INTERVIEW: Blizzard COO Paul Sams

Just in case you’ve had your eyelids sewn shut, your ears pinned forward and your ability to absorb information through telepathic means (we’re on to you!) nullified, World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King came out last week. Quite a few people (and some orcs and elves, too) braved the freezing cold and queued up at midnight store openings across the world just to get their desperate hands on what’s guaranteed to be the biggest PC release of the year. But before the Horde (and the Alliance) descended on HMV Oxford Street, we caught up with Blizzard chief operation officer (that’s a big deal, by the way) Paul Sams, to quiz him on everything from future WoW expansions to gamer anger at StarCraft II and Diablo III development. Why not take a break from World of Warcrack and have a read?

VideoGamer.com: How long will it be before someone hits the level cap then?

Paul Sams: I think it’ll probably be pretty quick, not that someone could enjoy the content that quickly, but there will be somebody that will try to be the first in the world for the notoriety I’m sure. I don’t know how long it will take but somebody will do it and it will astound all of us I’m sure because none of us will be able to contemplate that somebody would have been able to do so that quickly, but I think for the vast majority of people it’s going to take quite a while.

VideoGamer.com: The last expansion increased the cap by ten levels and it’s another ten levels with this one. Why is ten levels right for a WoW expansion?

PS: I think it’s an issue of content. You want to make sure that you spread the content intelligently across the levels and so if you go up 20 then that by default suggests you might need twice as much content. With the time and energy that goes into building the content it’s not really reasonable or else we’d be making people wait a lot longer on expansion sets. So it’s a balancing act between the amount of time there is between the releases and the amount of content and as a result the amount of levels.

VideoGamer.com: You’ve said in the past that you’re aiming for a new expansion every 12 months. Is that something you’re still aiming towards?

PS: It’s absolutely what we aim for. The challenge is it’s very hard to get there! We’re not willing to make content or quality compromises to achieve that timeline. That’s definitely the goal and the hope and the dream. We haven’t done a real good job on achieving it yet but we’ll continue to try and to try and get better each time. We’re shorter this time around than last time by a few months and I think that we should hopefully continue to improve on that as we become more efficient in the things that we do.

VideoGamer.com: In terms of further expansions, how long before you have to stop doing expansions for WoW and look at doing a sequel proper? Is that something that you ever have to do?

PS: I don’t personally think that there’s a requirement to do a sequel. You probably know or have heard that we have another next generation MMO that’s unannounced and there’s no details about it at this point, but while we’re doing it that does not suggest that it has to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. We think World of Warcraft is a great stand alone product and one that a lot of people are very much enjoying. For us we feel like we can achieve great evolution and change and improvement within the World of Warcraft product with content updates and with expansion sets, and will continue to do those for so long as there’s a meaningful number of players that are interested in playing it. As it relates to other MMOs, time will tell what we’re going to do but doing a sequel can help kill off the franchise and so I think we want people to be able to focus on this and again I think that we’re going to be able to provide compelling content that’s going to definitely feed the needs of players.

VideoGamer.com: I guess the WoW universe and lore is vast enough to be able to support as many expansions as you want.

PS: You know I think it is. The list of things that the team wants to do and the places the team wants to go within this product is excessively large. I don’t know if they’ll reach an end point of the things that they want to do. I say often times that the list of things that are on the wish list or the want list or the plan list are four times as long as your leg. It’s an exceptionally big list and so I think they’re going to have plenty to do.

VideoGamer.com: Has work on the next expansion already begun or do you get a break and then come back and think about it?

PS: No. There’s a long outward-looking plan on how it is that we want to approach the support of the franchise and so our team knows what the next expansion is going to include in general. Not every specific or every single zone and this that and the other, but they know from a story perspective what the next number of expansions will include.

VideoGamer.com: Even that far ahead?

PS: Oh absolutely. This is a gigantic universe and we have so many different moving parts, not to mention we have a department in the company called Creative Development, and their goal in life is to ensure that all the products within each of our franchises, whether it be games, the books, the manga, any of these things, that there’s also continuity and that we’re careful to not break continuity so it all fits together and meshes properly. The person that’s in charge of creative development, Chris Metzen, is also the guy that’s primary lore builder of all of our universes. They plan so far ahead, we know not only what the general storyline is but the names of those games, because we know the stories that we want to tell. Now, all the designers and other team members, they’ve got to try to formulate what the feature set is going to be for each of those and to look at that gigantic list of wants, wishes and dreams that they want to do and see which ones make most sense for the type of content that we want to deliver. They think a lot farther ahead as a team than I think most people realise. There is a very big plan and there is a lot of really exciting and I think ground-breaking things that we have in store for the future as well.

