Zerg Coverage >> Chris Sigaty Interview

Morten
I have just been wondering about this entire process behind this, and I’ll be damned to play a lot of StarCraft now, but I have been playing a lot of World of Warcraft and I have been following what has been going on in the Blizzard forums and all that and it is just quite interesting to see that a lot of people are complaining about that their voices are not being heard, and I suppose they are, but it seems like you’re having a very long run revision process in terms of balancing and such things.

Chris
We’re not even in the beta, when we’re in beta we will be reacting even more so to what people are saying. But we are already acting, I think it was late last week we put up some screenshots that were really a reaction to what the hardcore community was thinking about the art. And we’re trying our best to do all that while still moving forward.

Morten
On average, how long time would you say it takes if you detect a really good piece of reader feedback on the forums, to actually implement it? On average how much time would it take for that piece of reader feedback to actually be tried in the game?

Chris
It really depends on the situation like, you know, we should just make it so that…

Morten
Let’s say you’re rebalancing a unit.

Chris
Yeah, so like: “why doesn’t this unit regenerate when burrowed?” That can be simple, but something bigger like patching up all the art: “Terrans are to bright and colourful, they’re not as gritty”, well we’re not done yet, but ok, it took us months before we got back to fix up the Terrans even if we saw that feedback early. So it really is situational. If it is simple little balance tweaks or whatever, it could be hours, and if it’s something more significant it can take days to months.

Morten
Do you have any idea on the amount of bias you are going to get? Obviously when Blizzard released World of Warcraft, it skyrocketed the traffic, will it be anything like that with StarCraft?

Chris
Yeah, well when you bring up World of Warcraft people forget it was like “oh my…” you know, our goals were so far, I mean…

Morten
One might expect Blizzard to have become such a name that…

Chris
We are having a specific target now, but we are also familiar with the infrastructure necessary for that. And so the server/client being ready. It was all new to using World of Warcraft, I really don’t anticipate any problems with this, and we are planning to launch in several different languages.

Morten
Do you got any projected sales figures yet?

Chris
No, we don’t, and in fact, they purposely keep the dev team, us, away from being kind of like this analysing or stuff like that.

Leord
Are you using the same server infrastructure as the World of Warcraft servers or clusters?

Chris
No, we don’t. It will be much more similar to what you saw in WarCraft III.

Leord
So, battle.net basically?

Chris
Oh, yeah, battle.net for sure. We don’t have any details yet, but it is greatly enhanced new take on battle.net that you will hear about soon, in the upcoming months. Expect something much more similar to what you’d seen in WarCraft III. Easy ways to matchup and get in the game and that sort of thing.

Leord
Bob Kotick recently mention that there would be like ads ingame…

Chris
Yeah, that was a misunderstanding. We believe Bobby was was referring to.. Eh, we do have coke and diet coke ads in the game, but nah, I’m just kidding! [laughter] No, there is no technology for it, there is no discussion even of putting anything into the actual gameworld. Battle.net has always had that ads right across the top, and we think he is referring to that, and in fact I think he said “yeah that’s what I was referring to”. [laughter] I can just see the branded t-shirts across the Zerg ... [more laughter]

Leord
But there are some really cool doodad things, and I think there was some Korean game that actually had modified doodad [graphics].

Chris
Yeah, certainly you could do it, but we haven’t even thought of that as an idea. We could put it on there as a cool thing that generally will have to be in multiplayer and cool things that our artists come up or what the backup concept of Zerg is going on with the story, like billboards for example. You were referring to that, right? It’s more like you have an ad on what’s going on at the planet at that time, if you understand. Not an advertisement, nothing other than story based.

Leord
Something that actually fits into the story line?

Chris
Yeah.

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