Bill Roper Interview

CVG quizzes Bill Roper about his work for Blizzard and the launch of his recent title Hellgate: London.

Out of interest, if you were in charge of Diablo 3, what would you do with it?

Roper: Use all of the resources available to Blizzard to take absolutely as long as required to make it what the fans and we wanted – although that is always easier said than done.

If we had the ability, we would have taken longer on polishing Hellgate: London, but that is the difficult balance an independent developer has to strike.

Diablo III is going to be tricky because it has to innovate while still being what the core players want. It will be interesting to see if they go for a specific commercialization model (subscriptions, item sales, etc.) or have company subsidized online play (meaning it is free for the players but not to the developer/publisher) and try and crank out expansions.

You have to place a lot of trust in Blizzard in terms of what they do, and I think that the core philosophies would be the same regardless of who was running the project.

Spotted on Blue’s News.