VideoGamer.com: You recently announced that you have 11 million subscribers to World of Warcraft, which is a phenomenal achievement, but I guess also a pain in the arse to manage…

PS: You know it certainly comes with challenges but it’s pretty rewarding. I think our team and all of the people at Blizzard continue to be flabbergasted with how well it’s done. We have a lot of confidence and pride in this franchise and the work that we’ve done. I’d be lying to you to say that we thought that it was going to get here. The subscriber numbers, we never in our wildest dreams would have thought.

VideoGamer.com: What has been the chief factor in that phenomenal success.

PS: I could try to encapsulate it in a couple of things. One, is it’s based in a franchise that people were already familiar with and knew in the gaming space, that already had multiple products and had a tremendous amount of lore built that people loved and were already connected to, so we had that. And then you combine it with the fact that I think Blizzard, that’s something that Blizzard I think does better than any other company out there and that is we make our games easy to learn and hard to master. This type of game before we launched it was considered a niche type of product and I think it was in large part because these types of games were built for hardcore gamers. And they were uber geeky. And while there’s a tremendous amount of geekyness in World of Warcraft, a tremendous amount, it also is really accessible and it’s not intimidating. It may be intimidating, like the thought of it, but once you sit down and you start doing it the perceived intimidation goes away quickly, because I think we really do a good job at gently ramping people into the experience and complete noobs that just don’t know anything about it, next thing you know they’re doing great things and they’re off completing quests and they’re learning all of the different things that help you become a big player.

VideoGamer.com: How many millions of subscribers has WoW got the potential to achieve? 11 millions seems incredible but then so did ten.

PS: Yeah it really did! You know honestly I don’t know what the number is ultimately going to be for the peak. The good news I guess from my perspective is that we’re continuing to grow. We just announced a new number last week and traditionally when we put out new content updates or we put out expansions, surely with an expansion, Burning Crusade brought a lot of new customers in and a lot of former customers back. We’re hoping that that is the case with Wrath of the Lich King, obviously, that we would be able to maintain our subscribership, that we have a number of people return that maybe were taking a break and that we would be able to attract a number of new players. The way we do that, honestly, the number one way we do that is word of mouth. We have to do a great job, we have to please our current subscribers and when we do they tend to tell their friends about it so, yeah we have to deliver a spectacular experience to our current gamers. And so as a result those are the most important people.

VideoGamer.com: The economic downturn seems to have everyone very depressed. Is the MMO gaming industry immune?

PS: I would say that if you’re priced fairly, and you provide a great immersive experience that we have the opportunity of being touched less than other sectors. The reason I say that is this: We’re in England, what does it cost to go to a movie here?

VideoGamer.com: Well in London it can be anything up to £20.

PS: Right, and that’s typically for somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and a two-and-a-half hour, traditionally, movie-going experience, that’s not interactive. For £8.99 you can play as much as you want over a month, and it’s an interactive experience where you meet new friends, and it’s transportive. So if the experiences that you’re having in your real life are challenging, let’s say you’re concerned about your job because the economy is challenged at this point, or you’re unhappy with something else, it’s transportive and you can go be heroic and go do things that are entertaining to you, you can meet new friends, you can see old friends, again it’s transportive so it can take you away from the difficulties that you may be facing at that moment and allow you to do something where you feel really cool.

So I think that that’s positive, and no matter how bad the economy is people want and need to be entertained. If you look at the value that we provide for £8.99 a month, versus the other forms of entertainment, there’s no cheaper entertainment. When the economy is difficult, things that are inexpensive, that are immersive and a ton of fun, especially when it’s the most inexpensive form, why not? If you’re struggling, £20 is not like nothing, that’s something, right? And you haven’t even bought any snacks, and heaven forbid if you have a date with you! You’ve got to set some money aside right? So as a result of the fact that we’ve announced 11 million, people ask me how is it affecting us. It’s candidly and thankfully not.

VideoGamer.com: What do you think from what you’ve seen of the Knights of the Old Republic MMO?

PS: You know, I haven’t seen a ton. I’ve heard that they’re doing it. But I haven’t seen much yet. I think that they have the benefit of a strong development team, they have the benefit of a strong license, and so those are two of the key ingredients. I think they have a good shot. I think the thing that is most underestimated though is everything else around that. There’s a tremendous amount of work and knowledge that you need. I think what’s often forgotten is that Blizzard was the world leader in online gaming before we launched World of Warcraft. Battlenet was the largest gaming network in the world since early 1997. So we had a level of experience that candidly no other game company had and so a lot of the bumps and bruises that we got would have been substantially monumentally worse had we not gone through many of the same experiences with Battlenet and gotton our teeth kicked in multiple times on Battlenet. So we were able to avoid certain things or knew how to better react to certain things than maybe we would have had we not had that experience.

