As if you need any more reasons to get both excited and disgruntled about StarCraft II at the same time, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime confirmed to the media yesterday that the closed beta will take place this summer.
"This summer we will beta testing, this phase will signal the final stretch of development. During the Starcraft II beta test we'll begin external testing of our new Battle.net including some features that are designed to connect all future Blizzard games," said Morhaime. "This includes new tools that will make it easier for players to communicate with each other between games. We are also introducing a centralized system that would let players manage all of their Blizzard entertainment games and future games in one place without having to remember multiple sets of log in information."
This news came after Activision-Blizzard's first quarter earnings report which saw the company's $981 million in net revenue surpass their projected $860 million by $121 million.
According to Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, the company's "better-than-expected first quarter results were driven by strong global consumer response to the Call of Duty® and Guitar Hero® franchises and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft®, despite challenging economic times."
In addition to this StarCraft II's lead developer Dustin Browder was on the forums recently and shed some light on the process behind making the Battle Report gameplay videos that fans have come to enjoy. It would seem that we still have at least a month to wait before the beta begins and I know many of us are hoping for another Battle Report before then.
It's OK if you missed the last Battle Report, you can watch it here!
Here’s how it works.
1) We find a good game. This may take hours or it may take a week or two. Depends on how lucky we get. We don’t have thousands playing the game, just a few guys who are skilled enough, and they have other things they are doing, they aren’t just playing 24/7.
2) We schedule time to record the voice-over. This may take days or a week before we can get into the booth. Our sound guys are busy.
3) We capture the game footage from a replay into a movie format. This takes a few hours. If any mistakes occur it takes longer. The guy who does this has another job of course, so he gets to it when he can.
4) The footage gets compressed. The people who do that are busy. It takes them a short time to do, but it may be a day or two before they get to it.
5) Once we have the footage, we go into the sound booth, we do the voice-over, then the voice gets edited and put back into the movie (a day or two).
6) Then the translators get involved and we do the text summaries for our non-English-speaking fans. That takes a couple of days once they get to it.
7) Then the web guys set everything up and it finally goes live.
So the whole thing takes a while. And in the middle of that we are all working on the actual game. When we are working towards something important (Beta) this whole battle-report thing takes a back seat. That’s why you don’t get them as often as we would all like. It’s not something we are working on all the time. It’s something various departments do after hours so you guys can see some cool stuff.
We aren’t “withholding” battle reports to be mean. I swear. =)-- Dustin Browder
