Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Answers Your Questions, From Blizzcon
Last week we asked you to submit questions for several Blizzard employees on a wide range of issues. Since we undertook the pilgrimage to Blizzcon in person this year, we decided to use the question ideas as a guide rather than an absolute, so that it could be a little more conversational in tone. Below we have included the responses from Chris Sigaty, lead producer on StarCraft II; Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft; Leonard Boyarsky, lead world designer on Diablo III; and Paul Sams, Blizzard's COO. One interesting point: Paul Sams indicated in his interview that, with enough interest, Blizzard would be willing to entertain the idea of open sourcing some of their older games. He suggested that if you are interested in this to contact them directly (please be at least semi-coherent and polite). Update 19:00 by SM: Bob Colayco from Blizzard just contacted us to mention that if users wish to leave feedback about open sourcing games, support for Linux, or anything else you would like to express to them, you should do so in the comments section of this story. They plan on perusing the comments below for user feedback and interest, so don't be shy.
Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan — World of Warcraft Game Director
Slashdot: Could you walk us through how you balance a particular class or ability — especially going into Wrath as you're adding all these new and extra skills, and trying to find a new balance?
Jeff: Definitely. It's really an ongoing, iterative process. Every piece of content we add in terms of PvE — a new raid boss, new abilities that creatures are doing — and every other class ability are going to come into play in whatever original class ability we were trying to tune in the first place. So, as we add more things, we constantly have to go back and look at the things that were previously fine, but now might suddenly be overpowered or underpowered. We also have a lot of philosophy that comes into play. It's very easy to do what we call — it's kind of a Blizzard 'cardinal rule of never-do-this' — balancing to mediocrity, which means that you always notch everything down because you're scared of certain things feeling overpowered and are literally living by the numbers. I think numbers are a great guideline, and you should always understand the math behind what you're doing, but at the core, you need to follow the gut and ask "Hey, does this feel really great?" The best place classes can get, in our mind, is where everybody thinks everybody's overpowered. That's kind of the Starcraft balance at work — I think it's best illustrated in Starcraft — "Oh my god, all three races are wildly overpowered!" Yet, somehow, the matches seem to come out even most of the time. Something that we also try to communicate to players — it's difficult for them to understand, and it's not really their responsibility to even worry about it — if we never touched the classes — let's say we all agreed that the classes were perfectly balanced, and never touched them, and let them go for three months, they will eventually become unbalanced because of different strategies that evolve. The players are really driving how the game goes, and it's our job to play referee at a certain point. But not referee in the sense of "No, no, no, you're breaking the rules," but just asking, "Hey, are you still having fun?" And we have to make sure that you're having fun, but not at the expense of someone else.
Slashdot: Along those lines, how are you trying to balance for the arena at level 80, with the addition of a new class and all the new skills coming into play?
Jeff: The arena is particularly challenging because of the three brackets; a class that might be absolutely godly in 2v2 doesn't even get invited to 5v5. What we've claimed, and what we've stood by, is that we don't balance the classes in PvP in a 1v1 scenario. We have zero expectation that every class will be able to beat every other class. The key, and the real core to our arena tuning is making sure that tuning the classes in the arena doesn't step on the toes of the classes in other parts of the game. It's very important when we look at a class that we say, "Here are the fun things that this class has to do leveling up," and some level-up abilities have very little use in the arena at all. "Here are some uses in a 5-person encounter, and here are uses in a 25-man." So, the arena is just one part of that. It's very important that the arena doesn't become the sole focus of class balance for the game.
Slashdot: Professions in The Burning Crusade — tailoring, for one — the curve wasn't very smooth for progressing into raids. Are you trying to change that this time so it segues into raids better?
Jeff: We totally agreed with that; we felt like a lot of the trade skills had a very odd curve. Either they were way too easy, and you just sort of had everything, and you were instantly done for the expansion, or it felt like you could never get there. There's a new system in place for Jewelcrafting that I think is really interesting, and is a direction we want to swing more towards, which is a Jewelcrafting daily quest that rewards a currency for Jewelcrafters only. Then, there is a trainer that literally has dozens and dozens of Jewelcrafting recipes. Some of them are what we like to call "selfish" recipes — they only benefit the Jewelcrafter — and for others you're being the "outgoing, good guild member" if you get them. So we're really putting the power in the player's choice as far as "Hey, I want to get my guild in good shape for raiding Naxxramas," or, "No one on the auction house has yet purchased this recipe and put these gems up," or, "I really want this powerful item for myself, personally." So, we feel it will let player choose the direction of their tradeskill development while still having access to all the content over time. By the end of the expansion cycle, they'll probably have it all, it just depends how soon you get it, and how you prioritize. It's us putting that control in the players' hand, rather than us trying to anticipate what's going to matter to you, because there are so many different play styles.
Slashdot: As you go into raids, are you still going to be able to get upgrades through your professions?
Jeff: Yeah. You're going to continue to get upgrades. There's also the concept of the Primal Nether in The Burning Crusade. It used to be Bind on Pickup — we switched it to being trade-able. The equivalent to that is already in Wrath of the Lich King, and it's already trade-able. It can be purchased for the equivalent of Badges of Justice. So we feel like we have things that gate the tiers of raiding, and when we add a new raid tier, we can add another one of those items, similar to the progression from Primal Nether to Nether Vortex, and continue to progress those throughout the raid tiers.
Slashdot: Wintergrasp is a bold new direction in terms of creating world PvP that's something in which a lot of people can and want to participate. What's it like to design something like that and commit so many resources to it before seeing the fans' reaction to it?
Jeff: Well, I think it's our job as the WoW development team to try to anticipate fan reaction; anticipate not only what will be cool about things, and hold that vision, preach it through to the team, and make sure we realize the vision, but also to second guess ourselves the entire way. We have to ask all the questions of "What happens if...?" We need to solve a lot of those problems ahead of time and test it as much as possible. We had a test last Monday on the beta realm where we had 350 people fighting at once, which was a tremendous feat for us, because it was, on the server-side, completely lag-free. Player's clients, with 350 people in the area, are not always going to have systems that can handle it. For some people on lower-end systems, the sheer video lag or lack of processing power is going to slow them down. But, on the server side, as far as the network went, things were great, and we were supporting it. Another key component of doing something like Wintergrasp is playing it ourselves. There's no way to watch over an encounter like that and know, "Is that guy having fun?" Is it fun to be the one guy getting hit by four siege engines at one time? So, we need to play it ourselves and form our own opinions of what is fun, what is balance, what is overpowered. Is it too short? Is the reset time too long? For those sorts of things, you're never going to have enough design intuition to have the answer short of playing your own game. That sort of applies to us throughout World of Warcraft. We're very fortunate that our development team.. we have the problem of saying, "Ok guys, let's try to keep the WoW to lunch time or after hours." We're still in the mode where everybody's playing the game.
Slashdot: Speaking of siege engines, are you happy with where they're at, and where do you want to take them from here?
Jeff: I think the vehicle system has turned out to be one of the best things we added to the game. Originally we added it to do the Wintergrasp vehicles and the Strand of the Ancients vehicles, and to use those against destructible buildings. We wanted the Plaguethrower, and the Demolisher, and all these other things we added. What we ended up doing was developing a very robust vehicle system, which our quest designers, who weren't even working on the PvP content were kind of looking over our shoulder saying, "Well.. let me see what I can do with that." And they've ended up writing some of the coolest quest mechanics you've ever seen using that same system. You're on the back of a guy's horse throwing flaming bombs at Worgen as you go; you're flying a frost wyrm; the Malygos encounter — not to spoil any surprises — it ends with a big finale where the entire raid is on what are the equivalent of vehicles. So, that's turned out to be one of the coolest things. Also, just watching in Wintergrasp.. the sounds of the Plaguethrower are just amazing. Our sound team really nailed it. It just feels super-visceral to have that barrel of plague-muck and wing it across the battlefield, and see the destruction that it leaves. It's just fun, visceral, very video-gamey. It's fun to click the buttons; that was the general idea.
Slashdot: Are there any plans for vehicles to come into the arenas.
Jeff: Not into the arenas. We do have bigger battleground plans on the horizon. We have nothing specific to talk about, but siege definitely comes into play in those new battleground plans. The arena, we feel, is a more pure environment. The more we do gimmicks in the arena, the more the arena players complain. Our long-term goal for PvP is to actually shift the focus off of the arena, and get it back onto the Horde/Alliance conflict in the battlegrounds. We think Wintergrasp is really cool, and public PvP is cool, but when we don't have control over the balance — which we really don't, in a thing like Wintergrasp — we can't guarantee a fun play experience for people. But we feel that in the battlegrounds, it really strikes the right number of people, accessibility, less focus on individuals and more on teams, and definitely more focus on Horde vs. Alliance, and big, epic feel, which is really what Warcraft is all about.
Slashdot: Are there any plans to make WoW friendlier to Linux?
Jeff: Friendlier to Linux.. Currently we don't have any plans to release on Linux. WoW is actually extremely Linux-friendly, internally. There are many Linux WoW servers and WoW clients. But, publicly, we haven't released WoW on Linux, and don't currently have any plans to announce that.
Slashdot: Is there any sort of vehicle that might allow the people who have gone through the trials and tribulations of getting it stable on Linux to share their experience?
Jeff: Possibly. It's definitely not out of the realm of probability. But, at this time, we don't have any plans to announce it on any other clients than we currently have.
Slashdot: Are there any plans implement some kind of a spectator mode?
Jeff: Yes. We would love to implement spectator mode. We've had some really great ideas about it. Not only to do it for the arena, but we've had some really good suggestions about doing spectator modes for the 10 and 25-person raiding as well. There's been a desire for people to watch the top end guilds. It's definitely on our list. I can't say that it's coming out any time soon; it's quite a bit of development. Priority-wise, there's not a lot of new gameplay there. But, it is something that we'd like to do. We'd also like to get to replays, too. In a lot of ways, I feel like, for the arena, replay would serve people better than actual spectator mode. In spectator mode, you have to know to be watching the match when it happens, whereas a replay mode would allow, "Oh my god, this turned into the match of the century, you've got to see it." Those are definitely on our list. We think they're super-cool ideas, and it's just a matter of finding the right time in our production schedule to get to it.
Leonard Boyarsky — Lead World Designer, Diablo 3
Leonard was joined by another Blizzard representative.
Slashdot: How do you define the limits of the world and the individual levels?
Leonard: Well, the limits for designing the world and the limits for designing the levels are completely different things. For the world, we've done a lot of design even in areas that you won't be seeing in this game. We really wanted it to feel like a living world. One of the things they really started to scratch the surface on in Diablo 2 was expanding it and talking about some of that stuff. But you really didn't get all of the history. You got the feel for what these places were at the time you were there, but you didn't get a lot of depth. There's never too much you can do. There's too much we can try to shove on the player, but there's never too much for us to do. If we have that intense, deep knowledge, we can just drop tidbits here and there; intriguing things that will hopefully get people to research it further. As far as the levels, it really comes down to play time and what kind of feel we want for the dungeon. The perfect example for that would be the demo. There will probably be no levels as short as the one in the demo, except maybe the very first dungeon you go into. But, we crafted that level specifically for Blizzcon, because we knew people only had 15 minutes. So, that's a perfect example of the way it works. You look at it and you ask, "Ok, what kind of chunk of gameplay do we think this is going to be?" And then you make it how big you think it should be for that gameplay, play through it, fix it because you're generally wrong, and then just keep iterating until you get it. It's an iterative and complete process. It's not like you can look at one level separate from all the other levels. You have to look where it fits in the game.
Slashdot: Is it going to be the same system where there are Acts, and then the Acts are subdivided into different sections?
Leonard: Yes. We're probably going to do a little bit of tweaking. It's not going to be exactly the same as it was in Diablo 2, but we are sticking with the Act structure. We were trying to move away from it at first, but it just kept coming up, so it was obvious that the game needed to be structured that way.
Slashdot: Have you given any thought to having a less linear type of gameplay, where you have a world - similar to the things they're doing to Starcraft 2, where it lets players make more of a choice — or are you going to stick with the linear style for now?
Blizzard: The advantage we have with Diablo is that we can actually tell a story. You have a huge impact on the world with what you're doing.
Leonard: In the previous Diablos, you would get the quests in a linearly doled-out manner. Our main story arc is going to be linearly doled-out, but there are a lot of side quests. There are a lot of random quests that you may or may not get per game. Those are very non-linear in that you can do them earlier or later, depending on when they come up. So there's that form of non-linearity, and there's probably going to be ... other stuff we'll talk about at a later date that'll enhance that as well.
Blizzard: It's like a mix of the two. You have the backbone story structure and then you can decide whether to take some of the quests, and also the game decides whether you can see some of these things, because they're random each time you play through.
Slashdot: By that, are you referring to the scripted events that they mentioned yesterday?
Leonard: Yeah. A lot of those are random. Some of them have to do with the main story arc. Did you play the demo? When you run in and see those guys talking about the crown, that's supposed to be giving you a hint about what you're doing. You're basically summoning his spirit into the physical world so you can fight him. So, that's a way for us to give you guys a little more information. That one would always happen, because you always fight the Skeleton King. Other ones, the escort quest, for example, that's a completely random one. There's another one in the dungeon about bringing this mysterious box and putting it on an altar. There will be random quests in the world which work that way, probably some in the dungeons. So, even with letting you do quests in a different order, there's going to be a ton of varying content.
Slashdot: How does the new checkpoint system work?
Leonard: When you the end of a dungeon level, before you go to the next one, you hit a checkpoint. That's so, number one, you don't get teleported back to town if you die and say "Okay I have to run allllll the way back to the dungeon." The reason that we didn't put it at the beginning of the next level is because half the time you're saying "Oh my god, I'm going to die," and you're running back to the entrance to get away. So, you have this mob of monsters following you to the entrance, and you'd just spawn and die, spawn and die. It's a very simple system; it's just a way of keeping you from having to run from town to wherever you were every time you die.
Blizzard: It's nice for the users because you don't have to work about saving and crawling; it just works. You don't ever worry about saving your character.
Slashdot: Are there any plans to release some sort of map editor?
Leonard: No. The way we put together our maps is very art intensive and artist intensive. We talked about it a lot at the very beginning. First of all, you have the random dungeons, which are very technical. Then you have our out-of-doors, which gets put together in a very specific way. So, there's really not the raw materials for people to make their own stuff. It would take a lot of work for us to build our editor so that it was usable by those on the outside. It just didn't seem to have enough bang for the buck.
Blizzard: One of our key goals for Diablo 3, going back to the world layout and design, was to bring the world of Sanctuary into more focus and have more specifics. This is why Leonard and Chris Metzen are looking at having more back story for the classes you can pick. They're not just faceless archetypes, they have this whole back story. The regions you visit are more defined, and the whole world is becoming more and more real. We're just putting a lot more subtle and outwardly noticeable things in the world design to tell a story. You can come to a city that has this great past, and you can see it in the actual level design.
Slashdot: Along those lines, will we be seeing a similar amount of cinematics as were in Diablo 2?
Leonard: I don't know if there will be more. In Diablo 2, it was almost like a separate story from what was going on in the game. The story we're telling through our cinematics is directly related to what you're going through in the game. So, it is very much going to have an emotional impact on what you're seeing and doing. And we're doing scripted events in-game — you've seen some of the small ones, and there could be spots where we do bigger ones. But, once again, we're really keeping in mind the fact that it is an action game. We're balancing the action and the RPG. We don't want people who want a hardcore action game to feel like they're being bogged down with story, but we want it there for people who want to dig deeper.
Blizzard: It's mostly opt-in. You can decide to stay and listen to that little scripted event, or you can just go on and start cracking more skulls.
Slashdot: As far as the single-player campaign goes, will there be changes in balance as the difficulty scales up, so there are fewer instances of players running into a proverbial brick wall against certain monsters with extreme immunities and resists?
Leonard: You mean between the Normal, Nightmare, and Hell difficulties? Yeah. You know.. all our sympathy for the player starts being removed brick by brick as you get into those levels. (laughs) In the main game, we say, "We can't do that because players need to be able to get by this," and we don't want them to have to go back and build up their character even further just to handle this one guy. When you get into Nightmare and Hell, we figure that's what you're asking for.
Blizzard: Not that we just make it harder for harder's sake.
Leonard: Yeah, we don't screw you on purpose.
Blizzard: We require you to dig deeper into your kit of abilities to really pull things off. We require you to be smarter, use more tactics, and really dig into what you're able to do to handle some of the challenges.
Slashdot: From what it looks like, there's more of a toolset, or more of an incentive to build up a larger toolset.
Blizzard: Yeah. Say there's a boss that could be in a side-quest or the main quest that has a resistance to frost, and frost is what you've been focusing on. Well, you can go back and learn some new skills — fire skills, or something else — and return to tackle that guy. Those kind of specifics will be more prominent in the higher difficulty levels.
Slashdot: In the demo and the trailer, we saw parts of the environment that seemed to be destructible. Is that something you evolved from busting barrels in Diablo 2?
Leonard: Yes. We started off saying, "You know, it'd be really cool to be able to destroy a wall." At first it didn't do any damage, but we thought, "If you're destroying a wall and it falls down, it should damage whatever's there." So then we put the damage into it. And then everyone said, "That's the most fun in the whole game," so we decided, "Hey, we need to do more of that." So now, there are chandeliers. I didn't see anyone using chandeliers in the demo. If you click on the thing on the wall that holds them up, they'll drop. That's one of the fun things we do in co-op, because it stuns players. We'll wait until our friends get underneath and click it to stun them. (laughs) We are exploring what we can do with destructible environments a lot, because it's a crowd-pleaser.
