Bill Roper Interview Followup

HomeLAN have posted its second Q&A with Bill Roper, this time as former Blizzard Vice-President to find out more about his departure from the company along with the three co-founders of Blizzard North:

First, Roper assured us that at the time of our previous conversation neither he nor any of the Blizzard North co-founders were planning such a drastic move. Basically he said that they wanted to have more of a say in the direction of where Blizzard as a company was going to go in the future. "We really felt that for ourselves and for the people we worked with that we wanted a more direct pipeline," Roper said. However, Roper said that it was made clear to him and the Blizzard North co-founders that such an opportunity would not be made available to them by Blizzard's current owner Vivendi Universal Games so they all decided to take their leave of the company. However, Roper did say their decision was not taken lightly. "I was literary a month shy of my ninth year with the company," he said, "None of us were doing this because we wanted to.'

Roper said that he and his colleagues made sure that Blizzard and Blizzard North would not be adversely affected by their departures. Roper told us that Blizzard North currently has two unannounced projects in development but that he expects that the studio responsible for the hugely successful Diablo game franchise will continue to make great games. "We don't want to see Blizzard North or anything they have worked on disappear and we don't believe they are going to," he said.