Frank Pearce on Battle.net 2.0
A recent interview has surfaced with Frank Pearce. We have all the details and commentary on the StarCraft and Battle.net 2.0 potions.
This interview with Frank Pearce, hosted by GamesIndustry.biz, has questions from all over the map - covering the Blizzard Company, Diablo III, StarCraft 2, and Battle.net 2.0. We have cut through the fat and laid out the details concerning StarCraft 2 players:
Q: How are you hoping to advance community building in the upcoming revamped Battle.net?
Frank Pearce: That’s going to be a big challenge for us. It’s something we’ve got to figure out and we definitely have an ambitious feature set plan in store for the Battle.net launch with StarCraft II. Definitely improved friends list, improved functionality for groups, whether that’s clans or guilds, better chat functionality, voice over IP, anything we can do. Some of it’s going to depend on how ambitious the feature is, whether we can get it in conjunction with StarCraft II or if it has to come out at a later date. We’ll see what we can do.
Q: Have you looked at what other RTS titles have done, such as Command & Conquer 3’s video chat function?
Frank Pearce: I haven’t had a chance to look at that myself yet but we’ve got guys on the StarCraft II team that play other RTS’s pretty regularly. They have a library of RTS games in the dev team they’re in, so we look at all that stuff and take inspiration where it makes sense.
Q: How do you intend to make Battle.net the hub for e-sports, considering a number of contenders that have taken the lead since its launch?
Frank Pearce: We’ll take a look at the ladder system and the ranking system and see how we can improve that. Better support for leagues, whether they’re Blizzard leagues or third-party leagues, better support for play-by-play commentary, better support for replays. In Warcraft III the replays function wasn’t something we contemplated from the beginning, whereas in StarCraft II, seeing how critical that was for e-spot in Warcraft III, we definitely put that in form day one.
Q: In discussions with people from Blizzard I’ve noticed that the original StarCraft and expansion, Brood War, is close to your hearts maybe even more so than any other games. Why is this?
Frank Pearce: A lot of the veteran leadership of Blizzard Entertainment worked on StarCraft. I was a programmer on StarCraft, Mike [Morhaime] worked code on StarCraft. It was something that not only were we excited to play from a player perspective but we were also emotionally invested in the development. We poured our blood, sweat and tears into that product.
Mike had to take a business trip for the purpose of dealing with some StarCraft: Brood War stuff, he took that business trip on his birthday - that’s how important StarCraft was to us at the time. I think it has a lot to do with the emotional investment in the development of the title.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz (Blizzard’s Frank Pearce)
If you think this is news, you should definitelly read over our commentary and video from the US and EURO StarCraft 2 press conferences at this past Blizzcon:
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!