Blizzard: Our engineering group is amazing. The engine they've created — there's these technical aspects with the random dungeons as well as all the things they've advanced going from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3; the 3-D characters, all the effects, real-time physics, destructible environments. They're just pouring everything they can into making that engine sing and have all these great features.
Slashdot: In one of the panels, they mentioned their goal of making the character animations very visceral and having a big impact. What is your direction for the backgrounds — the levels themselves? What's your inspiration for building them, what are you trying to do with them, and what are you trying to make them look like?
Leonard: We want them to look fantastic. We want them to be very impressive. We look at a lot of real-world stuff, starting with a lot of real-world cultures, and then try to extrapolate from there. We try for the balance between believable — that it can actually be constructed — and fantastic. You don't want it mundane. You don't want it to look like you could go to Europe and see a destroyed 13th century castle and have it look the same. But, at the other end, we're being conscientious to not make it look like a full-on fantasy world. I think one of the reasons Diablo has worked so well in the past is because it feels very grounded in reality. That's our biggest balancing act, right there; trying to get both of those together.
Blizzard: It's kind of different; this is a world of dark fantasy. There are no elves or dwarves or that sort of thing. It has this off-kilter view that's foreboding, and we're trying to have that seep into and drip from all the environments we're creating.
Slashdot: Can you tell us about the multiplayer aspect of the game, in terms of Battle.net and the possibility of LAN play?
Blizzard: We're not supporting LAN play. We're basically focusing on making the best multiplayer experience we can, and that's all through Battle.net. There are tons of features we're going to be supporting both for cooperative play and competitive play. One of the things we can talk about with the new Battle.net is security. Fixing some of the problems we had with the earlier Diablos — item duping, cheating, and griefing — we're going to be addressing all of those things with the new Battle.net, as well as some pretty awesome competitive play ideas we're working with right now. So that's going to be the biggest advance, especially for previous Diablo players, to see all these we're planning. It going to be really awesome.
Chris Sigaty — Lead Producer, Starcraft 2
Slashdot: What is your approach when you look at balancing, not only player versus campaign, but player versus player?
Chris: Really, it all just happens through lots of play. We definitely are looking at numbers, and there are tons of numbers plugged into the game, and a lot of different dials that we can manipulate to try and hit balance. But, a lot of it comes through play, and often times we find things in beta or even after ship. We have patched Starcraft many, many times; we have patched Warcraft III many, many times. We definitely ship out the gates with a good balance, but it evolves. There are things that these really great players come along and figure out that we just aren't able to figure out. These are things that we don't necessarily anticipate, even in beta, so for us I would say the biggest part is lots of play. For example, Starcraft 2 right now is in alpha internally. Our whole company — we have over 3,000 people now, and many of them are playing when they have time between their jobs to give us feedback. The other big balance tool we have is a couple of pro-gamers, who basically spend all day just playing each other, and they try to develop strategies against each other. One of the unique challenges that we face in doing this, because the original was such a huge phenomenon from the e-sport perspective, is balancing those numbers really well, yet making things for the more average player, or new player, that feel really powerful. What happens is, in the hands of an expert, everything is powerful to some degree, and so then you end up balancing the numbers down to mediocrity. One thing we just did to try to combat this is that we just made the Zerg 30% faster on Creep. Many people were like, "You can't do that, that's gonna break it," but I wanted to try it and see what happens. We are trying to work in some things like this, so we would add an ability, balance it out and then explore some bigger things, like what does this mean in the hands of a pro. Those are some of the tools that we use to approach balance.
Slashdot: What types of caps are you looking at?
Chris: We are sticking with the hard population cap. We have had them in all of our games; it's 200 food again, and we will be sticking with that unless something changes significantly. Right now, we're definitely balancing the game in that direction. There isn't anything we have seen that has made us desire to do otherwise. Where we had a bigger reaction was with Warcraft III; we put in a much smaller cap — 90 — and a lot of people felt that was pretty heavy handed. It was a very different game, though, and a very different time. Graphics engines, too, were very different. So, part of it was system requirements, but now that it has opened up, the main reason is that going beyond 200 doesn't seem to mean anything for us. 200 seems like a good, hard cap, and even though hardware has come a long ways, we still see performance issues, especially in some of the 2v2 matches. If all four players have the 200 food cap, and they are running those units against each other, other games may solve that problem by choosing a performance solution. From a visual fidelity standpoint, we wanted to keep the same unit that you have at the beginning of the game that looks a particular way to look the same way when you have 200 units. So, it's partially that, and again, it's partially just management — once you get to 200, what are you really doing at that point? You want to force the guys to actually have action at some point, and 200 is really out there. We think far enough out there that it works.
Slashdot: How constrained are you going to keep players with respect to the UI? Some players have specific questions about the zoom level, and is there any possibility of giving a broader view of the battlefield?
Chris: It's interesting that you bring up UI. UI has been a point of contention since the beginning, for Starcraft 2. There were the biggest arguments about things you would never believe; unlimited selection is a great example of that. People thought unlimited selection would break it, arguing that you have to control groups of twelve units at a time, and that is the strategy and the way you have to play. Each one of those has been a big conversation. As far as zoom level specifically, we made a decision to keep the action pretty close on purpose. We are actually allowing players to see a little more with wider monitors, which is a big decision, but we kept it constrained, really, because that's how we feel is the best way to play the game. We are holding the players to some standards. The user interface that we have isn't going to be some sort of scripted user interface that you can update at will, like World of Warcraft does. It's going to be set, and this is how we envision the game being played. That said, you can go ahead and create all sorts of different visions for what gameplay should be by using the map editor and changing things up.
Slashdot: What are your goals for system requirements? Is there enough attention being paid to both the low and the high end?
Chris: We have definitely done a lot of cutting-edge things on our end, but we are about to (post-Blizzcon) run back through and make sure we are hitting the low end. We have generally done a good job at Blizzard about trying to make sure we support that lower end. I would even say that we have spent a little too much time making sure we have all the bells and whistles and crazy things, like our new cinematics, so now we are going back to re-balance. I'm not sure we are discussing any specifics yet, but we are going to be investigating those questions as soon as we get back from Blizzcon.
Slashdot: What capabilities do you foresee for the map creator, and is there any chance that the map creator could be released early, in a manner similar to Spore?
Chris: There is a possibility; we have actually been talking about releasing our editor in the beta. There are some concerns that if we put it out there for multi-player, we feel like a lot of players will just respond by saying, "Here is how you should balance it," and send back out re-balanced maps. We really don't want to go down that slippery slope and have players just joining in to those types of maps. We want to balance the game we're trying to make. At the same time, we do want to enable people that are doing more extreme games — things like the DOTAs out there that are re-envisioning games. So we are talking about it, and we may or may not include the map editor in the beta, or potentially roll it out halfway through. As far as scope of the editor and how big, I can tell you it's much more powerful than what we had in Warcraft III. We are trying to ensure the things that were done in Warcraft III are still possible. On top of that, we have this actor system now that allows players to do a lot more as far as putting together a series of events to make up abilities. For example, "Make this missile fly using this particular piece of art, play this explosion, make this sound go off." This way, people can now encompass abilities that have their own customized versions of that ability. So, beyond that, all the stuff we are doing with in-game cinematics are possible using the editor. DOTA is awesome. We love phenomenons like that. We want to make sure things like that and beyond are possible.
Slashdot: With Ghost suspended, do you ever see Starcraft evolving beyond a strict RTS setting?
Chris: We don't have any specific plans like that, but I definitely feel that the universe itself is very well loved within the company and other places. I personally think that it would be a fantastic universe to do any of several different genres. An MMO, an FPS, or anything in between. It's always something that is in discussion — "Where is this going to take place?" Always high on the list somewhere is the Starcraft universe.
Slashdot: With the recent controversy surrounding DRM, what is your take on DRM with respect to both Starcraft 2 and Battle.net?
Chris: We don't have specific plans ironed out. We are definitely aware of things that have happened with Spore, and some of the other games that have come out with big uprisings. We want to make sure that we are protected, but at the same time we want to make sure that it feels like the "right way" and not the "wrong way." Our biggest advantage is Battle.net, so I think the solution is that Battle.net is the premiere place to play, and that's where you want to be playing. So, that alone is the best sort of solution. You want to be up there and in contact with your friends, see what's going on, so there is your copy protection, essentially. As far as specifics, we haven't really worked that out. There are definitely some things to discuss still. One of the main things we are talking about is that there has to be a way for people to play offline — on the plane or wherever — but those are discussions that we still have to have.
Slashdot: How would you describe your AI in Starcraft 2, and how does it stack up against earlier AIs?
Chris: Our AI is a very script-driven, home-rolled system. We're going to expose all of that this time, and let people see that. Every time we change significant balance, we have to go back and look at what is going on. We have a pretty strong AI in there right now on hard, and it is just the beginnings of what we want to have in there at ship. There are different tactics and different paths that they can go down, so that you'll be surprised, but we're going to be rewriting all of that again before beta. It's not a learning AI, so we have to do a lot of hand tuning. We have certain algorithms in place that will attempt to analyze data and see what the player is doing. One thing that we are doing this time around that is totally new — our AI cheated in the past. Starcraft and Warcraft III saw the whole map, so the AI could see what the player was building or doing at any given time. The AI in Starcraft 2 now has to scout, and it's much harder to do, but there is a pretty effective AI in there for now.
Paul Sams — COO
Slashdot: What types of challenges do you face on a daily basis?
Paul: I would say that we have such a high level of confidence in our developers that I don't spend a ton of time worry about them, because I feel like they always are going to deliver great content, and they are always going to make sure that they are meeting the quality proposition. We have such an experienced team in that area that we kind of feel that they "got it." What's really new for us — and I guess it's not so new, because we have been doing it for four years now — is the customer service piece of the puzzle. It's really challenging. When you are dealing with 10.9 million subscribers globally and you are trying to provide customer service to them in a way that is consistent with their expectations, it's challenging. You never know what is going to be happening the next day or what challenges there may be with patches, griefing, bugs, or something. You never really know, so the customer service piece is probably the most challenging. Certainly in the earlier days, managing the network was very difficult. We have worked out many of the different challenges that we encountered. We periodically will have a challenge here and there, but for the most part the really nightmarish, difficult times are behind us, thankfully.
Slashdot: What types of measures do you use to ensure quality control?
Paul: One of the things that we have been doing for a while is surveys immediately after you get a ticket closed. It's a short survey that helps us to track the quality of our reps' performance. We also track how quickly they are able to resolve the issues and how long the customer had to wait. We are continually trying to evolve and improve that. I think that our customer service is pretty good. I would say that it is amongst the better customer service solutions in our industry, but it's not someplace where I am comfortable or "happy." We are actually putting forth a ton of focus right now — it's actually one of the big initiatives in our company and our leadership, to try to take our customer service experience from what I think is one of the best in our industry to being amongst the best of class regardless of industry. This is something that people are going to see over the next year. We are putting a huge amount of investment (time, energy, and money) towards really evolving and improving our customer service. It's something that our customers are telling us that they think needs to be better, and we are hearing them. I would envision some significant improvements in the coming months.
Slashdot: Given your position of market dominance, have you ever considered using this position to effect wide, sweeping change? Specifically, and most important to our readers, is with respect to Linux. I know you aren't about to jump in with both feet and support Linux outright, but I know there are people within Blizzard that have clients and tools running on Linux. Is there any sort of vehicle that could be put in place to allow that experience to be communicated to the outside world?
Paul: I know that there are a lot of people at our organization that are big fans of Linux, and I would say that it is something that we have looked at and have an openness to. But, we have built this system, and it is a system that we have gotten to be stable right now, so I wouldn't anticipate that we would do anything to make meaningful changes for right now. For future products it is certainly possible, but for us, there is certainly a comfort level in the way that we are doing it. All of our staff is very comfortable with the way that we are operating and the systems that we are using. So, when you go and shift your focus to something else, you don't necessarily know how to do it as well. I think that whenever you do something like that you have to do so with a lot of caution, so that it doesn't negatively impact your consumers. That being said, I would say that it is possible, but it's not something we are working on with any amount of focus right now.
Slashdot: Given that Blizzard has such a wonderfully rich backlog of games, has there any been any thought to open sourcing some of the older products?
Paul: I don't think we have ever talked about open sourcing our games. We own a few older games, like Lost Vikings, Rock and Roll Racing, and Black Thorn. Those were originally Interplay published products, and they owned those franchises. A number of years ago, we went to them, because those games hold a special place in our heart. So, we wanted to get those back, if for no other reason just because we didn't want anyone to do something different with those franchises and cause them to not have such a fond place in people's hearts. So we acquired those a few years back, which was good timing, since Interplay had a desire to have some revenue coming in, and we released GBA titles of each of those, and that was a fun thing for us to be able to make those available to a newer audience. My kids were both into Gameboy stuff, so they really dug that. That is something we have done with older titles, but open source isn't something that we have ever really talked about, and I don't know what the thought process would be. Certainly, if it is something of interest by your readers, they should let us know that officially so we could talk about it.
Slashdot: What are some of the details that you can give us about the evolution of Battle.net and some of the thought processes behind the decisions being made?
Paul: The things that we have shared thus far as it relates to the new version of Battle.net is, number one, it will ship together with Starcraft 2. There is going to be a real focus on e-sports, and there will also be some strong social networking elements to it as well. As far as it relates to what the business model is — we really haven't gotten there yet. I know that there is a lot of speculation, but I think that part of the speculation is simply because Blizzard isn't answering the question. The simple fact that Blizzard is not answering the question of whether Battle.net is for-pay or not suggests to people that it could have a pay component, and people should not assume that. The reason that we aren't talking about it is because we want to focus on the game, and we want to focus on the game network, and if you look at Blizzard's history, that is how we always do it. We almost never talk about how we are going to distribute it, what the price is going to be — we never talk about that stuff until very, very late in the game. There are multiple reasons for this. One, when you start talking about stuff like those things earlier, you start making decisions and potentially compromise on what the gameplay experience is. We never want to do that. The other thing is that even though we are a very game-first focused type of company, we are still mindful that we have competitors. Those competitors want to know what Blizzard is going to do, and how they are going to charge, and to be candid, I'm not interested in letting anyone else know how we are going to do it until it is too late for them to react. I think a lot of other companies, the way they run their business is they sit down at a table much like we are sitting at right now, they've got marketing and finance people sitting around, and they may ... maybe ... have a developer sitting at the table. They get out reports, and they look at what type of products are selling well, and then they notify the game development team, "Oh, by the way, you are going to be making a game about sailing." Well, no one is necessarily enthusiastic or excited about that. We do it differently. We actually go to the game teams as they are coming off of a game and ask them what is it they would like to play next, what they would like to work on next, and let them decide. Then we tell them to make the game and we decide what type of business model to wrap around it when it's time, but let's not have the business model dictate how good the game is. I think this is something that a lot publishers and developers make the mistake of doing, because they spend so much time thinking about how to get your money and they don't spend the time thinking about the game. We try to build a process such that we focus on the game, and our feeling is that if we make a great game that you and I want to play, that we'll vote with our pocketbooks.
Slashdot: Has Blizzard given any thought to consoles, both for existing and future games?
Paul: This is going to sound strangely similar to my last answer, and here is why. When we are making these games, we make the game for the platform that makes the most sense for the gameplay we're looking at. It's not that we don't like consoles. It's not that we aren't going to be on consoles, because we started on consoles. The games that we developed back with the Lost Vikings, Blackthorne, and Rock and Roll Racing — those, to us, felt better and more appropriate for consoles. Some would argue that it's because PC wasn't as big back then, but that was where those games naturally fit. Games that we have been making since that time have felt better and made more sense to be on PC. But, if our development teams came to us and said, "Listen, we want to make and play the following game next," and if that made sense to be on a console, then we wouldn't hesitate to do that. We're not afraid of consoles and we're not against consoles, it's just an issue of making the right decisions for the game and for the customers.
Slashdot: There has obviously been a lot of DRM fallout recently. What, specifically, is your mindset with respect to DRM?
Paul: Obviously, we want to protect our games. We put a lot of time and energy into building these things, and we feel like we prioritize the right things and make the right sacrifices to create a great game for the gamers. As a result of that, when we have done all of those things, and we think we have done them right, then we do have a desire to see the fruits of those labors. Just like other companies, we are looking at how we can protect those products and how we can ensure that the people who are playing our games have paid for them. How, exactly, are we going to approach that? Certainly Battle.net is a piece of that, and there may be other components there together with that when we launch these future games. World of Warcraft kind of has it built in — you can't play it without an authentic copy, but the other products aren't as easy to protect, so we are trying to come up with creative and clever ways to be able to do that, but it's challenging.
Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan — World of Warcraft Game Director
Slashdot: Could you walk us through how you balance a particular class or ability — especially going into Wrath as you're adding all these new and extra skills, and trying to find a new balance?
