 |
|
The interview I had with Rob Pardo, and a few fansites is now up in video format! This is the interview where he talks about some of his own additions to SC2 (Colossus + Reaper cliff jumping idea etc) and the debated “No LAN” comment. Well worth 20 minutes of your life.
First time I talk is about 03:00, if you’re interested, and that nice shiny phone in the middle of the screen is mine!
Full transcription available after the break.
 Blizzard Quote: |
||
| When we right-click a player will there be an option to mute that player or send a whipser? Yeah, of course. I can't remember if it's through right-click. Wow, I gotta think about that. It's not gonna work exactly like WoW, more like WarCraft III. Because the whole chat paradigm we did for WoW was really based around having an immersive chat experience. With battle.net were coming at it more from what's the evolution from WarCraft III. I can't remember exactly but I think there's a right-click way to whisper somebody. Is there anything you would like to change about StarCraft II but you can't because of battle.net? Well there's lots of things that we're going to change still. Some of the challenges we have right now, we're still trying to get it to run on our minimum system. But that's something all of our games have had that challenge at this point in development. As far as at a feature level, I think were gonna end up being pretty happy with that. There's always gonna be that unit that, "Oh I wish that unit had worked out," or that level, "Oh, I wish that one would have worked out." But it's not generally because of time. It's not, "Oh, if we had had four more months we could have done that unit." It's just, during the creative process lots of ideas don't work out how you thought they were gonna work out. You try a few times and you always feel kinda sad. It's like, "Oh, I thought that was such a good idea but it really wasn't," But luckily for us there's not usually a lot of time based things that we have to cut. How many portrait animations do you plan to have for each unit? Wow, I have no idea. *laughs* I am not even sure, to be honest. That is an art team question. *laughs* Is there any part in StarCraft II that you feel you have done a great contribution to yourself? Well, it's all teamwork. Yes, but is there any unit or mechanic that you feel extra proud of that you contributed to? There's lots of things that I contributed to each of the games obviously. It's kind of tricky once you get to that level. A lot of my contribution to each of the games I don't really think of it like that. Because a lot of times, even when you did have a cool original idea then someone else adds to it and it turns into both your ideas or it turns into the teams idea. Sometimes my idea will be just at a tuning level, "Oh, I wish that we would have kind of just tweaked that unit a little bit," or something like that. Exactly, and is there any of those that you feel that that was one of my best contributions? I don't know if I have any of those. I mean, I've trained myself so well to not think that way. I mean, I think probably a lot of my contributions early on, I was the original lead designer of the game before Dustin became the lead. So I probably drove a lot of the original vision. But again, it's not just me. I maybe drove the vision and held the vision but, you know, a lot of the ideas behind single player are ideas that me and a small collection of other people had and iterated on together. So that would be something I contributed a very high level early on. A lot of the early units are ideas that I drove with a small collection of other people again. New units, like for example the Reaper and the whole cliff jumping idea, you know, the Collosus and how that worked. But even if you have that basic idea early on it changes so much and it really becomes a collective idea again. How many actors are involved in in-game dialogue? Wow, you guys are just going for the hardcore numbers questions. I'm not sure on that one either. It's hard for me to even guess right this second. I don't even know those numbers for StarCraft or WarCraft III. Those are numbers that the sound department is gonna know. For example though, sometimes a single actor might do several units. But when you start thinking about single player characters it's always an actor per character. So I could sit here and scribble some math and then I might be able to estimate and it's going to be like the jelly bean bottle test where I go to Russel and go, "Hey, how close was I?" Right? So, I could guess but I don't know. Sticking to the single player. You were already involved in the original Starcraft. When we see the bonus mission [Dark Origins] and Ressurection IV there was already some foreshadowing of events. Did you have a concrete plan at that time and did you stick to that? We didn't have a concrete plan. We definitely had ideas of where we thought the storyline was gonna go. When we did the Dark Origins easter egg that was something that we very specifically wanted to foreshadow what the next chapter of the story would be. But we definitely did