During Games Convention 2008, Frank Pearce, senior VP at Blizzard, told GamesIndustry.biz about the progress of Starcraft II, working with online communities and the lessons learned from World of Warcraft's success

The details are as below:

In 1991 a company called Silicon & Synapse was founded by three graduates from UCLA - Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. That company was later renamed Blizzard Entertainment, and is now one of the most influential and successful videogame businesses in the world.

During this year's Games Convention GamesIndustry.biz was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Frank Pearce, now senior VP at Blizzard, to talk about the progress of Starcraft II, working with online communities, the lessons learned from World of Warcraft's success, and how to keep secrets.

Q: First of all, how is development on StarCraft II coming along?

Frank Pearce: Yeah, it's going pretty well, the game's pretty fun to play. There are guys back in the office who are playing it multiplayer and are having a good time, so that's always a good sign.

We've got a lot of work to do still on the single player campaign, and we have a lot of work to do on the Battle.net feature set, so we don't have any specific release date in mind - because we have so much work to do.

Q: What's the feedback been like so far from fans and the community?

Frank Pearce: I think the folks who have had an opportunity to play it have enjoyed it.

Q: Have there been any different opinions across territories? It's a game that has strong global success.

Frank Pearce: No, the feedback's been pretty consistent in each region.

Q: When it comes to putting together a sequel for a benchmark title like StarCraft, do you look around at what other companies have done in the genre since the original title?

Frank Pearce: Yeah, we've got a lot of guys on the team that are pretty passionate about playing RTS games, so they're playing all the games that come out as they're released. We don't try to chase feature sets for the sake of chasing them

If it makes more sense for the game because it's fun, or makes it more immersive, compelling or whatever it is, then we certainly want to do that. But a lot of the feature set we've got with StarCraft II, we've used our previous series of RTS titles as a foundation.

So like Warcraft III, the replay functionality wasn't something we contemplated from day one, it was an afterthought and wasn't implemented as well as it could have been - so that's something that we can do from day one for StarCraft II, which should be pretty cool.

We want to take the storytelling component in the single-player campaign to the next level, so we're talking about branching missions, decisions on the gamer's part in terms of the technology that's available to them - there's a lot of buzz on the Internet around social communities, and we've got those social communities around our games and we want to leverage that to bring those players closer together on Battle.net.