They have to do it for all our games and if we did a feature film we would have to add a 0 to that number. Blizzard also stayed busy licensing their properties for things like action figures, pen-and-paper RPGs and novels (Roper said that Blizzards book publisher, Simon and Schuster, is very happy with the sales of book based on things like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo). Roper also revealed to us how the recently announced Warcraft board game came about. Roper said there are about 10 or 12 Blizzard team members who regularly play board games at the office during breaks and when the Fantasy Flight Games publisher asked for the rights to make a Warcraft board game, it turned out that there were people at Blizzard who were familiar with the board game publisher and after playing a number of their products, Blizzard decided that Fantasy Flight would be the perfect choice to make a Warcraft board game.
Both talking and listening to Bill Roper is an entertaining experience in itself and we thank him and Blizzard RP rep George Wang for the opportunity.
From:
www.homelanfed.com
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Roper will only say that it (patch 1.10) will be soon after the release of Frozen Throne in order to give some distance between these two major releases on Battle.net. We want to make sure the two products dont collide
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So this is why patch 1.10 coming out so late.
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