Talking Heads: Bill Roper

We stop Bill Roper, senior producer at Blizzard, on the streets and force him to talk shop. Asking the questions Martin Korda

Blizzard is one of the games industry's leading developers, with both the WarCraft and Diablo series selling in droves over recent years. We caught up with Blizzard's senior producer, Bill Roper, during his tour of Europe, where he's been showing off the latest builds of WarCraft III and Diablo II: The Lord Of Destruction, and grilled him about the company's past projects and future plans.



Has the online popularity of Diablo II measured up to your expectations?

To be honest, it's been much higher than we expected it to be. Before Diablo II came out, we looked at how well Diablo and StarCraft had done. We took everything into consideration and made what we thought was an aggressive estimate of how popular Diablo II would be online. We were blown away by how fast the game sold, and the percentage of people who played it online. It was like nothing we'd seen before and we were actually caught flat-footed.



What are the factors that have made Diablo II so popular online?

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there are now many more people who are comfortable playing online than in the past. So much of Diablo II is based on collecting items, such as gem types and item sets. So when people played the single-player game and started collecting these things, they realised that if they were out in a community where hundreds or even thousands of other people were doing the same, they could get access to even better items a lot more quickly than they could playing the single-player game. Another thing that actually surprised us, is that generally people buy a game, play it in single-player and then go online to play it in multiplayer. More people than ever before bought the game and immediately started playing it in multiplayer, without even playing the single-player game. Core gamers are starting to do this more often, especially with games such as EverQuest and Asheron's Call. Their entire gaming lives are based online, so when they get a game with an online component, they want to try it right away.



So does this mean that you're considering making an online Diablo game, with a persistent universe?

If you talk to anybody in the industry, you'll find that this is kind of the Holy Grail, making a game with a persistent world, where anyone can jump in at any point and then just jump out again when they've had enough. Doing this would definitely be a shift from what we've done in the past, because if you want to do it well, you have to maintain it, even after the product shifts. This is why it makes sense for people to pay a monthly fee for a game like EverQuest, because you have to maintain a team of 15-20 people who work on providing new content. It's the only way to make the experience worthwhile. It's a different model to what we've done before, and while this wouldn't necessarily scare us off, we'd have to sit down and have a look at how we could do it.

In hindsight, what would you have done differently in Diablo II?

I think that the biggest thing we would have done, is made it smaller. It's huge.



Why would you have made it smaller?

So it wouldn't have taken us three and a half years. When we were working on the Gold Masters, it took us 72 hours of solid testing to check out each one, to make sure it was OK to go. With StarCraft, this only took ten or eleven hours.



Diablo II's maximum resolution is 640x480. Do you regret using such basic-looking graphics in the game?

Not really. I think you have to look at when the game was started, we're talking about back in 1997. Early on we thought about doing some 3D stuff, there were even some Voxel versions of the game that were done. When you look at the graphics aspect of it, I think it looks really great. The big challenge was that when the game came out, 3D graphics were in vogue. This is the downside of working on the PC - everything changes in a year and a half. With Diablo II, we went through two of those cycles. When we started on the product, a 3D card was a rarity. When we started it, we had no idea that the vast majority of people would have a 3D card when it shipped, which is why we didn't go down that route. However, everything we do from this point forwards will be in 3D.

Online cheating was a major problem with Diablo. How have you dealt with this problem in Diablo II?

The single biggest thing that we did was to use a client-server model, which protects all the character data. People can't go in and muck about with it. There have been a few people who've found loopholes, where we've had instances of item duplication. Fortunately, these weren't so much hacks, as people finding bugs in the code. We haven't come across any of the rampant, severe problems that we did with the original. We felt that this was the single biggest change we had to make, so that people could feel that playing online was an enjoyable and safe thing to do.



Looking back at Diablo II, what single feature are you most proud of?

The biggest thing that stood out for me were the skill trees. If I look at the differences between Diablo and Diablo II, I think that the development team's idea about introducing these skill trees was brilliant - the fact that you had a certain level of control over your character's destiny. In Diablo, you found spell books, which increased your abilities. So your skills were based on what you found. With Diablo II, you could experiment and try different things. It gives you so much more control, and lets you start looking forward to reaching the next skill level. It makes you play for that extra five minutes, just so you can discover that new skill. The skill trees were definitely the biggest and coolest thing that came out of Diablo II.



What's the next step for the RPG genre?

The refinement of multiplayer gaming. At the moment it's still a niche market, which is only really attractive to the core gamer. As it becomes more accessible and easier for people to understand, the RPG genre's popularity will really explode. If online RPGs were made more accessible, with a simpler, easier to understand user interface, the genre would become even more popular than it is now.

Would you consider branching out of the Diablo universe into other genres?

We've always felt that the universes we create don't have to be strictly tied to the genre from which they originated. We've already had a WarCraft and StarCraft novel, and a Diablo one should be out in May.



How about in terms of game genres?

I think we'd consider whatever made sense. If the development team thought it would be a good idea to make a Diablo strategy or FPS game, we'd certainly consider it. It would all depend on what made sense and what would be compelling.

It looks as though there's plenty to look forward to from Blizzard. Now firmly committed to 3D and with an open mind towards new gaming ideas, it's anyone's guess what they'll come up with next. For now, we can look forward to the Diablo II expansion pack The Lord Of Destruction, which is due out in June and WarCraft III, currently aiming for a Christmas release.