Do you think there's not enough creative risk being taken in the industry?
Roper: It's a difficult balance to strike. Games are gigantic, expensive endeavours for the most part. Functionally I think a lot are pushed towards more casual games that have smaller teams... smaller budgets, and they're able to take more leaps of faith and more risks.
But when you're making something of a very large scope, that millions and millions of dollars are invested in, for the people with the money - which for the vast amount of time is the publishers - they're rolling expensive dice and they want to make the surest bet they can...
...What's the most controversial decision you've made with the game?
Roper: I think the most controversial decision is the one we didn't think would be controversial. That was having the subscription element. The way I look at it is people, for some reason, expect the worst (laughs). So that made is controversial to some people, when it really isn't and shouldn't be and I get a little confused as to why that is.
You can buy the game as a stand-alone product, you're going to get 40 to 50 hours of story-driven gameplay. And that's the first time you go through it. You can go through it again as a different character class, and it's going to play extremely differently...
Then you can go online and have that same experience with friends - and more - for free. That was something we really wanted to do and something we knew there was going to be a level of expectation for because of Diablo.
Then for players that what to then continue growing the game, they want more stuff ... every three months we want to have much bigger content dumps. Things where you're not just getting gameplay mechanic changes or events but you're getting entirely new artwork, new areas, new monsters, new skills and items, even things as big as new gameplay modes - new damage types that alter the way the game is played - even things as big as new character classes. Things you only usually see in expansion sets.
Being able to push those things out, obviously we have to be able to maintain a full team to do that.
We want to be able to do that, and for people that want that, then they can subscribe. But they don't get less of the game because they don't, they just don't get it moving forward.
