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Interview: Bill Roper on leaving Blizzard North, starting up Flagship, online plans, and more.
Date: December 1, 2003
Source: NetWars.pl

NetWars Interview with Bill Roper

NetWars: Its have been some time since you and your friends set up Flagship Studios. Maybe you can tell us what happened in that period of time in the company?

Bill Roper: We are all incredibly excited to be startin a new company together. The early days and months of starting up a company are amazingly hectic since we're doing about 100 things at once. Fortunately, we've all worked together for a good number of years (in fact, some of the guys were friends long before they ever worked together), so we are very comfortable with the multi-tasking required during this stage of the process. The game design and technology are rolling along at a great clip, and something new seems to come online everyday. It is a great atmosphere with everybody focused on making absolutely the best game we can.

NW: When you left Blizzard there were many speculations about reasons for this decision. Can you tell us what was the real reason?

Bill Roper: Actually, we didn't plan on leaving Blizzard, but that's the way things ended up working out. Basically, we were looking for a higher level of involvement concerning the sale of the Vivendi Universal Games unit and felt we had to go as far as tendering our resignations to try and open a direct line of communication with the decision makers in France. It was difficult to plan for our futures, and the futures of our co-workers, and with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace.

In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. But going forward, we look at this as a great new opportunity to start all over again doing something we love. Life threw us a curve but, to use a baseball analogy, we're aiming to drive it out of the park.

NW: We know that your ideas for incoming games were called by developers to be your "flagship games." Can you say something more about these ideas?

Bill Roper: Actually, it was when we started talking to publishers that the comments about our game being a "flagship" title, started. As far as talking directly about what our ideas are, it is just too so early in the development of the game to go into a lot of detail. What I can say is that we're going to make a game that is easy to learn, simple to play and has a huge amount of replayability.

NW: Many players are wondering about one thing - will you be doing games like those you made during your time at Blizzard - Diablo, WarCraft and StarCraft. Can You give us answer for this question?

Bill Roper: Although I do believe that gamers who have played the past games we have worked on, we're not looking to simply remake the same games again. We want to go in a new direction in many regards, but the core design philosophies that we tried to put into any of the games we ever worked on, whether at Blizzard or not, are still going to be there. I think we may surprise a lot of people with our game idea, but it is going to be a pleasant surprise.

NW: We know that you are doing your own 3D Engine. For which types of games you`re doing it?

Bill Roper: We're designing the engine to be specifically for our current project and have not really considered trying to create an engine for licensing purposes. We really think it is best to have the game design drive the technology as opposed to the other way around.

NW: I'm curious about multiplayer in your games. Will you be making your own worldwide web of servers working like well-known Battle.Net or will you use already existing solutions?

Bill Roper: We're spending a lot of time looking into how we want to approach this specific aspect of the game, and that may include creating our own online multiplayer destination. No matter what we do, it has to be simple to use and offer something towards the game play experience and the way the community interacts.

NW: Do you want to put multiplayer mode into your first game? If yes, how do you imagine it?

Bill Roper: Our game design has a serious multiplayer aspect, and since multiplayer gaming is something that is in our blood, and there's no way we would ignore that. We imagine creating a simple to use system that allows players from all around the world to be able to quickly get into other gamers (most likely in their general geographical regions) so that they can have the best community and game play experience possible.

NW: What are company's plans for next 2-3 years?

Bill Roper: To work on our first game, make is the absolute highest quality product we can, and then release it to the worldwide community of gamers. Our goals are pretty simple in that we want to create something that is fun, addictive, and then have a great time playing it!

NW: Finally, do you want to say something from yourself to people who will read this inerview? ;-)

Bill Roper: We're honored to have the opportunity to get the word out about FlagshipStudios and what we're doing here to the great gaming community in Poland. We hope that you're as excited about all of this as we are, and we truly look forward to playing with you sometime!