Bill Roper departs Cryptic

that would be "apt" not app.

I have to agree you are right... unless they forced him out.

PS. Other 'high-level' folks have left too in recent months, so it may be a quiet house cleaning a going ons around them there parts.

You need-a training. Now, Paint-ah fence.


Uuuup! Doooowwwwn!

Make fastah.

I don't want to sound too positive, but when a company wants to dump someone off to save face, they should just do it .....instead of transferring lamebrains like Roper around internally until he "departs."

IMO, best thing to happen to Cryptic would be to close the doors permanently. Anger is the first word I associate when I hear the word "Cryptic," since I feel like they ripped me off 2x with the same game (CO & STO).

Blizzard are excel at making games which are easy to get into and very challenging to master, but it probably has a lot more to do with their corporation structure and management than the actual game developers.

I'll agree that mistah roper doesn't really seem to function outside Blizzard but I don't think that necessarily means he did bad work for them. I think it's fair to assume it's much easier to do good work as a game designer when everything business related in your company is handled by the master minds of Vivendi who even let you work with your design iterations for as long as it takes.

I mean I'm not too sure about CO but with hellgate he had to run a company, handle short deadlines, sweet talk investors while at the same time trying to make a Blizzard scale game. :p

But yeah, he's probably over hyped, at least in my eyes he's only really famous for leaving Blizzard. :p

Having worked with ex-Blizzard folk, I can say this: Roper was a marketing guy at Blizzard. He did a lot of nothing and gets credited for a lot more than that.

Bill Roper got lucky on the Blizzard gig. He was just in the right place at the right time; he was surrounded by successful people and thus was successful by association.

His "success" post-Blizzard has proven that his name is pure hype.

I'm with you there. All that good stuff from Blizzard was a long time ago, and in a different genre of computer game.

I'd be wary of the next thing he's involved in.

The real masterminds were Jeff Strain,Mike O'Brien and Patrick Wyatt who also left to form ArenaNet at that time.

@Goonja:

Indeed. With them attached to an upcoming zombie MMO, Guild Wars 2, and TERA Online, they at least have a history of good decision-making and management.

I agree...

...as much I can't trust Roper as far as I can throw Derek Smart and Bobby Kotick at the same time, I don't think he was the only problem at Cryptic Studios. Him leaving isn't going to remove Retcons from the C Store or magically add 4 more character slot's to your CO account for example. But he was most certainly a part of the problem.

The only disappointing thing about it, is that visible face of all things bad with Cryptic is gone. And to parphrase another outgoing excutive with a dubious track record: "You won't have this crook to kick around anymore."