Jeff: Definitely. It's really an ongoing, iterative process. Every piece of content we add in terms of PvE — a new raid boss, new abilities that creatures are doing — and every other class ability are going to come into play in whatever original class ability we were trying to tune in the first place. So, as we add more things, we constantly have to go back and look at the things that were previously fine, but now might suddenly be overpowered or underpowered. We also have a lot of philosophy that comes into play. It's very easy to do what we call — it's kind of a Blizzard 'cardinal rule of never-do-this' — balancing to mediocrity, which means that you always notch everything down because you're scared of certain things feeling overpowered and are literally living by the numbers. I think numbers are a great guideline, and you should always understand the math behind what you're doing, but at the core, you need to follow the gut and ask "Hey, does this feel really great?" The best place classes can get, in our mind, is where everybody thinks everybody's overpowered. That's kind of the Starcraft balance at work — I think it's best illustrated in Starcraft — "Oh my god, all three races are wildly overpowered!" Yet, somehow, the matches seem to come out even most of the time. Something that we also try to communicate to players — it's difficult for them to understand, and it's not really their responsibility to even worry about it — if we never touched the classes — let's say we all agreed that the classes were perfectly balanced, and never touched them, and let them go for three months, they will eventually become unbalanced because of different strategies that evolve. The players are really driving how the game goes, and it's our job to play referee at a certain point. But not referee in the sense of "No, no, no, you're breaking the rules," but just asking, "Hey, are you still having fun?" And we have to make sure that you're having fun, but not at the expense of someone else.
Slashdot: Along those lines, how are you trying to balance for the arena at level 80, with the addition of a new class and all the new skills coming into play?
Jeff: The arena is particularly challenging because of the three brackets; a class that might be absolutely godly in 2v2 doesn't even get invited to 5v5. What we've claimed, and what we've stood by, is that we don't balance the classes in PvP in a 1v1 scenario. We have zero expectation that every class will be able to beat every other class. The key, and the real core to our arena tuning is making sure that tuning the classes in the arena doesn't step on the toes of the classes in other parts of the game. It's very important when we look at a class that we say, "Here are the fun things that this class has to do leveling up," and some level-up abilities have very little use in the arena at all. "Here are some uses in a 5-person encounter, and here are uses in a 25-man." So, the arena is just one part of that. It's very important that the arena doesn't become the sole focus of class balance for the game.
Slashdot: Professions in The Burning Crusade — tailoring, for one — the curve wasn't very smooth for progressing into raids. Are you trying to change that this time so it segues into raids better?
Jeff: We totally agreed with that; we felt like a lot of the trade skills had a very odd curve. Either they were way too easy, and you just sort of had everything, and you were instantly done for the expansion, or it felt like you could never get there. There's a new system in place for Jewelcrafting that I think is really interesting, and is a direction we want to swing more towards, which is a Jewelcrafting daily quest that rewards a currency for Jewelcrafters only. Then, there is a trainer that literally has dozens and dozens of Jewelcrafting recipes. Some of them are what we like to call "selfish" recipes — they only benefit the Jewelcrafter — and for others you're being the "outgoing, good guild member" if you get them. So we're really putting the power in the player's choice as far as "Hey, I want to get my guild in good shape for raiding Naxxramas," or, "No one on the auction house has yet purchased this recipe and put these gems up," or, "I really want this powerful item for myself, personally." So, we feel it will let player choose the direction of their tradeskill development while still having access to all the content over time. By the end of the expansion cycle, they'll probably have it all, it just depends how soon you get it, and how you prioritize. It's us putting that control in the players' hand, rather than us trying to anticipate what's going to matter to you, because there are so many different play styles.
Slashdot: As you go into raids, are you still going to be able to get upgrades through your professions?
Jeff: Yeah. You're going to continue to get upgrades. There's also the concept of the Primal Nether in The Burning Crusade. It used to be Bind on Pickup — we switched it to being trade-able. The equivalent to that is already in Wrath of the Lich King, and it's already trade-able. It can be purchased for the equivalent of Badges of Justice. So we feel like we have things that gate the tiers of raiding, and when we add a new raid tier, we can add another one of those items, similar to the progression from Primal Nether to Nether Vortex, and continue to progress those throughout the raid tiers.
Slashdot: Wintergrasp is a bold new direction in terms of creating world PvP that's something in which a lot of people can and want to participate. What's it like to design something like that and commit so many resources to it before seeing the fans' reaction to it?
Jeff: Well, I think it's our job as the WoW development team to try to anticipate fan reaction; anticipate not only what will be cool about things, and hold that vision, preach it through to the team, and make sure we realize the vision, but also to second guess ourselves the entire way. We have to ask all the questions of "What happens if...?" We need to solve a lot of those problems ahead of time and test it as much as possible. We had a test last Monday on the beta realm where we had 350 people fighting at once, which was a tremendous feat for us, because it was, on the server-side, completely lag-free. Player's clients, with 350 people in the area, are not always going to have systems that can handle it. For some people on lower-end systems, the sheer video lag or lack of processing power is going to slow them down. But, on the server side, as far as the network went, things were great, and we were supporting it. Another key component of doing something like Wintergrasp is playing it ourselves. There's no way to watch over an encounter like that and know, "Is that guy having fun?" Is it fun to be the one guy getting hit by four siege engines at one time? So, we need to play it ourselves and form our own opinions of what is fun, what is balance, what is overpowered. Is it too short? Is the reset time too long? For those sorts of things, you're never going to have enough design intuition to have the answer short of playing your own game. That sort of applies to us throughout World of Warcraft. We're very fortunate that our development team.. we have the problem of saying, "Ok guys, let's try to keep the WoW to lunch time or after hours." We're still in the mode where everybody's playing the game.
Slashdot: Speaking of siege engines, are you happy with where they're at, and where do you want to take them from here?
Jeff: I think the vehicle system has turned out to be one of the best things we added to the game. Originally we added it to do the Wintergrasp vehicles and the Strand of the Ancients vehicles, and to use those against destructible buildings. We wanted the Plaguethrower, and the Demolisher, and all these other things we added. What we ended up doing was developing a very robust vehicle system, which our quest designers, who weren't even working on the PvP content were kind of looking over our shoulder saying, "Well.. let me see what I can do with that." And they've ended up writing some of the coolest quest mechanics you've ever seen using that same system. You're on the back of a guy's horse throwing flaming bombs at Worgen as you go; you're flying a frost wyrm; the Malygos encounter — not to spoil any surprises — it ends with a big finale where the entire raid is on what are the equivalent of vehicles. So, that's turned out to be one of the coolest things. Also, just watching in Wintergrasp.. the sounds of the Plaguethrower are just amazing. Our sound team really nailed it. It just feels super-visceral to have that barrel of plague-muck and wing it across the battlefield, and see the destruction that it leaves. It's just fun, visceral, very video-gamey. It's fun to click the buttons; that was the general idea.
Slashdot: Are there any plans for vehicles to come into the arenas.
Jeff: Not into the arenas. We do have bigger battleground plans on the horizon. We have nothing specific to talk about, but siege definitely comes into play in those new battleground plans. The arena, we feel, is a more pure environment. The more we do gimmicks in the arena, the more the arena players complain. Our long-term goal for PvP is to actually shift the focus off of the arena, and get it back onto the Horde/Alliance conflict in the battlegrounds. We think Wintergrasp is really cool, and public PvP is cool, but when we don't have control over the balance — which we really don't, in a thing like Wintergrasp — we can't guarantee a fun play experience for people. But we feel that in the battlegrounds, it really strikes the right number of people, accessibility, less focus on individuals and more on teams, and definitely more focus on Horde vs. Alliance, and big, epic feel, which is really what Warcraft is all about.
Slashdot: Are there any plans to make WoW friendlier to Linux?
Jeff: Friendlier to Linux.. Currently we don't have any plans to release on Linux. WoW is actually extremely Linux-friendly, internally. There are many Linux WoW servers and WoW clients. But, publicly, we haven't released WoW on Linux, and don't currently have any plans to announce that.
Slashdot: Is there any sort of vehicle that might allow the people who have gone through the trials and tribulations of getting it stable on Linux to share their experience?
Jeff: Possibly. It's definitely not out of the realm of probability. But, at this time, we don't have any plans to announce it on any other clients than we currently have.
Slashdot: Are there any plans implement some kind of a spectator mode?
Jeff: Yes. We would love to implement spectator mode. We've had some really great ideas about it. Not only to do it for the arena, but we've had some really good suggestions about doing spectator modes for the 10 and 25-person raiding as well. There's been a desire for people to watch the top end guilds. It's definitely on our list. I can't say that it's coming out any time soon; it's quite a bit of development. Priority-wise, there's not a lot of new gameplay there. But, it is something that we'd like to do. We'd also like to get to replays, too. In a lot of ways, I feel like, for the arena, replay would serve people better than actual spectator mode. In spectator mode, you have to know to be watching the match when it happens, whereas a replay mode would allow, "Oh my god, this turned into the match of the century, you've got to see it." Those are definitely on our list. We think they're super-cool ideas, and it's just a matter of finding the right time in our production schedule to get to it.
Leonard Boyarsky — Lead World Designer, Diablo 3
Leonard was joined by another Blizzard representative.
Slashdot: How do you define the limits of the world and the individual levels?
Leonard: Well, the limits for designing the world and the limits for designing the levels are completely different things. For the world, we've done a lot of design even in areas that you won't be seeing in this game. We really wanted it to feel like a living world. One of the things they really started to scratch the surface on in Diablo 2 was expanding it and talking about some of that stuff. But you really didn't get all of the history. You got the feel for what these places were at the time you were there, but you didn't get a lot of depth. There's never too much you can do. There's too much we can try to shove on the player, but there's never too much for us to do. If we have that intense, deep knowledge, we can just drop tidbits here and there; intriguing things that will hopefully get people to research it further. As far as the levels, it really comes down to play time and what kind of feel we want for the dungeon. The perfect example for that would be the demo. There will probably be no levels as short as the one in the demo, except maybe the very first dungeon you go into. But, we crafted that level specifically for Blizzcon, because we knew people only had 15 minutes. So, that's a perfect example of the way it works. You look at it and you ask, "Ok, what kind of chunk of gameplay do we think this is going to be?" And then you make it how big you think it should be for that gameplay, play through it, fix it because you're generally wrong, and then just keep iterating until you get it. It's an iterative and complete process. It's not like you can look at one level separate from all the other levels. You have to look where it fits in the game.
Slashdot: Is it going to be the same system where there are Acts, and then the Acts are subdivided into different sections?
Leonard: Yes. We're probably going to do a little bit of tweaking. It's not going to be exactly the same as it was in Diablo 2, but we are sticking with the Act structure. We were trying to move away from it at first, but it just kept coming up, so it was obvious that the game needed to be structured that way.
Slashdot: Have you given any thought to having a less linear type of gameplay, where you have a world - similar to the things they're doing to Starcraft 2, where it lets players make more of a choice — or are you going to stick with the linear style for now?
Blizzard: The advantage we have with Diablo is that we can actually tell a story. You have a huge impact on the world with what you're doing.
Leonard: In the previous Diablos, you would get the quests in a linearly doled-out manner. Our main story arc is going to be linearly doled-out, but there are a lot of side quests. There are a lot of random quests that you may or may not get per game. Those are very non-linear in that you can do them earlier or later, depending on when they come up. So there's that form of non-linearity, and there's probably going to be ... other stuff we'll talk about at a later date that'll enhance that as well.
Blizzard: It's like a mix of the two. You have the backbone story structure and then you can decide whether to take some of the quests, and also the game decides whether you can see some of these things, because they're random each time you play through.
Slashdot: By that, are you referring to the scripted events that they mentioned yesterday?
Leonard: Yeah. A lot of those are random. Some of them have to do with the main story arc. Did you play the demo? When you run in and see those guys talking about the crown, that's supposed to be giving you a hint about what you're doing. You're basically summoning his spirit into the physical world so you can fight him. So, that's a way for us to give you guys a little more information. That one would always happen, because you always fight the Skeleton King. Other ones, the escort quest, for example, that's a completely random one. There's another one in the dungeon about bringing this mysterious box and putting it on an altar. There will be random quests in the world which work that way, probably some in the dungeons. So, even with letting you do quests in a different order, there's going to be a ton of varying content.
Slashdot: How does the new checkpoint system work?
Leonard: When you the end of a dungeon level, before you go to the next one, you hit a checkpoint. That's so, number one, you don't get teleported back to town if you die and say "Okay I have to run allllll the way back to the dungeon." The reason that we didn't put it at the beginning of the next level is because half the time you're saying "Oh my god, I'm going to die," and you're running back to the entrance to get away. So, you have this mob of monsters following you to the entrance, and you'd just spawn and die, spawn and die. It's a very simple system; it's just a way of keeping you from having to run from town to wherever you were every time you die.
Blizzard: It's nice for the users because you don't have to work about saving and crawling; it just works. You don't ever worry about saving your character.
Slashdot: Are there any plans to release some sort of map editor?
Leonard: No. The way we put together our maps is very art intensive and artist intensive. We talked about it a lot at the very beginning. First of all, you have the random dungeons, which are very technical. Then you have our out-of-doors, which gets put together in a very specific way. So, there's really not the raw materials for people to make their own stuff. It would take a lot of work for us to build our editor so that it was usable by those on the outside. It just didn't seem to have enough bang for the buck.
Blizzard: One of our key goals for Diablo 3, going back to the world layout and design, was to bring the world of Sanctuary into more focus and have more specifics. This is why Leonard and Chris Metzen are looking at having more back story for the classes you can pick. They're not just faceless archetypes, they have this whole back story. The regions you visit are more defined, and the whole world is becoming more and more real. We're just putting a lot more subtle and outwardly noticeable things in the world design to tell a story. You can come to a city that has this great past, and you can see it in the actual level design.
Slashdot: Along those lines, will we be seeing a similar amount of cinematics as were in Diablo 2?
Leonard: I don't know if there will be more. In Diablo 2, it was almost like a separate story from what was going on in the game. The story we're telling through our cinematics is directly related to what you're going through in the game. So, it is very much going to have an emotional impact on what you're seeing and doing. And we're doing scripted events in-game — you've seen some of the small ones, and there could be spots where we do bigger ones. But, once again, we're really keeping in mind the fact that it is an action game. We're balancing the action and the RPG. We don't want people who want a hardcore action game to feel like they're being bogged down with story, but we want it there for people who want to dig deeper.
Blizzard: It's mostly opt-in. You can decide to stay and listen to that little scripted event, or you can just go on and start cracking more skulls.
Slashdot: As far as the single-player campaign goes, will there be changes in balance as the difficulty scales up, so there are fewer instances of players running into a proverbial brick wall against certain monsters with extreme immunities and resists?
Leonard: You mean between the Normal, Nightmare, and Hell difficulties? Yeah. You know.. all our sympathy for the player starts being removed brick by brick as you get into those levels. (laughs) In the main game, we say, "We can't do that because players need to be able to get by this," and we don't want them to have to go back and build up their character even further just to handle this one guy. When you get into Nightmare and Hell, we figure that's what you're asking for.
Blizzard: Not that we just make it harder for harder's sake.
Leonard: Yeah, we don't screw you on purpose.
Blizzard: We require you to dig deeper into your kit of abilities to really pull things off. We require you to be smarter, use more tactics, and really dig into what you're able to do to handle some of the challenges.
Slashdot: From what it looks like, there's more of a toolset, or more of an incentive to build up a larger toolset.
Blizzard: Yeah. Say there's a boss that could be in a side-quest or the main quest that has a resistance to frost, and frost is what you've been focusing on. Well, you can go back and learn some new skills — fire skills, or something else — and return to tackle that guy. Those kind of specifics will be more prominent in the higher difficulty levels.
Slashdot: In the demo and the trailer, we saw parts of the environment that seemed to be destructible. Is that something you evolved from busting barrels in Diablo 2?
Leonard: Yes. We started off saying, "You know, it'd be really cool to be able to destroy a wall." At first it didn't do any damage, but we thought, "If you're destroying a wall and it falls down, it should damage whatever's there." So then we put the damage into it. And then everyone said, "That's the most fun in the whole game," so we decided, "Hey, we need to do more of that." So now, there are chandeliers. I didn't see anyone using chandeliers in the demo. If you click on the thing on the wall that holds them up, they'll drop. That's one of the fun things we do in co-op, because it stuns players. We'll wait until our friends get underneath and click it to stun them. (laughs) We are exploring what we can do with destructible environments a lot, because it's a crowd-pleaser.
Blizzard: Our engineering group is amazing. The engine they've created — there's these technical aspects with the random dungeons as well as all the things they've advanced going from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3; the 3-D characters, all the effects, real-time physics, destructible environments. They're just pouring everything they can into making that engine sing and have all these great features.
Slashdot: In one of the panels, they mentioned their goal of making the character animations very visceral and having a big impact. What is your direction for the backgrounds — the levels themselves? What's your inspiration for building them, what are you trying to do with them, and what are you trying to make them look like?
Leonard: We want them to look fantastic. We want them to be very impressive. We look at a lot of real-world stuff, starting with a lot of real-world cultures, and then try to extrapolate from there. We try for the balance between believable — that it can actually be constructed — and fantastic. You don't want it mundane. You don't want it to look like you could go to Europe and see a destroyed 13th century castle and have it look the same. But, at the other end, we're being conscientious to not make it look like a full-on fantasy world. I think one of the reasons Diablo has worked so well in the past is because it feels very grounded in reality. That's our biggest balancing act, right there; trying to get both of those together.
