Bill Roper of Blizzard - Part One 2009-10-22 00:00:00
While there's been a lot of talk about Warcraft III's multiplayer
support in recent months thanks to the online beta test, which
every webmaster and his dog seems to be part of, precious little
has been heard about the single player campaign. We caught up with
Blizzard's Bill Roper during a recent press tour of Europe to find
out how the beta has been going, and what solo players can expect
from the game.
Are You Sitting Comfortably?Prince Arthas, one of the main characters in the human campaign
"As I go through the first level here, I don't do any of the
classic RTS things; I'm not doing any base building, I'm not doing
any resourcing", Bill boomed over the sound of clanging steel,
which was echoing out of the speakers in the little auditorium as
he demonstrated the game's opening stages to a group of British
journalists. "What I am doing is getting to know the characters,
their abilities, how to control them. Getting used to things like
going on quests and doing some exploring, and introducing players
to some of the main characters that are going to be seen in the
storyline."
Telling a gripping story is something that Blizzard have been
concentrating on in Warcraft III, with dozens of little in-game
cinematics pushing the plot along in a far more sophisticated way
than was possible in previous games in the series. "We've always
tried to tell good stories, but even up to Warcraft II so much of
that was done with the static introductions to missions and in the
manual", Bill told me later, esconced in the comfort of a plush
conference room hidden away in the bowels of the Covent Garden
Hotel.
"We started to break away from that a little bit in Starcraft, but
with Warcraft III at any point in the gameplay we can get to a
triggered event, zoom in to a scripted in-game cinematic sequence,
have exchanges between characters. It's really a huge focus of the
single player - we want people to come away at the end of the game
and feel like they've had an integral part in a fantastic story. We
want people to go away from it talking about the characters, just
like they do when they come away from the latest Star Wars film or
Harry Potter book. We wanted to have that level of experience and
empathy with the characters. It's been a big challenge for us, but
I think that hopefully we've been able to pull it off."
EpicGetting underway as the humans
As in Starcraft, this story is told through the eyes of all the
playable races (four in the case of Warcraft III), with players
switching between the various viewpoints over the course of the
campaign. "There's one epic storyline that you go through, and
you're seeing how it effects the different races. So you might be
playing [the human hero] Arthus at one point, and then fighting
against him at another. It was an idea that we tried in Starcraft
and we thought it worked really well, so we're trying to do that a
lot more in Warcraft III."
"We do block it off. You'll play eight or nine [missions] in a row
as the humans, and then you'll switch to the orcs, or the undead or
whatever. We don't do a lot of hopping around, we try to take the
story in chunks and look at it in that way. I really think it tells
a much better story. When you look back at Warcraft II, for
example, we basically told the same story from both viewpoints, and
part of the problem we came up with was that we wanted the player
to win at the end of both campaigns. So for example, when we
finished the original Warcraft, if you played through the human
campaign the humans won, if you played through the orc campaign the
orcs won. Now we did Warcraft II and we had to decide .. ok, who
really won?"
"The thing that's nice about the way the storyline works in
Starcraft and Warcraft III is that you've got one congruent story
that makes sense, and you follow it to the end. You can have the
classic story arcs, and there's the victor and the defeated, and
you'll have seen it through the eyes of a lot of different people
and different races on the way through, and you're not stuck at the
end thinking that maybe one of your outcomes wasn't valid. So we
feel that this is the best way for us to tell ...