Warcraft Adventures

Why Warcraft Adventures was canceled

GameSpot: However, despite the renewed design, things still weren't going in the right direction. When did you get the sense that Warcraft Adventures might not ever reach the vision you wanted and that it might have to be canceled?

Bill Roper: Well, we sat down as we were gearing up for E3 of 1998, and both Starcraft and Adventures were ready to show. We were taking a very hard look at where the product was at that point, which we always do around E3 because we know we'll get asked tons of release questions, so we like to get as firm a grasp as possible on where we really are [on a project]. We really just started talking about what was there and what needed to be there, and I think that there were a couple things that made us think the game was not living up to our expectations.

I think that if there was a fatal flaw in the project it was that we were a little too nostalgic. We definitely identified a lot of very strong things from classic adventure games that were missing in the adventure games at that time, like strong characters, strong storyline, excellent vocalization and acting... and interesting, fun puzzles that tied into the storyline. And while we definitely had all of that, I think that by that point we had really fallen behind a certain technology curve. And if the game came out, I think that people would have bought it and said, "This is really fun, but this would have been great a couple of years ago." We don't ever want to have a product that is like that, where the view on it is that it would have been great two or three years ago.

Certainly by the time we were getting into the release window we wanted, that was the same time Monkey Island III was to be released (and LucasArts started development around the same time as us I think). And I think that Monkey Island was a very strong [brand] in adventure games, and it was doing that more-nostalgic class of adventure game to a hilt. Grim Fandango had already been announced, and the early screenshots of that were showing that Lucas was really going to start going to the next level of adventure games. So we killed the product and said "For this to be a Blizzard title, for this to have that certain something and spark that we believe our games have, there has got to be something that takes it to a level that people don't expect when they get the game." And we didn't really feel that the game had that. And so it was an incredibly tough decision. I mean we worked on the project for well over a year and had poured a lot of time and effort into it. But we knew that it wasn't going to meet the expectations of anybody here and certainly not the expectations of our fans.

So we had to make the hard decision to go ahead and cancel.

Executing orders to kill