Kings of the World 2009-10-24 00:00:00this.
Seated comfortably in a rather grand old house somewhere in the leafy English countryside this week - well, outside London in any event - we had
a chance to talk to Sigaty, accompanied by Blizzard PR coordinator George Wang, at length about the forthcoming European launch, some of the problems inherent to running a game of this type and how Blizzard plans to deal with them, the benefits of the stress test, and Blizzard's stylistic approach to games in general. Oh, and since Sigaty also acted as producer on Warcraft III, we decided to sneak in a question about what that team's been up to since then. We'll get slapped for that, but it was worth it.Eurogamer:
Do you have a planned European release target at the moment?
Chris Sigaty:
We're saying right now winter. We hope to do it as soon as possible after the initial launch, but we don't even know for sure when we'll launch in the US and we are trying to do a simultaneous launch in two regions currently - the US and Korea - and with all the interest from Europe we actually think that the ramp-up is going to be extremely quick, and the closed beta should start any day. We're not going to run that for anywhere near the length that we ran the US beta, because really a lot of that was getting the balance down and all that - that's not going to be necessary - so we expect the game to go out very shortly after the US does, and we're currently saying we're targeting this winter.E...