I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that companies have when they’re entering the MMO space is they often times don’t have that MMO experience. And they’ve got all of these different issues coming at them at the speed of light, and there are a lot of issues. And so it makes it very challenging. You can have a great developer and you can have a great license but that’s not it. Those are two of the key components to give you a shot, and so they have that for sure. How well they do will be greatly dependent upon how well they can deal with the other stuff. Because you know that team is going to make a great game. You know it. It’s just a fact. And you know that’s a cool license. It’s a fact. But can you do all the other stuff? That’s what I think companies have to look at. You better have a great franchise and a great developer. You better. That’s a requirement. If you don’t have those from my perspective you shouldn’t do it. It’s just too big of a commitment. But if you’ve got those, that’s the key ingredients to start it out. Can you do the rest? And that’s hard. Because even with all the experience we had we got kicked in the mouth. I mean, countless times. I can’t tell you the number of times that we’ve done things that were wrong or we could have done better or that the players smacked us around. It’s just tough, it’s a tough business, and there are so many more moving parts than anybody realises.

VideoGamer.com: What was your reaction to the reaction to the decision to split StarCraft II into three separate products?

PS: I think the vast majority have been pretty excited by the concept. What it means to me as a gamer, by the way, some people know this, some don’t, StarCraft is my personal favourite game of all time, and I’m not just talking about Blizzard games, it’s my favourite. I’ve played thousands of hours of that game and I don’t think there’s ever been a time that Blizzard has done better work than has been done on StarCraft. That being said I think that we’re going to be able to do a much better job on telling the story of each of those races in a period of time that we’re covering with StarCraft 2 than we would have been able to had we done it in a traditional way. We’re going to be able to go into a level of depth that we wouldn’t have otherwise got. Our plan was already to do two expansion sets and this is what they are, right? It’s basically the core product and two expansions. We were doing that one way or the other, but I think we would have never been able to get into the level of depth for each race that we are going to this way. I think it’s going to provide for an experience that is far superior, and it’s going to provide for an opportunity to have the game sooner than gamers would have otherwise because, had we done all three together it would have taken longer because we wouldn’t have wanted to make the compromises with each campaign that I think we would have had to to achieve a reasonable development timeline that the customers are expecting from us now that we announced. I genuinely, wholeheartedly believe that it was the right choice and it’s the one that’s going to be the best experience for the players. The thing is multiplayer is going to be spectacular from point one, so it’s not like you’ve got to have the other two to have a great multiplayer. So if you’re a multiplayer guy, well guess what, upon initial load, you’re rocking and rolling. It’s going to be great.

VideoGamer.com: What do you say to critics who say that Blizzard is milking the franchise and are going to pirate the game because of the decision?

PS: The fact of the matter is, it’s absolutely, positively untrue about us trying to stretch it out and milk it. People think that it was a monetary driven decision. I can absolutely, positively tell you, with 100 per cent certainty, that that was not part of the conversation. I guarantee it. I give my word. There was never, ever a conversation where we said, ‘let’s do this because we’re going to make more money’. I guarantee it. As a matter of fact the sole reason we did it was because we thought it was going to be a better experience. Anybody that says otherwise is not correct. It is absolutely not what we did it for.

We’re doing just fine. The customers, the players of Blizzard games have rewarded us handsomely for making the right decisions on gameplay. We don’t ship games before they’re done and we try to provide the best experience that we possibly can because that’s our priority. We shipped a ton of games that have been great but we’ve also cancelled a ton of games that every other company that I know would have shipped. We don’t compromise on quality, and so it was a quality driven decision. It’s absolutely not a monetary decision. That’s absolutely not true.

VideoGamer.com: In September, battleforums.com carried quotes from an “anonymous source from inside Blizzard” that said: “Starcraft 2 is still being worked on, but only by a minuscule amount of people compared to what Blizzard put on the Diablo 3 team.” Is that true?

PS: Absolutely not. They are two separate teams entirely. The StarCraft 2 team is the most veteran team at Blizzard. As an example the team lead from StarCraft, the original, is one of the lead engineers on the game. I would say maybe as much as half of that team are among our most seasoned and most veteran players and developers in the entire company. They have not been pulled off. Absolutely, positively not. We used to do a lot more of that though when we were smaller, when we were a one product team or we were a two product company. People know, it is true that we had help from the Diablo team originally to get StarCraft out and vice versa. That is absolutely a fact, but that is absolutely not the fact this time.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is out now for PC. StarCraft II and Diablo III are yet to be dated.