Uh-huh. It's a trilogy at this point.
Yeah, you buy the different ... each race is a different title. Now, from my understanding you can play multiplayer with any one of those titles, right?
"You buy the core original product and then you get the ... basically the extended version." |
Like with Starcraft, you couldn't come in and buy, say, Brood War because you'd be unable to play the original game.
Right. That's not the intention right now. The intention here is we've traditionally broken them up where we tell the story of the different factions all in a fewer number of missions, and there wasn't this story mode anyway, so it was very difficult when we started talking about telling the story of a single character like Jim Raynor and doing it in this very short, compressed timeline and still allowing some of these big things that we wanted, which is where you pick your technology, you pick the way you want to enhance your army and what things you want to do as you go through, and even missions themselves, and doing that with some very small number of missions just wasn't feasible and the other option of doing 90+ missions ... to ship it that way was just not reasonable either.
So this was the right decision for us and it's got the same amount of content that we've done in many of our games previously. And yes, the multiplayer is fully fleshed out and you can completely play. Even in the single player Terran campaign Wings of Liberty you will come across and play at least as Protoss for a very short amount of time and experience all of the different factions against you. And the other thing that single player does is introduce units and other things you won't see at all in multiplayer.
Like I said before, we don't actually intend single-player to train you to play multi- because it's very different, but at any rate, when we come up with the next one then it will tell a different perspective and then our intention right now is to go Zerg and then Protoss. But the multiplayer will always stay consistent and be balanced between the three races from launch.
When Starcraft came out, you later put out a Nintendo 64 version of the game. Have you guys thought at all about consoles with this?
"We talk about consoles all the time" |
For Starcraft.
Yeah, for Starcraft. In RTS there's been some great games that have come out recently that have changed the game. They've come up with some interesting schemes for the controls, but it's just never been the same.
Yeah, it's a completely different experience.
I think, interestingly, first-person shooters have come along and they are fully playable now on console controllers, but still, there's definitely been some good moves in the RTS direction but I don't think ... once you have the mouse and you can select groups and so on it's just a very different experience.
At this point, are you guys your own biggest competition? Because when you think about it, Starcraft is pretty immersive. It's not a sit-down for 30 minutes kind of a game, you generally tend to play for a long time. Warcraft was the same way, WoW is the same way. Diablo 3 is coming out soon too and follows the same mold, so you guys are all competing for the same parts of the same pie it seems.
Yeah, well ... (laughs). I wish it was a problem. Just looking at our track record and what we've done -- we don't release games until they're ready and we tend to separate things in a way that it just seems to work out, so it's not a big concern. I think what you're talking about though does exist a bit because of the original games and expectations because now this is Starcraft 2 ... what's it going to do better? But I think we've really hit the right chords, I think it's going to be okay. It's certainly a challenge and if Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 did land at once we'd be in that situation, but I think right now were moving into a world where all these things can all coexist, and certainly the timing of it has an ebb and flow as well.
Blizzard is famous for saying, 'We don't ship it until it's done.' Do you guys set internal deadlines? Or do you just work on it until you feel it's ready?
No, we do. We set internal deadlines. It's a matter of trying to figure out, you know, some of the big questions that have to be answered before those deadlines really mean much. And so certainly we do set our own deadlines and what ends up happening, at least with all the games so far, is that we kind of get to this point where people are having a good time playing and then we know, "Okay guys, now we need to really get it out the door." And we've crossed that point with this game, but there's still a lot of work and polish to do before we get it done. So we're targeting this year, but we won't ship it until it's ready.
Well, that seems to be good thing. Thanks for your time, Chris.
Thank you! And we'll see you back here in July.