not have like a written narrative of what we thought StarCraft II story was gonna be. So what kind of happens is, Brood War came out almost eleven years ago now, so when we sat down to start talking about StarCraft II story. We kind of dusted all that off and okay, here's where we were, here's where we thought we were gonna go, here's kind of some of the novelizations and comic books that we've done around this universe and these characters. We also even discussed some of the places we went with the ghost storyline because that dealt with the Terran Dominion. And we use that as building blocks to go okay, here's kind of the loose idea of where we want to go and we just rolled up our arms like we always do and started talking about what are the big moments we want to hit, what are the big things we want to see, who are our major characters. And then we just start collaboratively crafting out the storyline and go from there. Can you tell us anything about the mission editor? I can talk in a big picture but if you guys start asking like how many triggers are in there. *laughs* The mission editor is something we're really proud of. We really put a lot of effort into it. We want to make sure people can make all the same sort of mods that they were able to do with War3. But in much the same way if you look at what WarCraft III could have done from StarCraft we want to have that same sort of leap forward of the sort of things that map makers can create. And we want to do a better job of supporting them on battle.net this time too. Even through the custom game search. These are things we'll talk more about at BlizzCon. We really want to support map makers on battle.net better and show which maps are more popular and things like that. Will it be possible to invite a friend to view a replay or to observe the same game? You can certainly do it for observing games. But we also have that for StarCraft and WarCraft III also. We had that spectator mode. So you'll be able to watch games together, we can watch the game you're playing, you can watch the game he's playing. There will certainly be that possibility. Not as much in ranked games because there could be cheating involved. On the replay side there probably won't be a facility to do that at launch. It's something we'd love to be able to do in the future though. Just to be clear, we do have replays, I'm just talking about can you spectate cooperatively on replays. Will battle.net be free or will there be some small fee features. It depends on the region. But since you guys are all Europe basically it's going to be very similar to what we've done in the past. Most of battle.net is free, pretty much all of it as far as Europe and North America are concerned. Asia is a little different, how they do things. There will be certain features that you might pay for. For example, look at how WoW works outside of the subscription stuff like server transfers. There will be some of that for battle.net but we really want to make sure that you can get the full experience of battle.net, all the features just from getting the box. Many players like to watch VODs of games. Do you have plans to have a VOD maker in StarCraft II? That was a feature that we wanted to do but it didn't quite make it in. We had a cool idea for a replay editor that we'll probably try to do in an expansion or in the future but it won't be in the shipping game. That will be something you'll have to do more like people have done in the past. WoW has added achievements recently, I assume this will be included in StarCraft II. Will any of that be offline or is everything on battle.net? There will be achievements for both single player and for battle.net but to get the single player achievements you will have to be connected to battle.net. So you will be connected to battle.net while you play single player. We want to encourage people in all of our future games to be logged on to battle.net while you play whether it's single player or battle.net so you have access to your community. It won't be required but we want to encourage it. That way if you have a buddy playing a 2v2 game and you're playing campaign you're still connected. Will there be Local Area Network (LAN) play? Yeah, we don't have any plans to support LAN in Star2. Probably not going to support it? Yeah, we're not going to support it. Multiplayer will be through battle.net Will there be any missions in Wings of Liberty where you play as Protoss? Yes, during the Wings of Liberty Campaign it is 95% Terran missions but there is small campaign that deals with Zeratul where you will play as the Protoss. And how many missions? A small number, it's a very small number in comparison to the Terran campaign. It's not an easter-egg but definitely a sub-plot campaign. If you need to be connected to play most of the game what is the minimum internet connection you need? I'm not sure what the minimum spec for that is. I don't know if we've set it yet. As low as we can make it. *laughs* Are you worried this might exclude some players? For multiplayer it might but it's really no different then requiring a certain level of video card. We look at the market and try to figure out what do most people have. It's certainly not going to require broadband. Do you have any plans for live StarCraft II events? Yeah, we've been doing it for WarCraft III and World of WarCraft so we'll definitely be supporting it as much if not more for StarCraft II. Will players be able to host their own tournaments? It's a feature we're not going to have initially. It's something we're talking about trying to do in the future. What chance is there of StarCraft II coming to consoles? 