Blizzard: It's kind of different; this is a world of dark fantasy. There are no elves or dwarves or that sort of thing. It has this off-kilter view that's foreboding, and we're trying to have that seep into and drip from all the environments we're creating.
Slashdot: Can you tell us about the multiplayer aspect of the game, in terms of Battle.net and the possibility of LAN play?
Blizzard: We're not supporting LAN play. We're basically focusing on making the best multiplayer experience we can, and that's all through Battle.net. There are tons of features we're going to be supporting both for cooperative play and competitive play. One of the things we can talk about with the new Battle.net is security. Fixing some of the problems we had with the earlier Diablos — item duping, cheating, and griefing — we're going to be addressing all of those things with the new Battle.net, as well as some pretty awesome competitive play ideas we're working with right now. So that's going to be the biggest advance, especially for previous Diablo players, to see all these we're planning. It going to be really awesome.
Chris Sigaty — Lead Producer, Starcraft 2
Slashdot: What is your approach when you look at balancing, not only player versus campaign, but player versus player?
Chris: Really, it all just happens through lots of play. We definitely are looking at numbers, and there are tons of numbers plugged into the game, and a lot of different dials that we can manipulate to try and hit balance. But, a lot of it comes through play, and often times we find things in beta or even after ship. We have patched Starcraft many, many times; we have patched Warcraft III many, many times. We definitely ship out the gates with a good balance, but it evolves. There are things that these really great players come along and figure out that we just aren't able to figure out. These are things that we don't necessarily anticipate, even in beta, so for us I would say the biggest part is lots of play. For example, Starcraft 2 right now is in alpha internally. Our whole company — we have over 3,000 people now, and many of them are playing when they have time between their jobs to give us feedback. The other big balance tool we have is a couple of pro-gamers, who basically spend all day just playing each other, and they try to develop strategies against each other. One of the unique challenges that we face in doing this, because the original was such a huge phenomenon from the e-sport perspective, is balancing those numbers really well, yet making things for the more average player, or new player, that feel really powerful. What happens is, in the hands of an expert, everything is powerful to some degree, and so then you end up balancing the numbers down to mediocrity. One thing we just did to try to combat this is that we just made the Zerg 30% faster on Creep. Many people were like, "You can't do that, that's gonna break it," but I wanted to try it and see what happens. We are trying to work in some things like this, so we would add an ability, balance it out and then explore some bigger things, like what does this mean in the hands of a pro. Those are some of the tools that we use to approach balance.
Slashdot: What types of caps are you looking at?
Chris: We are sticking with the hard population cap. We have had them in all of our games; it's 200 food again, and we will be sticking with that unless something changes significantly. Right now, we're definitely balancing the game in that direction. There isn't anything we have seen that has made us desire to do otherwise. Where we had a bigger reaction was with Warcraft III; we put in a much smaller cap — 90 — and a lot of people felt that was pretty heavy handed. It was a very different game, though, and a very different time. Graphics engines, too, were very different. So, part of it was system requirements, but now that it has opened up, the main reason is that going beyond 200 doesn't seem to mean anything for us. 200 seems like a good, hard cap, and even though hardware has come a long ways, we still see performance issues, especially in some of the 2v2 matches. If all four players have the 200 food cap, and they are running those units against each other, other games may solve that problem by choosing a performance solution. From a visual fidelity standpoint, we wanted to keep the same unit that you have at the beginning of the game that looks a particular way to look the same way when you have 200 units. So, it's partially that, and again, it's partially just management — once you get to 200, what are you really doing at that point? You want to force the guys to actually have action at some point, and 200 is really out there. We think far enough out there that it works.
Slashdot: How constrained are you going to keep players with respect to the UI? Some players have specific questions about the zoom level, and is there any possibility of giving a broader view of the battlefield?
Chris: It's interesting that you bring up UI. UI has been a point of contention since the beginning, for Starcraft 2. There were the biggest arguments about things you would never believe; unlimited selection is a great example of that. People thought unlimited selection would break it, arguing that you have to control groups of twelve units at a time, and that is the strategy and the way you have to play. Each one of those has been a big conversation. As far as zoom level specifically, we made a decision to keep the action pretty close on purpose. We are actually allowing players to see a little more with wider monitors, which is a big decision, but we kept it constrained, really, because that's how we feel is the best way to play the game. We are holding the players to some standards. The user interface that we have isn't going to be some sort of scripted user interface that you can update at will, like World of Warcraft does. It's going to be set, and this is how we envision the game being played. That said, you can go ahead and create all sorts of different visions for what gameplay should be by using the map editor and changing things up.
Slashdot: What are your goals for system requirements? Is there enough attention being paid to both the low and the high end?
Chris: We have definitely done a lot of cutting-edge things on our end, but we are about to (post-Blizzcon) run back through and make sure we are hitting the low end. We have generally done a good job at Blizzard about trying to make sure we support that lower end. I would even say that we have spent a little too much time making sure we have all the bells and whistles and crazy things, like our new cinematics, so now we are going back to re-balance. I'm not sure we are discussing any specifics yet, but we are going to be investigating those questions as soon as we get back from Blizzcon.
Slashdot: What capabilities do you foresee for the map creator, and is there any chance that the map creator could be released early, in a manner similar to Spore?
Chris: There is a possibility; we have actually been talking about releasing our editor in the beta. There are some concerns that if we put it out there for multi-player, we feel like a lot of players will just respond by saying, "Here is how you should balance it," and send back out re-balanced maps. We really don't want to go down that slippery slope and have players just joining in to those types of maps. We want to balance the game we're trying to make. At the same time, we do want to enable people that are doing more extreme games — things like the DOTAs out there that are re-envisioning games. So we are talking about it, and we may or may not include the map editor in the beta, or potentially roll it out halfway through. As far as scope of the editor and how big, I can tell you it's much more powerful than what we had in Warcraft III. We are trying to ensure the things that were done in Warcraft III are still possible. On top of that, we have this actor system now that allows players to do a lot more as far as putting together a series of events to make up abilities. For example, "Make this missile fly using this particular piece of art, play this explosion, make this sound go off." This way, people can now encompass abilities that have their own customized versions of that ability. So, beyond that, all the stuff we are doing with in-game cinematics are possible using the editor. DOTA is awesome. We love phenomenons like that. We want to make sure things like that and beyond are possible.
Slashdot: With Ghost suspended, do you ever see Starcraft evolving beyond a strict RTS setting?
Chris: We don't have any specific plans like that, but I definitely feel that the universe itself is very well loved within the company and other places. I personally think that it would be a fantastic universe to do any of several different genres. An MMO, an FPS, or anything in between. It's always something that is in discussion — "Where is this going to take place?" Always high on the list somewhere is the Starcraft universe.
Slashdot: With the recent controversy surrounding DRM, what is your take on DRM with respect to both Starcraft 2 and Battle.net?
Chris: We don't have specific plans ironed out. We are definitely aware of things that have happened with Spore, and some of the other games that have come out with big uprisings. We want to make sure that we are protected, but at the same time we want to make sure that it feels like the "right way" and not the "wrong way." Our biggest advantage is Battle.net, so I think the solution is that Battle.net is the premiere place to play, and that's where you want to be playing. So, that alone is the best sort of solution. You want to be up there and in contact with your friends, see what's going on, so there is your copy protection, essentially. As far as specifics, we haven't really worked that out. There are definitely some things to discuss still. One of the main things we are talking about is that there has to be a way for people to play offline — on the plane or wherever — but those are discussions that we still have to have.
Slashdot: How would you describe your AI in Starcraft 2, and how does it stack up against earlier AIs?
Chris: Our AI is a very script-driven, home-rolled system. We're going to expose all of that this time, and let people see that. Every time we change significant balance, we have to go back and look at what is going on. We have a pretty strong AI in there right now on hard, and it is just the beginnings of what we want to have in there at ship. There are different tactics and different paths that they can go down, so that you'll be surprised, but we're going to be rewriting all of that again before beta. It's not a learning AI, so we have to do a lot of hand tuning. We have certain algorithms in place that will attempt to analyze data and see what the player is doing. One thing that we are doing this time around that is totally new — our AI cheated in the past. Starcraft and Warcraft III saw the whole map, so the AI could see what the player was building or doing at any given time. The AI in Starcraft 2 now has to scout, and it's much harder to do, but there is a pretty effective AI in there for now.
Paul Sams — COO
Slashdot: What types of challenges do you face on a daily basis?
Paul: I would say that we have such a high level of confidence in our developers that I don't spend a ton of time worry about them, because I feel like they always are going to deliver great content, and they are always going to make sure that they are meeting the quality proposition. We have such an experienced team in that area that we kind of feel that they "got it." What's really new for us — and I guess it's not so new, because we have been doing it for four years now — is the customer service piece of the puzzle. It's really challenging. When you are dealing with 10.9 million subscribers globally and you are trying to provide customer service to them in a way that is consistent with their expectations, it's challenging. You never know what is going to be happening the next day or what challenges there may be with patches, griefing, bugs, or something. You never really know, so the customer service piece is probably the most challenging. Certainly in the earlier days, managing the network was very difficult. We have worked out many of the different challenges that we encountered. We periodically will have a challenge here and there, but for the most part the really nightmarish, difficult times are behind us, thankfully.
Slashdot: What types of measures do you use to ensure quality control?
Paul: One of the things that we have been doing for a while is surveys immediately after you get a ticket closed. It's a short survey that helps us to track the quality of our reps' performance. We also track how quickly they are able to resolve the issues and how long the customer had to wait. We are continually trying to evolve and improve that. I think that our customer service is pretty good. I would say that it is amongst the better customer service solutions in our industry, but it's not someplace where I am comfortable or "happy." We are actually putting forth a ton of focus right now — it's actually one of the big initiatives in our company and our leadership, to try to take our customer service experience from what I think is one of the best in our industry to being amongst the best of class regardless of industry. This is something that people are going to see over the next year. We are putting a huge amount of investment (time, energy, and money) towards really evolving and improving our customer service. It's something that our customers are telling us that they think needs to be better, and we are hearing them. I would envision some significant improvements in the coming months.
Slashdot: Given your position of market dominance, have you ever considered using this position to effect wide, sweeping change? Specifically, and most important to our readers, is with respect to Linux. I know you aren't about to jump in with both feet and support Linux outright, but I know there are people within Blizzard that have clients and tools running on Linux. Is there any sort of vehicle that could be put in place to allow that experience to be communicated to the outside world?
Paul: I know that there are a lot of people at our organization that are big fans of Linux, and I would say that it is something that we have looked at and have an openness to. But, we have built this system, and it is a system that we have gotten to be stable right now, so I wouldn't anticipate that we would do anything to make meaningful changes for right now. For future products it is certainly possible, but for us, there is certainly a comfort level in the way that we are doing it. All of our staff is very comfortable with the way that we are operating and the systems that we are using. So, when you go and shift your focus to something else, you don't necessarily know how to do it as well. I think that whenever you do something like that you have to do so with a lot of caution, so that it doesn't negatively impact your consumers. That being said, I would say that it is possible, but it's not something we are working on with any amount of focus right now.
Slashdot: Given that Blizzard has such a wonderfully rich backlog of games, has there any been any thought to open sourcing some of the older products?
Paul: I don't think we have ever talked about open sourcing our games. We own a few older games, like Lost Vikings, Rock and Roll Racing, and Black Thorn. Those were originally Interplay published products, and they owned those franchises. A number of years ago, we went to them, because those games hold a special place in our heart. So, we wanted to get those back, if for no other reason just because we didn't want anyone to do something different with those franchises and cause them to not have such a fond place in people's hearts. So we acquired those a few years back, which was good timing, since Interplay had a desire to have some revenue coming in, and we released GBA titles of each of those, and that was a fun thing for us to be able to make those available to a newer audience. My kids were both into Gameboy stuff, so they really dug that. That is something we have done with older titles, but open source isn't something that we have ever really talked about, and I don't know what the thought process would be. Certainly, if it is something of interest by your readers, they should let us know that officially so we could talk about it.
Slashdot: What are some of the details that you can give us about the evolution of Battle.net and some of the thought processes behind the decisions being made?
Paul: The things that we have shared thus far as it relates to the new version of Battle.net is, number one, it will ship together with Starcraft 2. There is going to be a real focus on e-sports, and there will also be some strong social networking elements to it as well. As far as it relates to what the business model is — we really haven't gotten there yet. I know that there is a lot of speculation, but I think that part of the speculation is simply because Blizzard isn't answering the question. The simple fact that Blizzard is not answering the question of whether Battle.net is for-pay or not suggests to people that it could have a pay component, and people should not assume that. The reason that we aren't talking about it is because we want to focus on the game, and we want to focus on the game network, and if you look at Blizzard's history, that is how we always do it. We almost never talk about how we are going to distribute it, what the price is going to be — we never talk about that stuff until very, very late in the game. There are multiple reasons for this. One, when you start talking about stuff like those things earlier, you start making decisions and potentially compromise on what the gameplay experience is. We never want to do that. The other thing is that even though we are a very game-first focused type of company, we are still mindful that we have competitors. Those competitors want to know what Blizzard is going to do, and how they are going to charge, and to be candid, I'm not interested in letting anyone else know how we are going to do it until it is too late for them to react. I think a lot of other companies, the way they run their business is they sit down at a table much like we are sitting at right now, they've got marketing and finance people sitting around, and they may ... maybe ... have a developer sitting at the table. They get out reports, and they look at what type of products are selling well, and then they notify the game development team, "Oh, by the way, you are going to be making a game about sailing." Well, no one is necessarily enthusiastic or excited about that. We do it differently. We actually go to the game teams as they are coming off of a game and ask them what is it they would like to play next, what they would like to work on next, and let them decide. Then we tell them to make the game and we decide what type of business model to wrap around it when it's time, but let's not have the business model dictate how good the game is. I think this is something that a lot publishers and developers make the mistake of doing, because they spend so much time thinking about how to get your money and they don't spend the time thinking about the game. We try to build a process such that we focus on the game, and our feeling is that if we make a great game that you and I want to play, that we'll vote with our pocketbooks.
Slashdot: Has Blizzard given any thought to consoles, both for existing and future games?
Paul: This is going to sound strangely similar to my last answer, and here is why. When we are making these games, we make the game for the platform that makes the most sense for the gameplay we're looking at. It's not that we don't like consoles. It's not that we aren't going to be on consoles, because we started on consoles. The games that we developed back with the Lost Vikings, Blackthorne, and Rock and Roll Racing — those, to us, felt better and more appropriate for consoles. Some would argue that it's because PC wasn't as big back then, but that was where those games naturally fit. Games that we have been making since that time have felt better and made more sense to be on PC. But, if our development teams came to us and said, "Listen, we want to make and play the following game next," and if that made sense to be on a console, then we wouldn't hesitate to do that. We're not afraid of consoles and we're not against consoles, it's just an issue of making the right decisions for the game and for the customers.
Slashdot: There has obviously been a lot of DRM fallout recently. What, specifically, is your mindset with respect to DRM?
Paul: Obviously, we want to protect our games. We put a lot of time and energy into building these things, and we feel like we prioritize the right things and make the right sacrifices to create a great game for the gamers. As a result of that, when we have done all of those things, and we think we have done them right, then we do have a desire to see the fruits of those labors. Just like other companies, we are looking at how we can protect those products and how we can ensure that the people who are playing our games have paid for them. How, exactly, are we going to approach that? Certainly Battle.net is a piece of that, and there may be other components there together with that when we launch these future games. World of Warcraft kind of has it built in — you can't play it without an authentic copy, but the other products aren't as easy to protect, so we are trying to come up with creative and clever ways to be able to do that, but it's challenging.
we will entertain the idea of open sourcing our old stuff if you can overlook our horde of lawyers that will go after you should you want to run open battle.net or depart from our draconian eulas on all our games.
I ran into Everybody. Level 70 warlock on icecrown.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
What made you take out LAN play? To me, playing with a bunch of friends in the same room is by far the best multi-player experience. No battle-net can touch it.
I suspect it's their way of implementing DRM. It's still going to cost them a sale. Before, I was excited about D3. Now, it's gonna take a discussion with my buddies to see if we're going to spring for D3. My suspicion is that we're going to go with some hacked version that allows for LAN play.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Blizzard finally admits SC2 is never coming out!
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
I'd love to use an open source version of Battle Chess as a client to FICS. Someone get on this!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Jeff: Friendlier to Linux.. Currently we don't have any plans to release on Linux. WoW is actually extremely Linux-friendly, internally. There are many Linux WoW servers and WoW clients. But, publicly, we haven't released WoW on Linux, and don't currently have any plans to announce that.
Many linux WoW servers and WoW clients? Is he referencing the ability to use Wine to run WoW? Because that isn't considered WoW on Linux to my standards or probably most of yours. WoW on Linux would entail that you can install it off of the CD on Linux and have it function correctly.
As for the servers, does he mean the emulated servers such as the MaNGOS project, or the internal servers?
There is a lot of things that need clarification, but I doubt we'll get it or will you get an answer from their forums before a CM dismisses your thread and locks it.
PS: I'm also cynical about Blizzard at this point and just about anything they implement related to WoW.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
No LAN play in Diablo 3 = fail.
Lots of people used it. Not everyone has access to a low-latency connection to the Internet all the time, and frankly the Battle.net servers don't either.
