Dustin Browder - Page 4
Well like you were saying earlier, does it now feel like to the team that these are three new games versus one really big game? I mean Wings of Liberty as a single player campaign feels pretty huge. The next two are going to be, if they are the same scope, really big games. Does it feel like three separate products at this point?
We still kind of view it as one product with a couple of expansions because we are still going to be building so much on what we built before. But yeah, they are still pretty big products. We are still really beating on them and trying to make sure that they are going to be great. But really, at this point we haven't really thought that much about the next game. Like there hasn't been a lot of effort put into that.
Back when we thought we were going to magically somehow do 90 missions or whatever, we had some thoughts put into it, but we really haven't gone back and revisited it.
And basically you guys have sort of the story. You know what is going to happen.
Some of it.
Some of it. The big beats.
Yeah, the big beats are covered. And there is definitely stuff that we know we want to hit as we go through. But there are definitely a lot of question marks, too, because at one point we just stopped development on those parts of the game, because we think, "Oh my God, just the Terrans are going to eat us alive." We focus on the Terrans and we put in a bunch of additional stuff that we haven't really ... well how will that carry through? Huh, be cool, don't worry about it, right? We'll have to get to that at some point down the road.
Yeah, Andrew also said the same thing, like some people are thinking there's some sort of karma system based on the choices you've made. But, you're just making a choice, it's not affecting the players. Raynor doesn't start glowing red or anything.
He doesn't grow devil horns and get things on his body. *laughter* Like you see games that do that, and that's their game. Like they build their whole game around that and everything feeds into those things, and it's awesome. I love those games, but our game is about real-time strategy.
Yeah.
Our game is about what happens on the battlefield and the kinds of toys you brought with you, and that's what our gameplay feeds on.
Is this planned still to have a Beta sometime in the next, I don't know, whenever?
Yes.
Because we heard about the planned Beta earlier this summer and I'm like, well, it's August, so...
[laughs] The next whenever, that's a good one.
I mean, whenever.
You can just put that, write that down... "whenever"
I'll write that, I'll put that in quotes.
As soon as we can.
Has the Beta been delayed just because of the changes to Battle.Net and everything else?
Battle.Net was a factor, performance is another factor. Yeah, and the other thing, too, that happens to us as well, is you know, we don't want to be in Beta for nine months. And we don't want to be in Beta and then take a break and then release the game. We want Beta and the game to be attached to each other by about a three to six month window.
When Beta starts, three to six months later we are going to ship the game, right? And you know, if there becomes uncertainty in this state, then this state becomes really uncertain, too.
I know that you guys don't ship until it's ready, but you're one of the few companies that have your own convention to bring fans in and show off stuff. Does that sort of become an internal date for you guys? Like, "Wow, if we can have this ready by BlizzCon, this will be awesome if we can show it off."
Sure. Yeah, because you know, these guys pay a pretty substantial sum of money to take a flight, in many cases, from God knows where to come out to Anaheim to see us, so we take that pretty seriously. At that point, it drives me a little crazy, frankly, because that's a bunch of work for us, but we take it very seriously because we know that our fans and our hardest core people have put in some resources to come here.
We've got to put on a show. So yeah, if we got stuff that we can put in front of them that we think would be cooler, we definitely make the extra effort to get it to them.
Are you guys looking at having single player playable at BlizzCon?
Yes, yes. Definitely. It will be a subset of what you've seen here. Just because there are so many people, we don't want them singing up the machines for two hours, so we show them a little less at one time. But yeah, they'll be able to see some of this.
Blizzard has been really open about pulling back the veil on development. I remember at last BlizzCon they were showing us, "Here are the failed skill systems we didn't use for Diablo III." There was a ton of stuff that we saw. Most places won't say, "Here's the dumb stuff that we thought of that ended up not working." Are you guys going to pull back the curtain on stuff for Starcraft at this point?
We don't have any plans to. I could. I don't know how fun that would be. I think the panel that we're going to talk about is sort of, show off some of the stuff we've done here. We could show off some of the missions and some of the mechanics on a little bit deeper level than they've seen before. We're going to talk about the editor, I think, and show how we use these things to create the things that we do.
So give the fans an idea of the kinds of things they'll be able to create when the game launches. Or for fans who maybe aren't as technically minded but might want to be playing these things, it will give them a hint as to the types of game play experiences they're going to have online once the other fans make those things. I think that's probably what I'm going to be focusing on. I think Rob has a whole other one that he's going to do.