Crafting a Sequel for Everyone: The Frank Pearce Interview
How does Blizzard plan to introduce new StarCraft players to the series, while keeping its hardcore fanbase happy?
9/8/2008 5:59 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 4
Crispy Gamer: So what are you most excited for, and what makes you most nervous about bringing back such a highly-esteemed franchise?
Pearce: The basic RTS experience isn't something that's unfamiliar to us -- right? We're not worried about that. Some of the ambitious goals that we have in terms of the online experience and Battle.Net -- bringing that to the next level, and contemplating the things that are going on in social networks and other online gaming services like Xbox Live -- I think that's where we're going to have some of the biggest challenges.
Crispy Gamer: Are you planning for voice-over IP (voice-over-Internet protocol)?
Pearce: That's something that we're talking about. It would be really cool. That presents some immediate challenges from a social community perspective and online community perspective, but it's something that we're talking about.
Crispy Gamer: Is the online community element something that you're thinking about adding to Battle.Net?
Pearce: It's something we're talking about. We've got such a big community surrounding StarCraft. There's a big community surrounding World of Warcraft and there's a big Blizzard community in general, and we would definitely like to do more with that.
Crispy Gamer: Are you looking at Steam as something like -- not just downloading games through Battle.Net -- but the community as well?
Pearce: It's really interesting, and we've been looking at Steam even before they brought those features in.
Crispy Gamer: I know you said that you're not interested in bringing StarCraft II to consoles, but do you think consoles are powerful enough this generation to handle StarCraft II?
Pearce: Yes. As far as minimum system requirements, we haven't locked them down yet. But we're only targeting video cards that have Shader 2.0 technology. We want minimum system requirements that will make the game accessible to a broad audience, so I think the latest-generation consoles are powerful enough for it. I don't know about the memory requirements -- right now, the game uses a lot of memory, and that's something we still have some work to do on, even on the PC side.
Crispy Gamer: Are you sad that StarCraft: Ghost was never released?
Pearce: I don't know if I'd say that I'm sad. I'm not crying in my beer over it. It's certainly disappointing; the game had a lot of potential. With World of Warcraft as big as it is, we're spread extremely thin. We've got a lot of stuff in development right now. Three products that have been publicly announced at this point -- that's unprecedented for us. It's disappointing, but we've got lots of other cool stuff that we're working on.