Just wait for it to land on every standalone type of game that Blizzard makes -- Starcraft 2 and Diablo III.
I fear the worst :(
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Do I need to buy a widescreen monitor or can I squeeze my screen with software settings.
God spoke to me.
When you get into Nightmare and Hell, we figure that's what you're asking for. ...
We require you to dig deeper into your kit of abilities to really pull things off. We require you to be smarter, use more tactics, and really dig into what you're able to do to handle some of the challenges.
I dunno...there's less forgiving, but there's also just downright brutal. I've had to hack my D2 1.10 character saves and drop on unique or rare gear and stats and I'd still get torn to shreads in Hell. I'm sure I'm not the best Paladin ever, but there's lack of tactics and then there's just...well...to lift from Tigole, "four siege engines on you at once."
I'm sure it's balanced fine for multiplayer, but single player SHOULD be finishable on any class.
It's not like single player is affecting b.net in any way, there should be a little leniency. Honestly, I don't mind challenges, but it's not a 'challenge' if the mob has 'one hit death' and you're melee or '99% immune to range melee' and you're a bowazon...
Oh yeah, more nitpicking...increase the drop rate of uniques and rares in single player! We don't have the luxury of millions of other people trying to sell their useless rares!
Me, I'd be designing fjords all over the place. :-P
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The AI in Starcraft 2 now has to scout, and it's much harder to do, but there is a pretty effective AI in there for now
FINALLY!
Jeff: Friendlier to Linux.. Currently we don't have any plans to release on Linux. WoW is actually extremely Linux-friendly, internally. There are many Linux WoW servers and WoW clients. But, publicly, we haven't released WoW on Linux, and don't currently have any plans to announce that.
What does this even mean??
Slashdot interviews are supposed to have commenters asking the questions, relayed by slashdot editors. Here we have an editor asking questions vaguely inspired by our questions. What is with the format change?
And was it just me, or were these all softball questions compared to the level of questions we had all submitted??
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
It sounds like the questions were asked during a regular Q&A panel at Blizzcon, not a one-on-one sitdown interview like we normally see here where the questions are delivered verbatim. I doubt it signals some sort of paradigm shift or format change in interviews, it's just what the editors had to work with.
I, a self-proclaimed reverse engineer, will make an updated bnet daemon when D3 comes out. I will base it off of http://bnetd.sourceforge.net/ (the existing daemon), then I will release it anonymously on a server in another country that blizzard has no jurisdiction over. Do not fear a lack of lan play!
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
think numbers are a great guideline, and you should always understand the math behind what you're doing, but at the core, you need to follow the gut and ask "Hey, does this feel really great?" The best place classes can get, in our mind, is where everybody thinks everybody's overpowered.
Drivel. If WOW developers actually believed this then the crap changes they made in yesterday's patch wouldn't have happened. They changed the way Hunter's play so much that I canceled my account in complete and utter disgust.
What made you take out LAN play? To me, playing with a bunch of friends in the same room is by far the best multi-player experience. No battle-net can touch it.
I can't think of any reason to leave out pure LAN play other than DRM issues. Thwarting DRM through LAN play is trivial. Simply tell all of your friends to install Hamachi, and kapow.. instant VPN LAN.
I think LAN play without a central server is gone the way of the dodo. I felt the similar shock when games started leaving out modem to modem play. If all you wanted to do was play 1 vs 1, then a direct 56k modem connection produced less latency without going through the internet.
I remember reading a developer blog about C&C:Generals. He said that performance wise, there is no difference between LAN and internet play. Once you press the launch button in the chatroom, all internet traffic is sent between you and your opponents -- the chat/match server has nothing to do with it.
Hmmm, I wonder how many people were angry when Warcaft III didn't support null-modem play? (For you youngsters: That's when you connected the serial ports of two computers together with a little null-modem adapter.... Oh god, now I have to explain what serial ports were.. )
If I could play SC2 reliably on a MacBook with a GMA 950, with no slowdowns, even if it takes degrading the graphics significantly to remove superfluous animations, I'd bite. I hope Blizzard's Mac support can go that far. And yes, I realize I'm trying to do gaming on a Mac...
Please support the Linux community, by releasing your games in ways that allow us to use them without having to 'hack' around to get them to work, I.E. wine.
I don't care if you don't cough up the code. I don't mind paying to play. I mind having to use the virus known as Windows.
Thank you, that is all.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
"It's very important that the arena doesn't become the sole focus of class balance for the game."
But it is the most important and most scrutinized focus of class balance. If you don't make the Arena mandatory for the best gear (please please please), then Arena balancing won't be nearly as important as it has become.
And here's an idea: Have servers/battle-groups with no Arena!
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Slashdot: Wintergrasp is a bold new direction in terms of creating world PvP that's something in which a lot of people can and want to participate. What's it like to design something like that and commit so many resources to it before seeing the fans' reaction to it?
Jeff: I mean we've been ripping off the Warhammer IP for what, over a decade now? So we really felt that we'd just do the same by watching a few of the developer videos from Warhammer Online and do something similar to what they're doing. Why do something unique when we can just copy someone else?
I mean we are going to add Blizzard's trademark PvP spin on it by making it fun for like 20 minutes and not have any game-world consequence. Sure, it'll probably be an empty zone a month after everyone hits 80 and the rewards from doing it will be outdone by arena gear or even just gear from level 80 quests and instances. You'll get very little honor for it, just like world PvP elsewhere, because we need to discourage people from playing in there - we really can't handle 300+ people in one location unless they are on our dev team's LAN, 20 feet of Cat5 away from the server. What I'm saying here is that you need to do the same 4 battlegrounds after hitting 80, at least until the next expansion.
Our world PvP is going to be awesome!
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"Hey, are you still having fun?"
I am, but you know what would be even more fun? An official wiki that tells me how combat works. Yeah, I know there's some pretty complicated formulas for combat dealing with stats and attack power and dodge and chance to hit ... but come on, there have been some serious moments in the game where I cannot tell which piece of armor is better! Is there some reason that players have to reverse engineer the formulas for combat instead of you guys hosting official formulas so that avid fans can fool around with different armor sets and stats?
My work here is dung.
Hello, glad to have this opportunity.
I'm a big fan of blizzard games since many years ago.
Now I migrated all my systems to Apple Macs and was very happy to see that Blizzard has a nice support for Mac OS X, so I hope this support continues.
Basically I want to tell to Blizzard that we need LAN gaming support. Usually I buy 2 copies of each game (if they support LAN play) so I can play with someone else in my home. So, my vote for this.
And maybe the most important issue for me at this time, and a wide concern among customers is the use of DRM. I cancelled two pre-orders of games from EA due to the DRM and SecuROM root kit. Looks like that company didn't learned the leason very well after the thousands of negatives feedbacks on Amazon (including myself). So, that is a valid concern and I really don't want to have to deal with a DRM in my system or have limited installations of a game I legally purchase. Is Blizzard going to use DRM in their games?
Recave
Since Blizzard said they'd be looking at this post's comments ;)
I for one have wanted native Linux support for quite a while. I run WoW on a dual core laptop that, when I had windows on it, was MORE than fast enough to run WoW at reasonably high quality settings.
I prefer to run Linux though, and removed Windows from my laptop entirely. Both Wine and Cedega do an OK job at getting WoW running, but it is not without it's problems and certainly not as fast as I had things going under Windows. Plus it seems WoW only uses a single core when I play under Wine or Cedega, rather than both.
Right now, if I use OpenGL mode in cedega or wine, I get about 3-4fps in shattrath, and D3D mode I get about 12fps. Pretty poor for a reasonably fast laptop with a 256mb vid. card! And I have the quality settings ratcheted way low.
This is besides the fact that I have had all kinds of issues using Wine or Cedega, from crashes, to texture issues, to the screen going black - and even the most basic - not being able to tab out of the game or change to windowed mode! And this is besides the PITA is is to setup the emulation environment (even beyond installing wine or cedega, then you have to make all the appropriate settings adjustment for your vid. card, choose whether to use ALSA or OSS to emulate windows sound, etc).
The fact that WoW is faster emulating D3d than it is usnig OpenGL is a little ridiculous, but part of that may be the fact that it is ALSO emulating a windows OS - and any emulation layer is going to siphon off raw speed, memory, etc.
If you have already done the work for a Linux client, or most of the work for it, why not release it as a supported platform? There are several other companies (ID and VMWare being notable) supporting Linux, and it is becoming more and more popular.
Don't think because the OS is free that people won't pay for software on it. Right now, on top of paying for my WoW software, and WoW subscription, I am also paying for Cedega, just to get my WoW on linux - I think a native client could do a much better job, and would love to see it.
Plus I suspect some linux-running friends of mine might start playing again if WoW were offered natively on their OS of choice ;)
As someone who somehow never heard of Starcraft or Diablo till last year, I thought I'd give them a try.
But your "Blizzent" online store appears to be blacklisted by my credit card company, probably due to WOW abuse. No checking phone call or anything. And in this forsaken EU country we're taxed per card, so another isn't an option. I don't suppose you've any plans to make your non WOW titles available through a separate/reputable provider? cough steam cough.
Why was noone executed for the termination of Ghost?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
We are developers interested in porting the Diablo games to different platforms. Please contact us at developers@apginc.net. Thanks in advance!
I don't get this. In the interview, it is made clear that Blizzard has, HAS, [native] linux clients for their games. Why don't they release them? Even if they are buggy, there's absolutely nothing they might lose with such a move. They might however gain more users. If some poor soul in Blizzard has actually spent the time to create a client, why not allow him to release it, close sourced, static, whatever. Just release something.
I noticed the format change too, and frankly, I liked it. I think in a lot of previous interviews, the questions could have used some editing. But the best part about the new format in my mind, is that they asked followup questions a couple times -- something the old format didn't really allow for. I liked it. It was much more coherent.
I can't say that I'm surprised. It just goes to show how Blizzard is acting like a typical big company. They refuse to even acknowledge anything negative or unpleasant. If they don't talk about it then it doesn't exist, right?
FINALLY they're talking about spectator modes.
I've wanted this for ages. Though they way they describe it sounds creepy - letting some anonymous person come view your guild run? not for me.
I envisioned spectator mode being more like people who missed out on going to a raid (it filled up), or who were just interested could enter spectator mode - and they would basically wander around like ghosts in the instance - not able to actually interact, but still with their own viewpoint and able to move around.
Then, even have the possibility of, if a raid slot fees up, allowing a spectator to 'corporialize' and then actually be a part of the raid.
Speaking of ghosts - WHY are ghosts a) so slow, and b) not able to climb infinitely steep inclines? or even fly? That is one of my pet peeves with WoW - having not just to run back to your corpse, but run AROUND everything to get back to your corpse. We should be able to fly as ghosts so we can get back to our bodies faster. As much as you might think otherwise, the being forced to run from whatever arbitrary place the graveyard is back to your body (which can be QUITE a distance), and basically taking several minutes (up to 15 or so!) to get back to your body, and not being able to intact with your environment is *NOT* part of the 'fun' experience. It's incredibly tedious. And it gets worse if you accidentally fall down a ravine or there is some feature (like a cliff) in the way that means you have to detour for ages to get back to your body ... especially in places like Outland, where you would have never had to go around the obstacle in the first place because you would have flown!
PLEASE fix ghost form!
I want to OWN that game, not Rent it. If I can't play it offline 10 years from now (as I do for ST Armada, Civ 3, and AlphaCentauri) because the DRM servers we're taken offline in 3, then it doesn't sound like I'm buying anything. Copy protection is fair. Server based DRM is not.
Also Linux ports would be most appreciated. or at least shoot for wine compatibility.
Just my two bits.
I always found blacksmithing was a disappointing profession.
It costs an arm and a leg to level to 375 - and when you get there, the gear you can make is at most only worth something to someone who JUST hit 70. There is basically no gear you can craft that would be eclipsed by even just doing things like Karazhan .. let alone later raids. So basically its a money pit with no benefit. Sure, there are some pattern drops - but even those are usually only good enough to make gear slightly BELOW the instance where they drop from, so they've of little use.
Please actually make this profession worth while again. Add some gear people will actually want to BUY because it's better than instance gear. Tailors got the soulcloth set, which most DPS casters will wear if they can - smiths have no equivalent 'desirable' set.
Additionally - WTF is with ALL the smithing stuff being plate? Smiths are supposed to make Mail as well! Apart from the general quality of what smiths can make being pretty poor - the amount of mail they can make is almost non-existent! Even in pattern drops!
I don't know why Leatherworkers can make mail in the first place - since I don't know about you, but I've not seen too much leather mail in any history books. But either way, that now means leatherworkers are making ALL the leather AND mail armor, while smiths get only plate, and tailors only cloth.
Not to mention that of the plate there IS for smiths to craft - it's pretty much ALL tanking warrior plate. VERY little ret or holy pally plate. Similarly, with the little mail we CAN craft, it's all enhance shaman, nothing for hunters, resto or elemental shammies.
All in all, smithing needs a MASSIVE rethink, and I hope a better job is done in WotLK.
I would absolutely LOVE Linux support for WoW! I would pay $30/account/month for a Linux client, even if it isn't supported, and I even have 2 WoW accounts! I'm sure this would be the case for MANY people. I'm getting sick of having to deal with Windows, and the only reason I still use Windows at all is for WoW because it runs 5x faster in Windows than emulated using Cedega/WineHQ on Linux. You have my vote!
Why can't Blizzard release a patch without causing a major disruption?
Every time there is a significant patch to WoW, their servers are a complete mess for at least the next 12 hours. If my software releases went like 3.0.2 did (which was pretty typical blizzard release), I'd be lucky to keep my job.
(Somewhere people a blizzard type /ignore kenj0418 )
Add scroll-making as a trade for Mages, scribes, rune-folks, etc. Scrolls are an underpowered, underused item. Although like a potion, they have the one major benefit over potions of being usable on someone else (such as a Hunter's pet), allowing for interesting ability buffs. Scrolls are pretty cheap and easy to come by, and I've never understood why they aren't created by PCs. Scroll-making could bring many new features to the game. Balance it against Alchemy for fun and profit.
I would love to learn and extend the open source version of Start Craft. WOW, this would be amazing.
Dear Blizzard,
Sure, I would love to see an open source client for WoW. There's lot of good technology in the client which would benefit the open source community, even outside of the development of open source games.
But I'm not here to ask for an open source WoW client. I'm here to ask for a WoW client for Linux (and other Unicies), open source or not. Let me try to convince you...
From the comments made in this post, it appears that a Wow client already exists for linux. I suspected this for some time, as your team seems quite capable of handling multiple platforms with your code. The very quick transition from PPC Macs to Intel Macs was impressive. Knowing how developers seem to often like linux, I'm sure the work was done in these developer's spare time.
Now, if there is a client, and you decide to make it available to Linux, you will find that the community has two kinds of users: A) Foaming at the mouth ranting zealots and B) Well informed, opinionated and/or helpful users. Looking at the World of Warcraft forums, It's obvious that you are familiar with the former, and if you read Slashdot, I'm sure that you've experienced the latter. What's important to know about this group of users: We do not expect linux to be a "primary" platform for WoW. We know that your primary audience uses PCs, and a smaller percentage uses Macs. We, the linux users, are (for now, we hope) a tiny percentage of your prospective users. Knowing this, any of us who want to play WoW already either run the client from a Windows/Mac operating system, or use Wine/Codeweavers in order to play in our preferred environment.
Taking myself as an example: I was running Ubuntu 64-bit, and was happy to run WoW in Wine. but, unfortunetly, the performance hit I was experiancing (vs running it in windows) was so great that I felt that I needed to move to a supported platform. Now I'm running Vista. While I am happy with the performance of WoW in Vista, I miss my linux desktop. If WoW ran nativly on linux, I would have never made the (quite expensive, mind you) switch.
If Linux was provided a community supported client (no phone support, only one forum for linux issues) I'm sure that linux users around the world would rejoice.
It's completely up to you, the developer, to decide if you wish to support a platform. And often, these decisions are made based off of profitability. While I'm sure your customer base may grow some, I'm also sure that most linux users who want to play WoW already play it by other means. There would be a small percentage that would come from those who only would play if it was native, but that number is bound to be small. Instead, the reason to do this is for the good of the game, the support of the platform, and for the good will for open source.
Thank you for taking the time to read our responses. I hope to see you online.
--Pathway
Honestly, I would love to see some of the older code from Blizzard. If not for practical purposes(Rock N Roll Racing XTREME!), it'll let universities use it some classes. I personally know my old CS professor would have loved some really proven game coding, and I can certainly think he would have loved the fact that "Oh, yeah, this was part of Blizz's source code."
import system.cool.Sig;
I was just thinking about all the hours I spent playing Starcraft, and I think it would be great if they released a "Classic" version that was updated only enough to work well on modern operating systems and networks. Perhaps it could also take advantage of larger monitors, but I would not want them to spend much time on things like that -- just bring back the original. Failing that, I have heard that it can be installed on OS X. How well does it run, and would my old copy need serious patches?
I would say that it is amongst the better customer service solutions in our industry, but it's not someplace where I am comfortable or "happy."
As someone who works in this business (customer support) I would honest say that if you ever are happy - you're probably missing something.
What I mean by that is there's always room for improvement in customer support because of the nature of the business.
Open source StartCraft ftw!
