Blizzard Entertainment Interview, Part Two

GamesIndustry has published the second portion of their interview with Blizzard’s Chris Metzen and Paul Sams, in which the creative director and VP of business operations discuss Starcraft Ghost, their relationship with Vivendi Universal, and more. Here’s a taste:

Q: In terms of games for the different platforms, you’ve taken quite a different creative approach on Starcraft Ghost to your PC titles – do you think there’s room for Blizzard to develop games which are ported across multiple platforms, or will you continue to develop unique titles for different systems?

A: I think that one of the inherent challenges in doing just that is that the gameplay styles, the user interfaces, and the types of games that work on each platform, are very different. Certainly, you can create a great RPG on console that would play well across any of the consoles; however, it’s not a slam dunk to think that that same RPG that you create for console would work well on PC – they’re just different.

Obviously there are different controls, which is a big part of it. The types of user interface that are acceptable on console versus PC are very different, and what you’ll find is that there are not many that are able to transition and do really well on both.

So, to get to the root of your question, do I think that we’ll try to do things that are cross platform? Well, I would say that we’ll do cross platform from the perspective that we’ll do Mac and Windows products, and that we’ll do PS2, Xbox and GameCube products, but crossing from console to PC? I think that there’s still a bit of time before that’s potentially going to work very well.

Maybe with the next generation consoles that will be easier, and hopefully the console manufacturers will be more open to having console to PC play. Right now, while people say that there’s an excitement about that, there’s not – in my opinion – a lot of openness to it. There are a lot of security concerns by the console manufacturers as to whether, if you’re connecting with PC people, they’re going to negatively impact the console – you know, utilising hacks and cheats and other things, and whether they’ll be able to pollute the console boxes with bad things if they’re connecting with each other. So I think there’s a bit of time between now and when that will happen.