Diablo 3

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New Battle.net 2.0 details show up after Q&A with Rob Pardo (Blizzard Vice President), and also why battle.net was delayed, right before BlizzCon 2009.

You build in-depth to the hardcore first, then work backwards into making the game more accessible for more casual players. Is that a design philosophy that you employ across all of your products, or is that a product-specific thing?

It’s something we do across all of our games. I’m a big believer in that it’s the right way to develop a multi-player game, one that is capable of lasting for years and years. It’s a little bit counter-intuitive in the gaming industry that I think most other gaming companies tend to tag multi-player on at the end. From an hours of play standpoint, it’s logical if you want a game to last for 500+ hours, which is something we strive for in all of our games. You have to spend a lot of time making sure that your game has that much depth to it. Then you really want to put in that single player element and read that story through, once you have those fundamental foundations of gameplay if you consider single player can last anywhere from 24-50 hours of gameplay. People go through it once, twice, maybe a few times. But multi-player is really what has longevity that can last for years and years.

You’d recently said that Battle.net was started about halfway through the Starcraft 2 development cycle. Looking back, do you wish you’d started it earlier?

I don’t know that it would’ve been possible to start it earlier. From a purely production point of view, that would’ve been great to start single player and multi-player at the same time. But the reality is that we have to figure out the units and what’s fun. A lot of our early development with a lot of our games is to get the multi-player up and running really quick. We want to be able to play against each other as soon as possible in the development cycle. Then we start designing the units, figuring out what’s fun. And really, how do we build a single player campaign when we don’t even know what the units are going to be in the game? So we have to get a certain amount into the game so that we feel like we can trust what’s going to be there. If we start single player too early, then we’re just going to be throwing out missions constantly – which we still do, even when we do start playing it. The units are just changing so much earlier in development that, until we’ve got that multi-player foundational base in, we can’t really seriously start to work on that part. Of course, we do lots of things like story development and talk a lot about what kinds of design – come up with ideas like story mode and what we want to do with that. But we really can’t physically implement the levels until multi-player is kind of to – I don’t know – maybe a 70% state of unit design.

Have you made any final decisions on your plans to recoup the investment you’ve made into the new Battle.net?

We’re still finalizing that. The big question out there is, “Will it require a subscription?” We are certainly not doing that for Starcraft 2. That’s really our approach for monetization and business model for a game, whatever is right for the game. What’s worked well for World of Warcraft doesn’t mean we’re going to put that on Starcraft 2 because it’s entirely a different kind of game. So as far as what we do for Battle.net, we have a lot of different ideas, but nothing that we’re going to talk about here. I don’t want to put the scare out there that it’s going to be subscription-based, because it’s not. What I’ve said previously is that we’re probably going to take an approach that is a little bit micro-transactiony, like value-added services in WoW where you can do a paid character transfer and re-customization of your character – things that you really don’t need to play the game. Like, you can get the full experience of WoW without any of the value-added services. We’re going to take more of that approach with Starcraft 2 and Battle.net. There will be things, like, if you want to rename or delete your character and other things like that where we might do some of the business model for Battle.net.

Are there any plans to fight against piracy, except for Battle.net? But as you know, Battle.net was also pirated.

Dustin: I think the most powerful solution for piracy is to create a compelling enough experience that people don’t want to go elsewhere. That is ultimately our best weapon. At some point, we can’t stop every hacker in the world who has some enthusiasm to get us. That’s one of the things we’re really focusing on – trying to make the experience so strong that people really want to come to us to get that experience.

Rob: Historically, though, piracy for us has not been that big of a deal. There have been some big deals like the BNet DKs – which we won, by the way – and cases like that. We can shut down those services. And even if those services exist, which is quite possible, I don’t think there’s going to be any way that they’re going to be able to compare to the feature set that will be available on our version of Battle.net. A really good example of that – it is possible to pirate Wow today. You can do your own set of servers and your own immulation technology, but it’s just not going to be as good.

How does match-making work on the new Battle.net?

Dustin: It’s similar to how it works in Warcraft 3. After about 5 or 10 games, we have a pretty good idea of your skill level, and we’re matching you at that point based on your skill level. So assuming you’re paying attention, you should win about half of your games. As you begin to improve, we upgrade your skill level once again. I know a lot of players would rather win 60-70% of their games because that would be the most fun, but that means that somebody else is losing 60-70% of their games. We had some – not a whole lot – of issues with players re-rolling characters in Warcraft 3 and coming back through ranks and being rematched. So you’d be enjoying your lower rank of gameplay, and here comes somebody who’s obviously meant to be at level 25. He’s going to be there in a minute, but meanwhile he’s going to pound on you. We’ve got some ideas on how to smooth that kind of thing out and prevent a lot of that kind of behavior.

Read more about battle net features at starcraft-source