You, Blizzard, were the greatest game company in history. People would buy your games just knowing that you made them. For more than 12 years you've put out games that to a one have sold millions of copies and received rave reviews. Your last game has made more money than god and has stacked up more hours of user playtime than peoples jobs. Why on earth are you trying to ruin this? Charging for something other than the game, splitting one game into 3, ect. Let me put it to you clearly: in ratio to the games you put out you are the most successful and profitable games company in history. You didn't charge people anymore than you had, you made as much as you could free, and you supported your games brilliantly.
Why have you even considered changing this, is it because you merged with Activision? Relatively they don't make as much money as you, they aren't as successful as you. The stockholders agreed to put your company above them for a reason, and that reason is that you have demonstrated better business practices than they have. You can say your not "milking" Starcraft 2 all you want, but it doesn't matter what you think your doing. It matters what the public thinks your doing, and to them it looks like your making a cheap money grab. If your really want to make 3 epic and huge campaigns make two of them expansion packs to the original and charge $15 for each of them. People can accept that, people can say "ok, I see what they're doing here".
Whatever you do, don't try and make more money than you have in the past. Don't try and make cheap grabs at extra money. You don't need to charge people for anything more than the game. You don't need to "expand a products profits". You don't need to, because your Blizzard. As long as you keep up what you did in the past your going to continue to make a huge amount of money and your going to deliver award winning games that fans love.
HUGE SUPPORT FOR OPEN SOURCING AND SUPPORTING LINUX! It would make so much sense, increase your client base with virtually no additional cost. You don't even need to put the Linux installer on the cd, just make 'em available as torrents so you don't have to spend money on hosting the data. Linux users are smart! Linux users are fanatics! You'll attract a HUGE amount of support, even if its from a relatively small number of people. It would be a GREAT move for blizzard!!!
The piece of shit falls apaGAME HAS DETECTED A MISMATCH
Fucking hell, let's try agaSERIAL IN USE
--- Do you believe in the day?
Does Blizzard have a Quality Assurance department staffed with senior engineering talent that follows industry standard best practices? Do they have a testbed that mirrors the live production environment? and do they actually perform unit level and integration testing? Or is this week's 3.02 patch deployment just another example of "million monkey" testing that most commercial software houses confuse with QA?
I don't mean to be snide, but for a company that pulls down roughly $150 million a month in revenue from the World of Warcraft, is there any legitimate excuse for the rolling QA horror story that happens around expansion releases? Why does Blizzard's QA suck so bad?
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I see that all the Glider questions just didn't seem to be asked or answered. Someone wimped out somewhere.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
DRM and that is better then the drm the f* you cdrom, dose not work if it sees pices of software, and does other crap with your system. Maybe they can have a way where the bandwidth stays mostly over the lan.
Slashdot interviews are supposed to have commenters asking the questions, relayed by slashdot editors. Here we have an editor asking questions vaguely inspired by our questions. What is with the format change?
FTFS: Since we undertook the pilgrimage to Blizzcon in person this year, we decided to use the question ideas as a guide rather than an absolute, so that it could be a little more conversational in tone.
I can understand not reading articles, but not even reading the summary? Granted, I didn't like this format either, but they explained why they did it.
See my Home Theater
You would gain a considerable amount of fan support/respect for this action.
These games could be ported to run natively on Linux, and, could be updated for better compatibility with OS X, XP, and Vista; and the core engines behind Warcraft and Diablo would be amazing platforms to develop new and interesting fan-made titles (assuming their engines are easy to understand and create new content for. Without the source code I'm just guessing).
In particular, Lost Vikings is a prime candidate for open sourcing; it's old but extremely fun, and fan-made levels would really bring new life to a vastly under-appreciated classic.
Diablo is an amazingly fun game (I'm replaying it just now for the first time in almost 10 years), but it lacks all of the UI features that make D2 so great. It would require trivial amounts of effort to update this game to 2008 playability standards, if we had the source.
One other point: you don't have to give up any of your existing IP, simply release the source code, and have players take data and sound files off their original CDs. This way you protect your amazing franchises, we get cool new engines to play with, and you get free advertising amongst the tech news sites (a strategic open sourcing of Diablo 1 a couple of weeks before D3 launches would do wonders to raise hype for the game.
I know you've had your disputes with the Open Source community in the past (Freecraft, bnetd), but I think you'll find we're a forgiving lot, especially if you're willing to give back to your fans.
Please, at least consider it.
Sincerely, A hardcore gamer who loves open source and owns ever Blizzard game ever released.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Support for Linux, either native or at the very least through testing/working with WINE, is something that I would really like to see. I've played WoW through WINE and managed to get it running, but the overall game play experience is just not on par with that of playing through Windows.
Blizzard Folks:
Please release for Linux...Even if it's "as is" and officially unsupported.
Thanks, you'd prove that Blizzard deserves a place with the great game developers of all time!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
From the interview:
It's interesting that you bring up UI. UI has been a point of contention since the beginning, for Starcraft 2. There were the biggest arguments about things you would never believe; unlimited selection is a great example of that. People thought unlimited selection would break it, arguing that you have to control groups of twelve units at a time, and that is the strategy and the way you have to play.
Very interested to hear about the UI, because Blizzard has a habit (or at least it can be perceived that way - intentional or not) of using the UI as a bludgeon to get the player to play the game a certain way.
I have heard the argument he mentioned above, and it is just absurd. The UI IS NOT A BALANCE TOOL! Or it shouldn't be - and trying to make it one is incredibly frustrating. If a unit/strategy is imbalanced because I can select as many units as I want and tell them to attack or do whatever, then it is imbalanced whether the game lets me do that easily or not. I emphasize 'easily' because that UI limiation (and others - spellcasting behavior/ idle unit behavior or ai /etc) doesn't stop anyone from doing it - it just makes it harder. It increases the mp difficulty without adding any value to the game.
I played Starcraft from the beginning (I still have my SC1 Beta CD) but I get frustrated going back to it when set next to all the advancements that have been made since. I know it will get my geek card revoked, but I am always struck by the glaring issues with SC1 in this regard and it's the only thing I think of when people go on about how good the game is.
It's just frustrating to play because of the lack of certain features and having certain limitations. I could be totally off-base, but sometimes I think the people that heap so much praise on it, haven't really played it in a while, or just re-install it instead of playing newer RTS games that might make them think differently. Might be just my own pet-peeve though.
Of the SC2 UI developments I have heard, it looks like they are getting away from some of the silly limitations and I am glad. War3 had some good advancements, and it seems it will continue here.
Also kudos on what sounds like proper hor+ widescreen support.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
I'm not that sad.
In Regards to their future projects I really hope blizzard opens their eyes to see the kind of market linux can provide, and that their 'comfort' level won't cause them to miss the profitability of linux gaming.
This line is something I found to be something directed towards games like Age of Conan, where balancing issues were a big problem back when I was playing the game. Updates and re-balancing done in that game often had the lines of "[class] is now working by the intended values." Those words always made me ask to what numbers are they basing all these classes on? In most cases each class seemed to be lacking in areas yet each had abilities or gear that made the class truly amazing. Shields and gems for example made the game have a dynamic that allowed anyone to take on anyone else with the right equipment and abilities. But due to the magic numbers they had set forth, most of these great things were reduced to keep the game on track, something they never elaborated to their player base.
This to me is exactly the kind of logic most MMOs or other games based on numbers should avoid all together. A game that evolves to how the players are able to make use of mechanics in game should be the game people will continue playing. AoC for me continued down that path for more than 2 months, not delivering to me at all any feeling of accomplishment when I hit max level.
I always thought that making blizzard games available for Linux would be an amazing idea. You could even use SDL and I believe you have an SDL expert working at blizzard (the guy who made it). As someone who has purchased every blizzard game (and Silicon and Synapses games) I would really love Linux clients for your games.
As for open sourcing your previous games... GREAT IDEA! It would be a great way to rev. up some enthusiasm for the franchises before the sequels hit. It would also be great to play starcraft in 32 million colors. And plus, the older games have all made 99.9% of the money they are going to make, so it's basically really cheap advertisement
The final strand keeping me from a full migration to linux is the games :-(. I recently had to reinstall XP in order to play D2. A lot of the older games are still a lot of fun and most definitely worth coding for all the linux nerds out there.
Blizzard, you indicated a possibility of open sourcing old games and that you would read these comments? Please open source Diablo 2. Then the community could make a linux port of it, tweak it, etc. That would be way cool.
Diablo 2 is a great game, but it is also getting long in the tooth. It isn't exactly a flagship product. Following up the release of D3 with an open source of D2 as a gift to the community would be a very much appreciated.
thoromyr
Blizzard has deleted at least 30 of my D2 accounts.
3 times, I've built up 10 accounts, then lost interest and had them deleted.
Now I whenever I get the itch to play D2 I play a mod instead, like Kingdom of Tenaii.
The above, and the fact that they were one of the early abusers of the DMCA hammer makes me prefer other game makers to them (see also http://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-seven-years-under-dmca ). Those are some of the reasons I play Anarchy Online instead of WoW.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
If it's all anonymous, how am I supposed to send my grateful paypal tips to you to keep it updated?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Looking at my shelf I realise that every game I've purchased is one I first played at a LAN. Somebody bought a copy and we all installed it. The ones I adore (Myth II, for example) made this trivially easy.
No LAN support for Diablo III is really lame. A LAN is the only setting I really feel comfortable plying multiplayer in. There is no griefing when you can simply walk over to the culprit and whack them upside the head. When somebody does something amazing or we finally lay waste to some boss/level, there's a real cheer. No co-op / competitive rule sets can be as instantly enjoyable or applicable as those that you negotiate at the start of the game with your mates. No internet ranking ladder is gives the same sense of accomplishment as finally trouncing that guy across from you who has previously always had the edge.
There's a sort of sort of enjoyment you get at LANs not matched by internet play, and Diablo I and II each had their time as jewels of LAN gaming. To hear Diablo III will be missing it is very disappointing.
I want to know who this "Slashdot" pansy is, and where I can find him--and beat him. Too bad he didn't ask any questions about turning StarCraft 2 into episodic content. Sure, some people will happily pay 3 times for a storyline that continues... but fracturing each of the 3 species into 3 separate games? That's a cliff-hanging outrage if I've ever heard it. I should expect to play the Protoss campaigns sometime before 2020? Or not?
Fuck. How long has it taken to get even just the promise of a new StarCraft, and now we have to wait for their sluggish development cycle to churn out story-lines? Oh, no... they already have the story... what we're really waiting for are the cut-scenes. Read the article.
The cut-scenes from Blizzard are great, but Goddamn it, you guys! Scale the cut-scenes down, give me the whole story for one payment of $50, $60, or whatever the going rate for major titles is these days, and save the great cut-scene stuff for a big-screen movie. That way, I'm not stewing between releases about how I'm getting fucked over the coals by your new Activision Overlords, and you'll probably make more money in the long run from movie-ticket sales. Hell, I'd probably go see a StarCraft movie 5 times in the theater, and still by the Blu-ray--but the difference between that way of bleeding my wallet dry, and the way you're proposing is that I wouldn't feel like my loyalty is being exploited--but rewarded.
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
In case anyone is counting, I'm voting for Diablo 3 for Linux. Games were the only reason I would dual boot in the past, but now I just wait and wait for WINE to catch up. I happily completed NWN2 and Titan Quest with the help of WINE and if there's no D3 for Linux I'll just wait it out. A side benefit (for me) is that prices for games tend to drop over time.
Join the club. After that patch I'm canceling my account too.
Warlocks were my favorite. Fear was our class defining ability for CC. Look at this:
"Curse of Recklessness will no longer prevent Fear effects, only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health)."
You know what happens when you Fear without using Curse of Recklessness?
In open areas the mobs run so far away they EVADE. In dungeons and other close quarters, they agro another dozen mobs onto you.
I mean, why they hell didn't they just remove FEAR altogether? About the only thing it's still useful for is PvP. (Run the other guy into mob groups for laughs.)
I've complained on the boards. I've complained during the test phase. Others have complained. Nothing we do makes any difference.
Only one thing will make any difference, and that's just to me. That's to cancel my purchase of WotLK, cancel my account, and put the $220 I would have spent over the next year towards another game.
I'm not the only one in my guild giving up in disgust. If enough of us leave, the rest will follow.
I believe in the John Carmack approach to open source. When your old games are no longer a significant source of revenue - open source them. Let the community play around with them, and would-be game developers see how the pros do it. Ultimately this feeds the whole industry, and might lead some inspired candidates to apply at your company sometime in the future. If people are still willing to pay $40 for Diablo 2, well then I don't blame you for keeping that one, but I'd say open source Warcraft I and II and Diablo I. They're well past their prime.
Please support linux with your games and make your old games opensource. You support Windows and Mac why not Linux??
i been playing wow since last year and i run several other computers in my home 3 of them being linux computers and my only windows computer being for work i would love to be able to run wow from my linux machine and leave my work computer for what it is work.
Good for them on the drm issue. You can't stop pirates so you need to make it simpler and easier for players to come to you as the primary distributer. For example, people bought counterstrike even though then newest version was entirely free for download. I'd buy a game even if a friend would let me install their copy because I want a case to put it in, I want a dvd backup premade, a manual, and I don't want to wait on them whenever I want to install it to a new machine.
As for the AI, well, I've played quite a few strategy games in the past and it has always saddened me how a simple AI that doesn't cheat never seems to get made for games. It isn't that hard to prebuild 10 different assault forces for the AI and then let it randomly select one. Granted, this isn't an extremely dangerous AI, but following more simple logic like this, in effect creating a state machine, would make the AI much more human than they currently are, there is still lots of room for improvement, without dramatically increasing the set of instructions for the AI to follow.
And yes, in case you haven't figured it out, I'm an avid Starcraft fan. :)
Can you please contact me over e-mail? I would like to discuss this with you. My e-mail address is info at jon!kri dot org without the exclamation mark. Take care!
I play WOW, and I have to run it with WINE, the windows emulator. I don't get nearly the frame rate I could if the game could be run natively. Please make a GNU/Linux version of World of Waarcraft!
WoW is the sole reason I have a computer with windows installed on it. I would gladly buy ANOTHER copy of the client and the expansions if it would allow me to play it on Linux. Anything to get away from windows. I cannot express how much it would please me as a customer to have a Linux port of WoW.
NVIDIA and ATI both offer linux drivers for their cards native to Linux so your graphics will be supported for a lot of hardware out there. I know that you can minimize the bulk of your customer support structure for the Linux client by using a community based approach as we are already quite used to it. Please consider releasing the client to Linux, even if it is under your own proprietary license.
Thank you very much for reading this post
Maric.
I realise its a big ask but it would be really something to have the Starcraft 1 source out in the open. The ability to customise and extend a game that has retained this degree of popularity for so long would be great...
Blizzard,
How about fixing the issues of the past game first...
- The ability to actually pay $1/month to keep my characters "alive"
- Guild channels (that are password protected)
- Fix the horrendous lag of b.net (h/c is completely unplayable due to lag spikes)
- Give he ability for the _host_ of the game to actually KICK griefers.
- A better loot system (like wow) instead of grubby-fingers that encourages selfish behavior.
- And the ability to actually make all rune-words and uber-tristim in single-player.
- Make druids not suck
- nerfing xp didn't stop all the baal bot runs to hit level 90+. Un-nerf the xp at level 95+.
D3 is offering nothing new.
I would love to see open sourced blizzard games. It's actually a dream of mine to go into the game development industry, and I would greatly enjoy playing around with a genuine industry piece of code to see what makes it tick. : )
Maybe I will be that guy that applies to blizzard someday.
Getting WoW
Given that you can't play World of Warcraft at all without a monthly account, why do I have to buy the game on CD, in the shops? Why can't I just download the .iso from blizzard? As I've got the pain-in-the-ass 5 CD version, re-installing is quite time consuming. Or why can't I download a tiny little 500Kb wow-install.exe from you, which prompts me for my account credentials, authenticates me and then downloads and installs the latest, fully patched version or whatever I've paid for?
This leads me to my next point...
Patching WoW
This is an extremely annoying and time consuming process. Quite often when logging on to WoW, I'm immediately kicked out so that it can download and install a patch. This can be anything from a few MB's to a few GB's. When this is done, I can log in again - only to be chucked out immediately so the next patch can download. Why doesn't blizzard use a repository-like system which just downloads the latest version in one go, rather than endless patches?
Speaking of which...
The blizzard downloader
Blizzard appear to be doing quite well, financially speaking, from $10 * 10 million subscribers a month. It would be nice if they would pony up a little bit of that for some bandwidth for patch downloading. I'm not expecting patches via ftp, but if the peer-to-peer is being slow, maybe blizard's http download stream in the downloader could help out a little bit more than ~20kbps?
Torrent
Also - why is the blizzard downloader only faux bittorrent? When you're using it, it only seems to talk to other Blizzard downloader clients, not bittorent clients in general. If you swipe the .torrent file from drive_c/Program Files/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Cache (I think) and load it into a real bittorrent client, you get the opposite effect - normal torrent users will talk to you, but blizzard clients won't.
Last one...
WoW is a very well behaved piece of windows software - you can run it from anywhere, you don't have to install it - you can just copy the folder. It's so well behaved that it even runs fine on Linux under Wine - this works out of the box for me with recent version of Linux, Wine & Wow. It's not perfect - but it's pretty good.
