Gamasutra, the gaming site tailored towards the business and creative side of game design, recently posted an interview they conducted with Blizzard's Greg Canessa, Battle.net 2.0's Lead Designer regarding the Battle.net service, the challenges of building such an ambitious project, and where it could be heading in the future.
You believe it's really important [for the service team] to be integrated, working closely with the game design team. Did that you think that caused the delay in launch?
GC: Oh no.
But it certainly didn't help things, as far as the timeliness of the game?
GC: It was one of many factors. There were a lot of risk factors, a lot of complexity. There was a lot of engineering complexity. There was a lot of risk related to the WoW integration, risk related to being able to staff up a team, risk related to being able to deeply integrate -- certainly design and coordination with the game team. [Figuring out] what the meta-social Battle.net experience will be around StarCraft was a challenge for us. It was a contributor.
I wouldn't say it was a primary driver, but it definitely was kind of more of a cautionary note for everyone to realize that there's a lot of complexity there when you're working with two different teams and you're working on a unified experience that's supposed to be deeply integrated.
It's a very complex thing to do and to pull off really effectively. It's one implication of the deeply integrated approach, right. If it's a platform -- like Xbox Live, right? It's a platform, there's a dashboard, and then there are games that sit on top of it. Those two don't really interact with each other that much. There's the heads-up display where you can access your friends list and such, but that's kind of an overlay.
Bungie can do whatever they want underneath with Halo: Reach, and this is kind of an overlay. That's not the approach we took. Battle.net is not an overlay on top of a StarCraft experience that would be, "Those guys would own that. We would own this." No, it's a meeting of the minds.
If you're interested in the development of Blizzard's game service checkout the rest of the interview and watch for StarCraft: Legacy's BlizzCon wrap-up post coming soon!
Source:Gamasutra - Building Battle.net
