Dustin Browder, der aktuell an Starcraft 2 arbeitet, wurde von Gamasutra.com gefragt, wie es ist, bei Blizzard an einem Spiel zu arbeiten, das nicht aus der Warcraft-Reihe stammt. Seit 2001 hat Blizzard ausschließlich Warcraft 3 und WoW mit ihren Addons herausgebracht, sie haben damit deutlich mehr Zeit verbracht als mit allen ihren Spielen zuvor.
Browder bestätigt nun, dass die lange Entwicklungszeit von Diablo 3 und Starcraft 2 nicht durch den unglaublichen Erfolg von World of Warcraft beeinflusst wurde.
At this point, Blizzard hasn’t made a non-WarCraft game since 2001. It’s now spent longer just releasing WarCraft games than it did making all the other games for its three main franchises up until that point. Does that seem odd at all, especially from the perspective of someone not working on a WarCraft game?
DB: For me, I don’t think it has anything to do with anything. It’s just all about scheduling and resources and what happened. World of Warcraft was not something this company expected to be this successful by far. They were hoping for a couple hundred thousand subscribers. That was what had been done in the past — „If we could equal those numbers, we’d be fine.“
So, I don’t think there’s any sort of conscious focus on a particular franchise in that respect. The Diablo III team has been working really hard to get their stuff to a point where they could present it, and they finally did. It was last year when they announced and said, „Hey, we’ve got something to show.“
We wish we were shipping by now as opposed to still working on the game. So, I think it’s just that these games are taking longer to make than we’d like. And the World of Warcraft team is doing expansions. They’ve got a strong team. They’ve got an established toolset. These guys know what they’re doing. I think it shows in every expansion. They just get better and better and better every year.
Es war also nicht geplant, dass wir so lange auf die Fortsetzungen unserer Lieblingsspiele warten mussten, aber es brauchte einfach seine Zeit.