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StarCraft II Cost $100 Million To Develop
UgLyPuNk writes with news of a report that Blizzard has spent over $100 million developing StarCraft II. Initial development on the game began in 2003, and it's due to be released on July 27th. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick "described StarCraft as one of the company’s seven 'pillars of opportunity' (where each pillar has the potential to deliver operating profit between $500 million and $1 billion over its life span)." The finalized system requirements for the game have been released, and players planning to buy the digitally distributed version can download it now, though it won't be playable until the 27th.
Wow, $100million dollars and STILL couldn't afford to include LAN play. No worries, someone will do it for them free ;)
Qxe4
You may not get into it for single player, but there are those of us who don't play WoW because we don't have the time and like a good offline gaming experience.
Not that I'm arguing for piracy here - If I want to play I'll buy - but online is not the only thing going and I hope they haven't neglected offline play. Knowing Blizzard though, they won't have neglected it because they do put so very much effort into making their games perfect.
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
They put a lot of work into single-player mode. Reports I've heard are things like non-linear story-lines, where choices you make in game change the story, and the cut scenes that have been released already make the story look good. You never know for sure until you play it, but all signs point towards a fun game.
Qxe4
I was in the beta program too and didn't enjoy it much either. I'd play a game or two and then quit for the evening, whereas with the original Starcraft I'd get sucked in and play for hours (often into the wee hours of the morning and miss out on sleep).
One problem I noticed is that the game moves too fast. The units do so much damage that they kill each other or buildings in mere seconds. There's no time to send reinforcements, cast spells, or even retreat. Well, maybe pro players with 600 APM can do that stuff, but for an average player the battles are over before you even get the alert that they've started.
The only missing "features" in offline mode will be unlocking achievements, saving your progress on the cloud, and sending in-game and cross-game messages while playing single player. Not one of those actually has any impact whatsoever on the game itself (presuming you don't mind copying save files to a portable storage device to continue your game progress on another machine, which is a practice nearly as old as gaming itself).