Bearing this in mind, it wouldn't seem like a big leap to suggest releasing a pre-packaged Linux version, bundling WoW+Wine into a .deb/rpm for install either via your distro's repositories, or a blizzard repository. This is the approach that Google takes with Picasa - the Linux version is just the windows version bundled with Wine.
A native version would be very nice, but this would be better than the current situation, for many people.
What do you think?
Starcraft is already a decade old, maybe it's also due for some good ol' open-sourcing? Linux people would be all over it.
But, will it run on Linux?
If we could, regarding Diablo...
* Raise the projectile cap so chain lightning isn't broken.
* Close the holes in the design, where you could become permanently gimped by getting hit by a zombie or by touching a shrine.
* Add MOAR stuff; spells to enchant weapons, more palette swapped monsters, nightmare and hell quality items... The endgame desperately needs some balance, the sorcerer is a nuclear bomb with legs and there's no "real" reward for playing the higher difficulties.
* Not need to click for every attack.
* Have real storage in multiplayer.
* Still continue to use Battle.net to host games for these mods.
I would love them forever and ever. If Blizzard started World War III, I would not care. They would irrevocably be saints in my eyes.
I for one would LOVE to see Diablo II go open source. You would still need a legitimate copy of the game to get the data files and you would still need a legitimate CD key to play on battle.net.
Starcraft 1 would be nice too (it IS one of the best selling RTS games of all time)
You just have to setup your own TCP/IP connection between the computers using Dial-up Networking or Direct Cable Connect (or whatever, depending on the OS). I played two-player war3 over a pair of 14.4K modems, as well as with a parallel port laplink cable.
The same thing is possible with other games, although older games like DOOM and Warcraft II used IPX instead of TCP/IP.
When you're running under Windows instead of plain DOS, the app doesn't really need to support the specific connections anymore.
I would love nothing more than to play WOW natively on my linux machine. I've been hanging around for such things! P.S. you dont get better frame rates on linux by default. You might if your windows box has lots of bloated crap (read: symantec AV and such like) that kills the OS.
I'm all for seeing the open sourcing of older games that are no longer generating revenue for Blizzard. I just started on a Game Design program in college, and it would be awesome to be able to tinker around with how some of those older games work. I'm especially thinking of Warcraft 2, which is still installed on my primary gaming computer (the computer I am typing this from) to this day. I spent many hours in that game. :-)
I understand holding off on Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft, and especially World of Warcraft, as those games still generate sales. It's one thing I really appreciate about Id software, for example, that they are more than willing to give their old games back to the community. Do what they do and open the code, but keep the art assets closed. Meaning, for someone to be able to take the code and compile a working copy of Warcraft 2, they would need the Warcraft 2 disc with the appropriate data files.
I do also support the idea of releasing a native Linux WoW client. Not open source (I would actually rather not see it open sourced at this point because of the opportunities for hacking that would introduce to the live servers - I am a WoW player and would like to see the game's integrity preserved), but a functional Linux client. The only support you would need to provide is a single forum for Linux-specific issues and patches on patch days. The fact that WoW runs in Wine and Cedega doesn't really count as Linux support - that's just an indication that an interest for that functionality is there. A native client that can be downloaded or installed off the disc would make a lot of people happy.
Cheers! (Clomer, 70 Paladin; Teliah, 70 Mage; both on Sisters of Elune)
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
Please start writing games for Linux!
Doesn't Blizzard employ at least one person from Loki Software, and the primary author of SDL?
I think mine was the Linux question... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=987005&cid=25276819 :) Anyway;
Dear Mr. Blizzard Folks,
The last 5 software titles I have purchased have had native Linux clients. Only 1 had real support, (which I never used) and 2 came from iD software. I just don't really buy Windows software much anymore. I have very fond memories of Diablo 1 and 2, but no plans for 3 at this time. A linux client would change that.
I'm curious about how the new battle.net is going to be affecting both the original Starcraft and Diablo II. Odds are that when the sequels come out, a lot of people will go to those, but some of us may still want to play the originals. Will it be possible to do that on the new Battle.net? What about Open?
Or will the two simply be run in tandem? Or will Starcraft and Diablo II enter the realm of the unsupported?
http://www.tenjou.net/
A few of these are about WoW, others are not.
1. Either stop releasing updates that raise the level limit in your MMO (and this really goes for any MMORPG) in a way that obsoletes the most elite epic gear.
You got away with it because you are still early enough into the lifecycle of the game and because there really weren't any viable game alternatives.
There are a lot of things that could be done with expansions besides raising the level limit to tack on content but if you insist on doing it then don't obsolete the existing epic gear.
In fact, make an addition that REQUIRES the old epic gear to be of benefit. Instead of making a lvl 80 trash drop that trumps the lvl 70 epic make enhancements that can only be applied to epic gear that upgrades it. Make lvl restricted instances, like 71-73 and so on where you get the gear upgrades.
2. Implement a real, solid, and structured large scale PvP gameplay. Something akin to Dark Ages of Camelot with actual fortresses that players lay siege to and large scale battles over these structures and PvE content is unlocked for the side that controls the PvP in some fashion.
3. GPL your older games. Let your fans have their way with them. While the current player base of WoW may not be majorly composed of blizzard's oldschool fans, it is those fans that attested to blizzard's talent with gamecrafting and drew the crowd to look at WoW in the first place. They are your single most valuable asset.
Right now you are extremely popular and in the spotlight, anything you do will garner large interest. Historically, that flame dies for every company that gets it. When they get that big spotlight they ignore their cult fans and when the light goes out they have nothing left and die. Don't make that mistake. Think about what your company will need to find a new big hit in 10yrs when the bulk crowd of gamers have never heard of World of Warcraft.
3. DRM and technical copy protection measures... it sounds like in some games you are even crippling actual game function (excluding LAN play). This stuff doesn't work. It's never worked, for anyone, ever. EVERY copy protection scheme used for any form of entertainment media has been cracked and more often then not is cracked before the official release! Make a profit from selling first copies of awesome games. People will use your server for multi-player as long as your server is BETTER. Parents will buy your game because their kids want it. Kids will want your game because their friends pirated it.
4. Linux version. This is a no brainer, you are practically there already. If you don't want to handle the tech support, I don't blame you. Just release free binaries to those who buy your game. I don't play world of warcraft anymore because I found the Linux experience to be subpar to the windows experience and I refuse to reboot. That said, I don't play warhammer online either (despite vastly superior pvp) because of a lack of windows support.
I promise you I am not alone in this. While linux is probably still in the hands of techs more than anyone else on the desktop for now it is techs who everyone else looks to when it comes to what they should buy. The linux and open source crowd are very very vocal.
How does the Battle.net v2.0 effect on Diablo 2 and other older games? I hope we finally get rid of all the crappy spam, bots etc.
Dear Blizzard,
Please consider my voice a part of the chorus asking for native Linux editions of your games. I'm not a WoW player, but I have spent more time than I normally care to admit playing Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft. After recently making the switch to Ubuntu on my desktop machine, and discovering how much better it works for me, I am quite sure I will never go back to Windows. It would be nice if I could buy future versions of your outstanding games to run on my outstanding operating system.
* Linux clients should be done, at some point. Compability with WINE is a _must_.
* Open sourcing Lost Vikings would be great!
* If you make me shell out for battle.net, you just lost a sale
* I will not buy Starcraft 2 until a compilation which encompasses all three 'games' is released.
As a Linux user who has over 250d /played in WoW, some sort of native version would really make my day. Even though the game works rather well in Wine, the performance hit is noticeable. There's no need for huge support investments at the start, heck I'd be happy if you just dumped the Linux binaries on some ftp like id software does with their games. In addition maybe set up a forum where users can help each other with their problems. From there you can gradually add some support options if the thing takes off (and I'm sure it will).
Think of it, you (Blizzard) were one of the first companies to consistently support Mac on all your games. The amount of a sort of 'geek credibility', positive image and revenue gained by this is substantial. Why not pioneer the ever growing Linux platform too?
Hi all
I'm a WoW player since 2007 and in this time I aways desire linux support for WoW. Because of WoW I'm forced to have Windows installed on my PC just to be able to play wow.. I try to run wow with wine but theres some performance problems. Now when I want to play WoW I use Windows and when i want do something else i have to switch to Linux.
Blizzard needs to target single popular desktop distro like Ubuntu for their eventual linux port. Maybe even talk to Canonical for support and games related improvements. The community will handle other distros.
I was a amazed when Slashdot asked about a Linux client from WoW developer and didn't ask the same question the other game developers.
Those are different games, different engines so a new chance exists for every new game.
Please consider making Linux clients for Diablo3 and Starcraft2.
Regards
Maxim.
I'll start by saying I am not a developer, but I have been watching some open-source projects.
When you're looking at open-sourcing sourcing a title, there are going to be many things that you should consider. First and foremost, it makes the game and its functions available to be modded, much like Diablo 2 saw many fan mods that changed things up for the classes, only on a wider, deeper scale. It also means that communities will form around the game for trading of ideas and content or code for the old game. It means releasing the old corporate idea of control from the game, but opens up other possibilities.
This may present unprecedented insight into trends among consumers. The open-source community may be a small demographic (people who understand at least some of the code), but focus-groups have been used for years by corporations to get consumer feedback. Worry over competition from open-sourcing old projects is unwarranted. For example, Blizzard knows very well how much it takes to go from concept art to a new outdoor landscape in WoW, for someone to take the source of Starcraft, let's say, and make it 3D rendered instead of sprite-based would take years of focused development, while also making the potential for script issues and glitches to arise. In that time, the community, from what I've seen, understands that it would not be attributing these changes to the classic to Blizzard, but rather to the volunteers and their own contributions. As long as that wish was passed along in the source, Blizzard is unlikely to hear anything about it. The company already issues EULAs with an AS-IS disclaimer, the only difference would be that open-source communities constantly change the AS-IS state to new versions on the source tracker. Also, the disclaimer likely wouldn't be included in the source - legalese in comments is in bad taste, but pointing to a legal document on the web seems perfectly fine.
While I find it terribly unlikely that something as recent as Warcraft 2 or Starcraft will be open-sourced any time soon, but those scenarios could lead to new insights about the flexibility the games already have. Alterations to the event engine in Starcraft could expand the diversity of options, and bring new fans to current releases.
Should Blizzard be concerned about divulging inner workings of battle.net and it's handling of any present or previous games, it may be an option to remove specific battle.net code before open-souring the title, but take care not to disable all forms of network or internet play, as they were often a driving reason those supported games were such a huge success.
Take the id software approach. Once the sequel is in full swing, place the previous iteration under the GPL for the code only. This won't include the graphics, music and such, so no one can get the game 100% free. However, people can make their own games, or update the engine so that those who own the classic game can get renewed play out of it.
The only problem I would see is BNet code. But since people have been able to make their own version of BNet without seeing its code, I doubt this will be a huge barrier, or a necessary release.
id software realized long ago that the community made them greater. Mods and levels added replay value, and they had to pay no one to do this. For Blizzard, they have quality games that people still play. It is harder to find a store that carries Diablo or WarCraft II (StarCraft is still sometimes available in Battlechest format), but if these games were available for $5 or $10 in download-only format, GPL'ed for added mod and graphic-update support, and some kind of limited BNet code support were included, I don't see how Blizzard could lose.
1. No LAN Play = No purchase by this consumer.
2. Linux clients, please.
3. Open source old games, definitely.
I second this. I have been using linux as my only PC desktop for about 4 years now and will never use Windows. I would be playing WoW if it was released for Linux.
Aren't you missing a space between the 's:' and the 'a--' in your geek code there?
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Please browse at +2
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Freeing old blizzard games would be great, even if it was only partially like ID did with Q3. I actually thought about sending an email to Blizzard and beg them to free some older games just this week, but I gave up before even trying. Turns out Blizzard were not quite as evil as I thougt. But I guess we'll see, just saying "we might release something" is far from actually doing it. At the top of my wishlist is Starcraft by the way, partly because I have a nvidious graphics card and thus no direct rendering and partly because it's one of the best Blizzard games I know of.
One of the things that annoys the hell out of my roommmates is the Blizzard Downloader: it kills our DSL connection if more than one person tries to update at the same time. I know SixXS is doing work with an IPv6 bittorrent client, and I also know that LAN games could network better over an IPv6 subnet. I also know at least overseas, more ISPs are switching to IPv6. Just something to consider.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
I would think that Replay Mode would be the only way to go. First, you've already stated in another question that 300+ people on a server might bog it down. Spectators will count as people when they can move about the environment.
And then there's the overwhelmingly large chances for abuse by a spectator. You just need to have a guild-friendly spectator pop into the enemy team's base and watch what spells they cast-- or run about the field shouting "here he is"-- or even have a cadre of spectators on standby, and if your team is losing, have them all connect and lag/crash the game.
Replay, on the other hand, would be an amazing tool for guilds who are into strategy. They could run some big game, then afterwards walk through it (pause, rewind, replay) to analyze their tactics. Especially if you put in a "global control", or a "lecture mode": all X people to connect to 1 person's replay, so she can walk them through, point out particular things, paste magical notes for others to read, etc.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
YES YES YES PLEASE GOD YES make a Linux version of DIABLO II:LORD OF DESTRUCTION and DIABLO 3 available to your faithful servants!!
It wouldn't be hard to encourage good behavior and punish bad behavior with some pro-active thinking. Currently, you kick and ban for bad behavior. Sometimes, this affects people who are not being naughty at all. I think you should employ less heavy penalties and instead look at what the bad behavior seeks to gain and remove the benefit. Too many games created doing MF runs? Why not penalize the bad behavior by starting with a low MF mod and ramping it up the longer someone plays nicely, thus encouraging civil play. One player creating too much lag? Drop that player's response rate and increase the impediments to that player's ability to induce lag. Remove the rewards for bad play. Increase the rewards for nice play. Increase the penalties for bad play. Decrease the penalties for nice play. Just my 2 cents.
DRM doesn't work. Your just raising the cost of developing the game.
When most people talk about DRM they aren't talking about network play. They are talking about disk protection; which compromises the quality of the game experience.
Typically, people will buy the game, and then download a crack so their experience is improved. No CD crack, or a tool the removes the 'wrapper' DRM.
This means that it stop know one for getting your game and not paying for it, and it irritates people who do pay for it.
DRM get's you nothing. It never has.
I will buy SCII. I'll be able to get it for free if I want, but I won't. Me, like most people, will buy the product. I will download any DRM crack, because it hogs resource, slows the game, and it's principle is "Everyone is guilty."
Every song on iTunes is available for free, yet iTunes has sold over 2 billion songs.
DRM has nothing to do with that, ethics do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Starcraft, Diablo 1/2 etc are truly great games. But after I switched to Linux, I have stopped buying Windows titles.
I keep my eyes open for games with Linux clients, for instance I've picked up several games with id Software's logo on the box (Doom 3+RoE, Quake 4, RTCW, Q2). To be honest I don't think many of these would have made the cut had I still been a Windows gamer, but I wanted to make a point of supporting them because of their Linux-friendliness.
I would love to buy your products if they were available on Linux.
(Opening up the source of old games would be nice too, and could help keeping them playable even in the distant future.)
Personally, I'd me more interested in seeing some of the projects that didn't pan out get the good olde opes source treatment. Warcraft Adventures is the one I'm speaking of specifically. While it's great to open source games that many of us still own and play; I think it'd me much more interesting to see these abandoned titles. Obviously the problem with releasing the source for D2, W3 and the like would be the security of Battle.net (unless the network code and BN protocol was taken out of course). So something in the interim like the abandoned title would be great. I mean, how great would it be if 3d realms gave us every version of DNF they developed along the way as a bonus when we do eventually get DNF? I think it's facinating to see how developers come along, not only in their successes; but also in their failures.
Me and my friends are LAN-ers through and through.
If blizzard is still watching this thread, I'd be interested in clarifying what they're really telling us LAN-ers, what are our options if we want to LAN?
- Isn't banning LAN play just asking for a community hack from day one?
- Isn't banning LAN play destroying the LAN-party experience for tens even hundreds of thousands of players who want to gather together in one latency-free place and co-op play, or play in a place without any online connectivity?
- Isn't banning LAN play reducing the value of the product to gamers from I can i) single-play, ii) LAN-play and iii) online-play to just single play and online play?
Removing LAN play is removing a big chunk of my Blizzard experience, as I lan-ed the diablo games, warcraft and starcraft and was hoping to lan D3 to death.
Please don't make the same mistake as spore.. as in make a great game and then arbitrarily fuck it up for no reason. LAN play was a huge part in getting me and others to play your games, and dismissing it is throwing out my expectations and memories of how I had fun with a blizzard game. you're touting that you're allowing game developers make the game, and then letting the marketers and CEOs take that product onwards instead of the other way around.. but in this case, you're not. you're actually arbitrarily removing one of the great things about warcraft, starcraft and diablo that made the games great; You could hold a LAN-party with your friends and play them to death against/with your friends.
If I'm mistaken and you're not banning LAN play, then please clarify what LAN-players can do to play on a LAN, and if there will be some solution for people on offline LANs.
You're always saying "is it fun to push the buttons" as a marker of how fun a game is, well let me extend that to : "Is it fun to play with your friends?" If you agree with me and say yes, then why remove friends abilities in getting together and having fun? Thing is with LAN-play is you don't need a internet connection to enjoy yourself with your friends, just a little extra space and a router is plenty (or at the least a crossover cable).
