World of Warcraft Killed Starcraft Ghost
According to Mike Morhaime, Startcraft II, Starcraft Ghost and World of Warcraft were all being developed at the same time. But when WoW started picking up steam, something had to give.
“We have to choose, we can’t do everything,” he said during a panel last week at the Design Innovate Create Explore summit. “Our vision for what’s possible directs that. We like complex games and we like casual games.”
Those choices sometimes lead to killing a game in progress.
“They were working on StarCraft Ghost the same time we were working on World of Warcraft and StarCraft II,” Morhaime said, “World of Warcraft exploded and we needed to make some resource decisions. It just wasn’t an environment in which a project like (StarCraft Ghost ) could succeed.”
Fortunately, not all of Morhaime’s decisions are followed.
The head of Blizzard said that he initially fought the push for a context sensitive interface for one of their games, because they were done with it and ready to ship.
“The entire programming staff said absolutely not, and I said absolutely not,” he said. “Adam went around me and went to a programmer and had him add it on his own.
“It luckily worked and it was very elegant. In retrospect it would have been a disaster if I had won that argument.”
Blizzcon 2011
I know this is a “welcome to last week” post, but Blizzcon 2011 has been announced for October 21-22. I was on my lunch break at work when I read the news, but with their website blocker in place I couldn’t read much more than the date. Didn’t need to. I had the date, which meant I could book my hotel.
Whaaaa? That’s right – without even knowing what a ticket was going to cost, I was going to commit to Anaheim a good ten months in advance. Truth be told, I wasn’t overly concerned about getting an admission ticket. In the two days of Blizzcon 2010 that I attended, I probably spent three hours actually inside the Convention Center. A large part of my day was spent walking to the building, walking back from the building, and hanging out in my room checking out the various Twitter feeds to find out what events were going on (the curse of going by myself without having any contacts to meet up with). I had planned on attending more of the panels, but there was a scheduling mixup and the panels I did want to see started at different times than what was posted on the schedule I had. When you’re looking at a 15-20 minute walk just from your room to the Convention Center, that can affect what you get to see. If I had wanted to spend more time at the Convention Center, I suppose I could have stood in line for swag. But after looking to see what they had for sale, I couldn’t see a single thing I was interested in buying.
The night life is what saved Blizzcon for me, and I didn’t need a ticket for it.
