Two New Frank Pearce Interviews

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Posted 2nd Sep 2008 04:31 PM by Leord

Frank Pearce has been out getting interviewed again (or it’s possibly remnants of material from GC’08 or PAX), either way, it’s the voice of Blizzard in this matter, and even if no new information is revealed it’s always interesting to read through. While a video interview with Frankies sexy baritone would have been cooler, this is till nice!

The first one is from GamesIndustry.biz:

Blizzard Quote: (Source)

Frank Pearce: We want to take the storytelling component in the single-player campaign to the next level, so we’re talking about branching missions, decisions on the gamer’s part in terms of the technology that’s available to them - there’s a lot of buzz on the Internet around social communities, and we’ve got those social communities around our games and we want to leverage that to bring those players closer together on Battle.net.

Q: That’s the basis of the plan to unite communities from all of Blizzard’s titles more?

Frank Pearce: We’d definitely like to be able to bring the entire Blizzard community together online. Battlenet would certinaly be a good tool to make that happen. The WoW community is massive, the StarCraft community is large as well.

We’ll have to see - we probably won’t be able to implement all the plans that we have in mind when StarCraft II launches, but with Battlenet being an online destination, we can add features as we go.

Second one is from Screen Play:

Blizzard Quote: (Source)

A lot of game developers are chasing the more “casual player” at the moment yet StarCraft has this huge hardcore following, particularly in Asia. How do you balance those two conflicting forces, making a game that is accessible yet deep?

It actually goes back to one of our old-school development philosophies, which is that we want to make games that are very easy-to-learn but difficult to master. So it’s important that there is a very short learning curve in terms of someone comprehending the experience but in terms of becoming an expert, the curve is a little bit steeper. A difficulty curve that allows you quick accessibility but in terms of mastering it, it requires a lot more effort. It’s a lot like chess, right? The rule set for chess is very simple but to become a master at chess requires a huge investment of time and energy.

So how mindful are you that this has got to be a game that can support competitive professional play?

Very mindful of that. E-sport is very important to us, and we definitely want to incorporate features beyond what we have historically to support E-sport. It’s just exciting for us to see our games used in tournaments and leagues. It’s definitely something that we keep in mind from day one.

On a side note, our friends at StarCraft2Forum has contacted Project Revolution (the guys making a StarCraft mod for WarCraft III) and asked them about modding games. Find the whole interview here.

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