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 1 of 4
While StarCraft is popular worldwide, it's a religion in Korea -- with tournaments, TV shows, and high-ranked players who are treated like sports stars. So how is Blizzard readying the game's sequel to make not only the hardcore happy, but also suck in newbs like myself? Crispy Gamer gets the latest on StarCraft II from Blizzard's executive vice president of product development, Frank Pearce, and its associate PR manager, Bob Colayco.
Crispy Gamer: Generally, there are a lot of games that are more popular in specific territories, but Blizzard titles are popular worldwide. What's it like making a game that has such an international appeal?
Frank Pearce: It's exciting for us to know that we've got really passionate fans that are interested in the game. I wouldn't say that we're specifically trying to target functionality for specific regions. We try to make a game that's really, really fun and hope that it has global appeal, but we definitely take the unique needs of each of the regions into consideration.
Crispy Gamer: How do you balance designing a game that has such a hardcore user base -- especially in Korea -- while keeping the more casual StarCraft player in mind?
Pearce: One of our development philosophies is to try to create games that are easy to learn but difficult to master: make sure that there's a fast learning curve. When you sit down and play the game for the first time, you feel like it's accessible to you -- that you can grasp the basic concepts, and play and enjoy the game. But we try to also create opportunities to distinguish the average player from an expert player. So there are a lot of units that'll have unique abilities that give the expert players the opportunity to develop strategies around those abilities that the average player might not be able to leverage as well.
Crispy Gamer: How long has the game been in development? What percent complete is the build that you're showing now?
Pearce: Four to five years. We don't even measure [percentages]. It takes 50 percent of the time to get the game 80 percent complete, and the other 50 percent of the time is the last 20 percent of the work. We have such an iterative process that it doesn't really matter what percentage complete the game is, because we still have a lot of work to do in terms of iteration and the quality of experiences that we expect for ourselves and that fans expect.
We have project management folks on the development teams and they're not required to do anything in terms of measuring percent completion. We have the tasks ahead of us and we have to make sure they get completed, and we also have to iterate on the entire experience. It's not an exact science by any stretch of the imagination.