Also, people who are behind corporate walls, but would want to LAN together after hours and won't be able to get through to battle.net because of firewalls, you're going to tell them they can't play?
Add LAN-play, because it's been a part of gaming since the beginning of the gaming frenzy, and will never really go away.
I just wanted to put in my 2 cents since Blizzard is reading this feedback.
1) Kudos on WoW. I have 2 accounts (my kids share an account), and have enjoyed it since initial release.
2) I am very excited about the possibility of Spectator mode. This would allow me to 'tag-along' on Raids with the guild so I can learn their way of doing an encounter, and maybe you could even say that I'd get to 'experience' content that I might not otherwise ever see. Please proceed with developing that.
3) Please think about the idea of buildable housing at some point. You could have some sort of 'instanced' street in town that would be for the guild, and would have some sort of buildable guildhall, etc. It could also have other areas that could be used to build member houses, etc. Since it's instanced, it wouldn't add any unnecessary clutter or burden to the existing areas you've designed, but would give us yet another money- and time-sink to work on besides daily quests. For some ideas, check out Horizons:Istaria or Star Wars:Galaxies for example. Neither system was perfect, but would give you some great ideas for what has been tried before.
3) For PvP, I personally can't stand Arenas. I do however sometimes enjoy battlegrounds (tho I must confess I'm no master at PvP, but it's a fun change of pace sometimes). I like the idea of having honor points that can be slowly saved up over time and spent on gear. Please do not ever take that away and force people to play Arenas for arena points! The normal World PvP that certain regions offer is fun as well, but of course suffers when realms are not balanced population-wise between Horde & Alliance.
4) It sure would be nice if you could someone conceive of a graphics upgrade to the base engine. I enjoy your stylistic artwork design, and also realize your intent is for WoW to be able to run on a wide variety of older hardware. But, it would be nice for those of us with current generation gear to be able to get something more out of it. I don't have suggestions as to how you'd be able to pull this off, but hopefully you can think of something worthwhile.
5) Please consider the idea of a Starcraft MMO. Theoretically, you've already got the 'infrastructure' components developed for WoW (server design, client components, experience running an MMO, etc) I know developing content and art is not easy, but you've got plenty of talent onboard who is doing that already for the Starcraft sequel. It would definitely be nice to have a space-based future MMO to compliment WoW. I'd especially love it if you had some sort of BlizzPass subscription that allowed access to both MMOs :-)
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
I've been playing Starcraft Brood War with Wine for two years. It's one of the most popular games on Wine. The petition for a native version of Starcraft 2 is already up to 17,363 signatures. It appears there would be a decent market for Starcraft 2 on Linux version.
We want more linux game! And open source old game anyway you've made enough cash with them why not letting us really play with them?
the chump who took Ultima Online in a "new" direction? If so he should be aware that my foot has a natural affinity for his reproductive organs. Should I ever meet him, the forces of nature will be set loose, and he will be in pain.
Expansion packs / new games / re-released games - why not let us download them (and/or buy a key online) rather than have to buy a box in a store?
For WoLK (WoW) this makes more sense for most of us than having to pre-order and wait for a postie to turn up with the box (or drive into a store and buy it or pick it up). We already have the game installed as part of the 3.02 update, so having to wait for a physical item that could be delivered electronically annoys the customers that don't want or desire the physical box.
Think of all the environment that would be saved too! Electronic delivery of a registration key harms less trees than shipping a box all over the place does, that's for sure!
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
I heartily support this; look at how it's helped keep DOOM and friends alive for many, many years after they would normally no longer have been relevant.
Fellowship 9/11
Dear Blizzard,
i would really like to have new Blizzard releases working under Linux nativ!
Regards
Thomas KÃnning
Please release your games also for Linux. Especialy Star-Craft 2. I think many Linux User would by star craft 2 if you develop it for linux too.
Dear Blizzard,
you make very good games. I remember playing countless hours of WarCraft II: Battle.net edition many many years ago, aswell as Diablo and a huge amount of Diablo II (so much that I own two Diablo II CD keys at the moment). Friends have also played and gotten seriously hooked on WoW.
However, I am not able to play these games properly on my platform of choice, Linux. I can resort to wine, which I hear run at least WoW well, but what I would like is official support. As far as I've heard there's a Linux client somewhere in the Blizzard offices, I would love to get my hands on it and would really appreciate an official release (I'd buy any game for Linux you'd release, because I have yet to see a low quality game from you). I would also really appreciate being able to play Diablo III on Linux.
Please reconsider releasing Linux versions of your games, I will buy them, and I'm certain many many others will aswell. A Linux version does not have to be open (though I personally use exclusively free software, the single exception I make is commercial games).
I'd like to have a native WoW on my Linux machine, cause it doesn't run well on Linux with wine. This would be great if you could port WoW for Linux.
Im currently running a linux based OS, and I really would apreciate a native version of Blizzard's games, as WINE, Crossover Games or Cegeda are not the best solutions.
I did not play WOW, but Diablo and Starcraft had been really nice (how many evenings did I spent? Dunno...)
Please bring out a Linux-Version of the sequels, I'll buy it! ;)
Thank you!
I want a Linux Port from Diablo3, WOW and Starcraft 2. PLEASE Blizzard make it real!!!
Hi!
A Unix/Linux version of Blizzard's games would be very nice, but I think having gold/platinum state in wine would also do it, at least for me. But in such a case the developers should test the game against the stable version of wine and eventually submit patches.
My 2 cents.
Please open the old games and port the new games to linux! =)
me loves linux
I'm willing to support blizard if they start making Linux native games. Unreal Tournament is always high on my list or any Linux native games because they are supporting my operating system and want to show that isn't a mistake.
I'm currently studying Network Engineering and Security Analysis at mohawk college, I've been using the linux operating system for the last three years simply because I believe in open source software. I've got many friends and professors in the software engineering department that would benefit greatly from being able to take open sourced software from a highly reputable company like blizzard. To be able to use those games as examples and analyze the code/programming methods is priceless. It's one thing to play with theories and its an entirely different thing to be able to tinker and disect a proven and working model. Even if Blizzard were to not open source the data files and release only the engine codes they greatly help the community, and protect their franchises. Not to mention the open source community would breathe new life into these favorite games and make it more available to a much wider audience. Even draw blizzard more attention. For example if Diablo 1's source engine were to be released and an open source engine combined with new data files impressed someone who's never played the series before, undoubtedly they'd be curious to see the latest entry in the series. Everyone wins when a company releases their work to others.
If Blizzard considers it, it would be a nice gesture, but I have no false hopes it is coming. Companies come and go with the words of "Hey we don't hate Linux" then stab you right at the back by leaving you out in the cold.
Now considering I run Vista and Ubuntu and that 99% of the time I am on Ubuntu, I look forward to any Linux game that comes, be it open source or not. I play Neverwinter on Linux and it's been awesome. If Blizzard decides to have some form of Linux support for ANY of their titles, that would be the best news yet. You can push out Linux ports for 5 year old games and I am sure they'll surely be appreciated by some folks.
I know that some Linux users demand an open-source release of some of their software and I certainly wouldn't complain about it, I wouldn't hope for that either. There's too many complicated factors with this and the mere existence of an official Linux port already is pretty much tied to that too.
Linux games, I'm afraid is still a pipe-dream inspite of the so-called "We'll read your comments." Prove me wrong, Blizzard.
Finally a producer asks the customers about linux ports. I run my Linux for about over 1 year and I'm very satisfied with it, if now blizzards games come to linux, it would be like heaven :)
Good luck on this!
peace out
There would be NOTHING greater than D3 for Linux. I think this will be a milestone in roleplay-gaming and the linux-community is rising fast - so why shouldnt we be respected? Linux-supp for D3!!
I hope Diablo III, Starcraft etc. would be come on Linux, too. Actually some games from Blizzard (for example, WoW) are playable with Cedega and so on. But this is not the best way to get it running, because there are always problems with patches, copy protection and and and ... ... I really would say "Welcome" to the client versions.
The Blizzard games for Linux
Why not create your own version of Linux specifically geared toward gaming, call it BlizLin or something, corporations have done this in the past with UNIX and Linux but on a smaller scale. And with Microsoft's latest release of Windows... Vista *shivers* having such a bad vibe a version of Linux by Blizzard specifically built for better support for gamming packaged along with a hot new game may have great appeal for a lot of gamers.
Fuax
Hi Guys,
bringing Diablo3 and Starcraft2 to Linux would be really great. You are already doing it for Mac, so it could not be that hard to get it
working on Linux also.
Companies like Blizzard with their games have the power to push Linux forward in the desktop market, cause there are many
people who don't want to use Linux cause of gaming.
Additionally if a company like Blizzard would start to bring their games to Linux, many other game companies may follow.
If you don't want to/can not support the thing officially, then do it like ID does. Give as a technical forum where we can exchange
problems with other linux users.
But please do not "I will not release a linux version, cause i can not/don't want to support it" . Get the game out for Linux without official support if neccessary.
ID does it this way and their Linux binaries run great, so nearly no need for support :-) ..
Regards,
Christian
..would be great, especially Diablo and Warcraft III.
If it happens, i will buy WIII because i like the story modus.
And dear Blizzard developers, if you are planning
to port these games, please don't forget the WIII Mapeditor.
You (Blizzard) should definitely support linux. By releasing your games for OS X you've helped that platform tremendously. Linux is developing rapidly but without support from company's like i.e Blizzard linux as an home and entertaintment platform can not really move forward in the desired pace. Which is a shame really because the fans of blizzard games has to buy a mac or a copy of windows. It's not meant to choose operating system after what games are supported.
I have no idea if this post will matter at this point, but nonetheless. the things i want to see from blizzard are the following: Linux Support, of any kind at all. Ideally a Linux build, if not then a Linux build that is really a Windows build that ships with a pre-configured copy of Wine, similar to what Picasa and Eve Online do. I really don't care if it's a Linux binary or a Windows binary as long as I can run it in Linux without having to work to get it working. Even if it is something as little as a constantly updated support page on your website that explains how to get it working in Linux with Wine, that would be better than what is being done now. I also want to see them open source the old version of the game engines as open source. That way they can be recompiled by enterprising developers to run on other platforms like Windows and Mac and oddball platforms like mobile phones. the id games like Doom and Quake and others have benefitted from this for years. As far as the actual game content goes, you can release it as abandonware or even charge $10 for a pack of it of some sort that would come with whatever version of the recompiled engine that exists for a particular platform.
1. Release some kind of SDK or editor for Diablo III so we can make our MOD(DOTA, TD) like WC3. 2. Unofficial but do some support(doc, forum, etc) for Blizzard games on Wine. 3. Release old games full source code or engine code under free software license. 4. Build a Linux porting team or cooperate with other Linux porting company. 5. Make a all-new Linux friendly game title.
Please Blizzard release a Native Linux port for Diablo III.
Diablo II worked ok in WINE, but a Native Linux port would be better for Diablo III. Plus, you are using a new engine for Diablo 3, so we have no idea if it will run as good on WINE as Diablo 2 did.
we are even wiling to wait a little longer after the Mac and Win releases are released. Please put resources into creating a native Linux port after that.... please...
that would be a very good thing if i can run those games on my arch linux machine!
It's about time...
I remember signing various petitions to port various Blizzard games with more than 10k signers and NOTHING, really NOTHING happened, no response at all, except for tha default: "Currently we are not going to support linux, this may happen at a later point of time"
So I "hope" (I can't do anything beyond that) NOW IS the later point of time.
I will get my hands on Starcraft 2 in case there will be a linux client.
I really wish there will be a linux client, but I somehow doubt it.
we need a linux client!!!
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?ibpfl says all
I'm a Linux-user and I don't want to use any products from Microsoft. Why am I forced to use an operating system from Microsoft? Why can't I just choose the operating system I want to use? As a PC-Gamer I "just have to use Windows". Why? I don't want to use it. Just develop the games for Linux, Mac OS and Windows, so we can choose at which platform we want to play.
I've bought & played about 1 year on warcraft 3, 6 months on starcraft, diablo 2 about 1 year, 6 months on warcraft 2, and 3 years one World of Warcraft(and I continue to play it and pay my bill each month). I've played all of those games except Starcraft under Linux and wanted to thank you about not putting f*cking protection for us (even on WoW) that unables us to play under Linux. If I buy your games, it's beacause I know I'll probably can run them under Linux. However, the step between an OSX x86 Mac and an x86 Linux is technically speaking not far and I would be glad to be able to play Blizzard's games natively ! Please make this effort and I'll continue to advertise your games to my friends and play with them on it, just for ever !! :D
About Open Sourcing or free (like free speach) your games, I think you can open source at least old games, like id software does.
I think you can even open source a lot of part of you softwares, in order to have a community like the addon community on wow which is very impressive, it can even save you a lot of work, you just have to focus on the core functionnalites, and the addons will give you the best interface for players.
My WoW runs with about 200+ addons, totally changing the game experience, my interface, but not the way I play as I don't like to play like a bot clicking without thinking to what I do ! I wouldn't have continue to play WoW without any addons as some part of the basic interface just bug (or bugged) me, and you have used addons to see what interface improvement WoW needed, and see the way people wanted to play it... so it's a real benefit for you to open at least some part of your interface to third party developers... So, go deeper please !
It is indeed nice to see Blizzard talk about Linux, and Open Source, and even admit to have internal Linux clients and tools in their development infrastructure, as well as being vocal about it. Just to add my voice to that of the many other users here who have already expressed their thoughts and express interest in Blizzard first open sourcing older titles and considering releasing new titles for Linux besides Mac and Windows. I know these requests implicate a LOT of work for them, which may not necessarily be in their priorities, or generate revenue in any way (I'm talking about open sourcing some game engines). And Blizzard making available native clients of future titles would simply be awesome.
I'd like to ask Blizzard to release the source of games they no longer sell or make profit on GPL v2 or any other free license, which would allow porting them to Linux and other operating systems. There are always people that enjoy taking such projects pro bono. Such decisions have no negative impact on Blizzard, and in fact - the contrary. The games live longer and the producent has more respect among the gamers. Good example: ID Software.
I'm posting to make sure Blizzard hears the voice of linux users. There are a lot of us who would love to see your games run natively. And a bunch more who would convert to linux given the opportunity to game without too much hassle.
It would be nice to play WoW with the linux experience without the use of Wine or Crossover. You would have even more people one WoW if you made a linux version.
I think that would be great to have title like Diablo 3 on my favorite OS. Personnaly I'm not a WoW style, but I surrely appreciate the great work of Blizzard! Hope for a great "partnership"!
I will only buy games with Linux clients -- no wine for me.
Here are another 17000 votes:
http://www.petitiononline.com/ibpfl/petition.html
I think it would be great if blizzard took the plunge and added linux support to older games and future games. it might give the entire gaming industry the push it needs to head this way. linux is great really. appart from not really having any good native games. go for it blizzard it would give you an edge in the gaming world.
With linux gaining popularity (Ubuntu alone has 6 - 12+ million users) I would think it be a good idea for Blizzard and other large game/application companies to port versions of there products for Linux. Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora/Redhat sense they are the top distributions in that order. I personally won't purchase a game unless it has a version that can run natively in Ubuntu. And overlooking Linux is definitely NOT a smart idea given there are far more users world wide then many people realize. Also on a different note i would like to suggest to Blizzard to take a look at Oblivion as to a direction to go with at least some games (not saying to make clones of course just that Bethesda has for sure is going in a very good direction with their games. :)
It would be a very good thing that Blizzard adapt theirs games for GNU/Linux as they already do for Mac OS.
That would be beneficial to all points of view. ;)
I think it would be incredibly super to have have those old games opensourced. I can't imagine how great the community will be if those old games will be revived, maybe with lots of new content made by the community.
I bet it will be picked up by the people very quickly, because the Blizzard-community is like no other :-)
Can't wait to hear more about this!
Hi,
A big part of your bussiness model is a perfect match for free software. The more your income is based on subscription of MMORPG rather than retail sales, the more it's on your benefit to liberate your code and receive back a huge amount of QA work, improvements, etc, at no cost.
I refer you to this excellent article from Bruce Perens:
http://perens.com/works/articles/Economic.html
Dear blizzard,
I like multi-player on-line games once in a while, but single player and LAN games are the ones i play mostly. If Diablo 3 does not have those, then i'm not buying, sorry.
Since i'm a Linux user, and the only game i had good luck with in WINE was diablo 2, i was considering to buy Diablo 3 even though it would not be for windows. But, not now.
In another note.. If you are developing for MAC, i don't think it would be too hard to do the same thing for Linux. MAC systems are very similar, and it would not "change the way your staff is used to".
Sorry if this sounds like a rant. I tried to be polite.
As a fan, I would really apreciate to be able to buy a game immediatelly when it comes; rather than in fact, wait for some feedback of the community about the possibility to run it through wine.
Hopefully blizzard's one work almost perfect on linux through wine; But I cannot pay for a game if I am not able to know if it will work on my system. So, as many of us, many times I am waiting a little more before buying a game, just to know if it will be runnable through wine, So in the end, I cannot enjoy the game right when I would be able.
On top of that, giving support for linux would be really apreciate by the community. In fact there is company that do not treat there customers the right way; having somes of the best as blizzard's or Id software on our hand is really reassuring.
So the best you give you to the community, the more we will give you in return.