Battle.net head Greg Canessa told Gamasutra that his work on Xbox Live only “scratched the surface” of what Blizzard’s online service is planning with achievements, metagame rewards, avatars, and ladders. Greg Canessa was formerly head General Manager of Microsoft’s Xbox Live and self-proclaimed creator of Xbox Live Arcade. He later became VP of Video Game Platforms at PopCap Games.
On May 2009, Greg Canessa joined Blizzard Entertainment to take lead as Head of Battle.net 2.0 when Rob Pardo proposed him the following: “What if you could build an online game service that had that level of sophistication or greater, but you weren’t bound by the constraints of being a platform provider? You could come out of it from a perspective of, ‘What you could you do with those online game services by deeply integrating them into specific games?’’ —read the full interview
Looks like the wait on Starcraft II due to delay behind Battle.net 2.0 will pay off big time and be worthwhile. Check out 15 screenshots StarcraftWire.net acquired from Blizzard’s Press kit CD which shows screenshots of some of the features interface.
 Blizzard Quote: |
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| We just scratched the surface with Xbox Live of what you could do with achievements. Wow, you can earn achievements. Great. But what if you customize those achievements really deeply and build really compelling meta-game scenarios around unlockable rewards, or decals and avatars, and ladders and leagues for StarCraft II?
Those things would be really hard to do for Xbox Live. Believe me, I was on the other side. We would have loved to do that stuff, but we couldn’t do it because we couldn’t integrate it. Some games, it applies; some games, it doesn’t apply. You can’t do that sort of custom stuff.” |
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