0%. The approach we take for all of our games is we decide the game we want to make then we decide which platforms it makes sense for. In our opinion we can't deliver an RTS game, at least the type of RTS that we've been creating at high quality on a console. We've tried in the past. We actually tried the original StarCraft on Nintendo 64 and it works, it's playable, it's just such a different playability and gameplay experience then on the PC and we really don't want it to be that different. Many players decide to play StarCraft on iCCup servers rather then battle.net do you plan to allow alternate services for StarCraft II? No, because that's one of the reasons we don't have LAN play. We want everyone to play on battle.net and we want to make sure that's a great experience. If there's a reason people aren't enjoying it on battle.net then we want to correct it there. They're using a modified version of battle.net though. They're actually using your own battle.net engine. Yeah, which is even worse. That's called a pirate server. Do you have a plan to allow players to export their replays from StarCraft II to a battle.net webpage? We want to support something like that on battle.net that allows players to upload their replays. More like a video. Yeah, we don't have that. You can't upload the video like an .avi or anything. That would be cool though. The big thing we're trying to do with replays for Star2 is compatability for versioned replays. In WarCraft III you patched the game your old replay would no longer work. That's something we're definitely correcting for Star2. So it doesn't matter which version you played the game in, you'll still be able to view that replay afterwards. Are you going to stick to the old ranking system with the new battle.net? We have a whole new system planned for battle.net. We don't have a problem with 3rd party groups designing ladders as long as they're playing on battle.net. We're doing a different ladder system. Each time we've learned lessons and tried something new. Last question, make it a good one. How long will the Terran campaign be? On your website it said each campaign will be around 14 missions. It's way more then that. It should have said somewhere around 30 missions. The Terran campaign is as large as StarCraft with all three races. Because you choose your own missions I can't tell you how many missions there will be. There will probably be around 15-30 in that critical path but it depends on how much of a completionist you are and how many missions you decide to play. For the ultra-completionist how many time in hours will it be to finish the campaign? It depends on how good you are. Anywhere from 30-60 depending on how long it takes you to complete the missions. If you did it in world speed trial time, maybe 20 hours. If you're like one of your QA guys who has already played through the campaign. That's when it gets tough giving those hour estimates. It's like, how many times did you have to try mission 5 because that one's really tough. So it's a very variable amount. If you don't lose at all each mission is probably between 30 and 60 minutes. Transcribed by Deep.Thought |
||
Man, i'm having problem viewing this video. It only buffers.
Really? He comes off as a bit of an arse to me...
The ability to have your friend watch the replay with you at the same time sounds fancy. And oh Leord, you asked some good questions well done. The other guys questions were knid of meh.
Sniffles, whispers, rustles behind the camera are real annoying! With addition of low vices it is really wrost interview sound.
I actually like his no-bullshit attitude. The problem is, at least when talking about things important for the community, like ICCUP and LAN, he does come across a little “assholy” 
He’s a nice guy though
I'm not alone then. :P
They want to make sure people use Battle.net?. Ok, make it better, don't put a fucking gun in our heads!. Assholy is way too soft for my taste. If he was a nice guy, he'd care about what the fans want, not what is better for their money accounts. Why would you care if you win a gazillion dollar or a gazillion plus ten percent?
- StarCraft Videos |
Network sites: IncGamers.com | World of Warcraft | WoWUI | Guild Wars | Warcraft 3 | Diablo 3I | Diablo Wiki | Hellgate: London | StarCraft 2 |
| Copyright © IncGamers Ltd. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
At last, Dustin got a day off. Nice new tidbits, semi-decent questions.
I have to give some major props to Rob Pardo. I couldn’t make out half of the questions due to the poor english.