In 1991 a company called Silicon & Synapse was founded by three graduates
from UCLA - Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. That company was later
renamed Blizzard Entertainment, and is now one of the most influential and
successful videogame businesses in the world.
During this year's Games Convention GamesIndustry.biz was fortunate enough to
be able to spend some time with Frank Pearce, now senior VP at Blizzard, to talk
about the progress of Starcraft II, working with online communities, the lessons
learned from World of
Warcraft's success, and how to keep secrets.
Q: First of all, how is development on StarCraft II coming
along?
Frank Pearce: Yeah, it's going pretty well, the game's
pretty fun to play. There are guys back in the office who are playing it
multiplayer and are having a good time, so that's always a good sign.
We've got a lot of work to do still on the single player campaign, and we
have a lot of work to do on the Battle.net feature set, so we don't have any
specific release date in mind - because we have so much work to do.
Q: What's the feedback been like so far from fans and the
community?
Frank Pearce: I think the folks who have had an opportunity
to play it have enjoyed it.
Q: Have there been any different opinions across territories? It's a
game that has strong global success.
Frank Pearce: No, the feedback's been pretty consistent in
each region.
Q: When it comes to putting together a sequel for a benchmark title
like StarCraft, do you look around at what other companies have done in the
genre since the original title?
Frank Pearce: Yeah, we've got a lot of guys on the team that
are pretty passionate about playing RTS games, so they're playing all the games
that come out as they're released. We don't try to chase feature sets for the
sake of chasing them
If it makes more sense for the game because it's fun, or makes it more
immersive, compelling or whatever it is, then we certainly want to do that. But
a lot of the feature set we've got with StarCraft II, we've used our previous
series of RTS titles as a foundation.
So like Warcraft III, the replay functionality wasn't something we
contemplated from day one, it was an afterthought and wasn't implemented as well
as it could have been - so that's something that we can do from day one for
StarCraft II, which should be pretty cool.
We want to take the storytelling component in the single-player campaign to
the next level, so we're talking about branching missions, decisions on the
gamer's part in terms of the technology that's available to them - there's a lot
of buzz on the Internet around social communities, and we've got those social
communities around our games and we want to leverage that to bring those players
closer together on Battle.net.
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