A Chat With Bill Roper

"Blizzard Producer Talks About the Much-Anticipated Game"
by Jason Ocampo CGO

When StarCraft slipped from its holiday release date last year, there was speculation that the delay was an intentional decision on the part of Blizzard to hold the game until after the post-Christmas rush so it could dominate the relatively competition-free months afterwards. After all, Blizzard’s previous title, Diablo, had missed its holiday date, yet it dominated the shelves and became the fourth highest selling title of the year, according to PC Data.

Computer Games Online recently spoke to Bill Roper, StarCraft’s producer, and asked him about the delay, the game, and the (seemingly) $40 billion question: what makes StarCraft different.

"The game’s coming along exceptionally well, it’s really exciting," Roper said. "Right now we’re not only hunting the bugs but the balance stage is really the most critical because if the game’s not balanced as well as it could be, that’s where you [get into] trouble."

When asked what exactly play balancing is, Roper broke the answer down in simplist terms.

"The easiest way to explain it is really what the balancing issues are is making sure there’s no one tactic that works every time," he said. "One of the things that is really vital about the StarCraft balance is that every unit has its [Roper pauses] If every unit was a character in a book or a play, every character has its fatal flaw. Every character has its one major weakness. Every unit.

"What we want to get away from is ‘Oh, here’s this tank rush and all you have to do in the game is build this one unit and then rush that one unit in and make as many as you can and you’ll win the game." It doesn’t really work in StarCraft."

When asked about whether the StarCraft team played any of the (seemingly) countless real-time strategy games on the market, Roper discussed the evolution of gaming.

"Certainly, we look at everything that comes out and most of the time it’s just because we want to play it," he said, "see if it’s as cool as we heard about or read about. I think it’s important in our industry that you really stand on the shoulders of giants. So if there’s another company that’s doing something very well, I think it’s important for other companies to look at what that company’s done well."

"I think that certainly our reputation adds pressure," Roper said, when asked whether there were added expectations from the company that produced WarCraft and Diablo. "We have expectations of ourselves, the people who buy our games have expectations. And I think those self-expectations are the ones that are the hardest to live up, because we can see before anybody else does what we envisioned the whole project to be."

Perhaps the most important question is how StarCraft will be different. As one of the two design houses responsible for kicking off the real-time strategy craze (Westwood Studios and its Command & Conquer series being the other), the expectations for StarCraft are high. Roper brought up many points, talking like one who’s been asked this question countless times before.

"Obviously, I’d like to think that there’s a lot of new stuff in StarCraft, I really think that for the first time people are going to three unique, distinct races. The Terrans, the Protoss and the Zerg are very diffferent in the way they play and in the way you build them up," Roper said.

"I think from the gameplay aspect is where people are really going to see the difference. I honestly believe that more so than any other real-time strategy game I’ve ever played. You have to be able to use multiple units, and use them effectively... there’s so many things, so many combinations."

As an example, Roper brought up Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering card game. Magic, he said, was a game of considerable depth. "The more you delve into the game, the more you play it, the more multitude of strategies are revealed... as you understand it more, the game becomes deeper for you, it becomes a better game."

©1998 Strategy Plus, Inc. Posted 2/3/98