quote AznLiquid

According to interviews with the Korean progamers during the Zerg press release, they are willing to play SC2 professionally.


I'm hoping there won't be a split in the community between SC and SC2 players. This type of thing really killed the Counter-strike scene.

quote

Q u o t e:
Dustin Browder — Lead Designer, Starcraft 2

Slashdot: How much of the team has already rolled over to Heart of the Swarm?
Dustin Browder: Almost no one. Occasional meetings with Cinematics team, who wants to get a jump on things, and the occasional water cooler conversation. Pretty much everyone is focused entirely on Wings of Liberty.

Slashdot: How much of your work from Wings of Liberty will you be able to duplicate throughout the other two installments of the trilogy?
Dustin Browder: Very little. We have tools and we have an engine, and that's huge. We also have a lot more knowledge of what we're trying to accomplish with the scenes and with the story, so we have a lot of benefit from the software that is already created and a lot of knowledge to help us move faster.

Slashdot: How many of those software tools are going to be available to the community-at-large?
Dustin Browder: As many as we can. Certainly the data editor, the map editor, and the terrain editor. That lets users create pretty much anything the design staff can create. Since the story-mode stuff is put together by one of our designers — he collects the art from cinematics and makes it all happen — all that stuff is accessible as well. I'm not gonna lie to you and tell you this stuff is easy; this guy is really smart, and this stuff is complicated, but it's totally doable. We have seen our fans do some amazing things in the past with a very limited toolset by comparison. In this case we're really hopeful that they will do a lot of cool stuff. I can't even guess what they are going to do. [Dustin gave a panel later on in the day where demonstrated some of the things that Blizzard employees had done in their spare time just playing around with the tools. A few examples were; an "Uberlisk" which had a number of spine crawlers on his back and wandered around terrorizing a board filled with hostiles, a zoomed-in third-person action game with a Ghost as the main character, with the ability to interact with "quest givers" and actually go inside buildings and underground, and a top-scrolling space shooter.]

Slashdot: There has been some talk that the streamlining of commands has been moving the focus away from actions per minute [APM]. How important is APM as a metric for you and will we see a decline in the importance of this metric?
Dustin Browder: That type of feedback is incredibly important for us. We want players making smart decisions all the time and we want a lot of skill required to play this game at the highest levels. We absolutely want the best players to be the best players. We're not looking to even out or flatten the skill curve so that "everybody can be a winner." This is not the first grade. We want this to be tennis, baseball, football, whatever, we want this to be a game that requires real skill. But at the same time we don't want this to be a bunch of bogus skill. We have definitely gotten rid of some clicks, but we have also added some clicks back in. We got rid of some clicks in terms of how you had to select your buildings and how you had to give build commands, but we also made sure that we had the finest amount of control at the same time.

When we originally put it out there we said you could double-click the barracks and hit 'M,' and you get five marines, one from each barracks for instance. The fans were outraged and we kind of ignored them, saying, "Whatever, this is a better gameplay experience," but as we played it, we realized that it wasn't a better gameplay experience. Maybe when you hit 'M,' what you really wanted was three marines and two marauders, and you couldn't do that. Instead we have said you can select all of your barracks at once, but each click sends a build command individually to each of those barracks. So now you are able to hit "M, M, M, D, D." This gave us a decent amount of clicks, but actually the correct amount of control. That's actually the control you wanted as a player. We weren't looking to hurt you by giving you too many clicks or hold your hand by taking away some of the gameplay experience. We were actually giving you the controls that made you powerful by having the correct balance between the two.

Also we have a bunch of macro mechanics in the game to encourage players to control their economy better, because as you know in Starcraft, economy is king. One of the things that we loved about the original Starcraft was not so much that we want you to click a bunch, but that there was a lot of tension between players who were micro-oriented and players who were economy-oriented. For instance, if you are playing Zerg and are micro-oriented and I'm playing Zerg and I'm economy-oriented, we're kind of playing two different races — not exactly, but a little bit. We're having a very different experience, and that style difference now becomes the interesting problem for both of us, and that is what we're really pursuing with a lot of this stuff. So, we've definitely taken some clicks away, but we have added some back, and I think the fans will be fine with it. Certainly the hardcore fans I've spoken with, who have actually had a chance to play the game, seem to be very positive about the experience.

Slashdot: It looks like the new league system is going a long way toward making the play experience much better across the board, and will allow people to grow at their own pace. What can you tell us about how this system works?
Dustin Browder: We think this system will really help a lot of players. Even if you are going to stay down in the copper league forever, at least you are playing against your skill level and can hope to win something. In Warcraft 3, minus the "Smurfs" who would come through and ruin everybody's day, we had a pretty good matchmaking system and you could win about half your games. I know most people would prefer to win about 70% of their games, but that would mean someone else has to lose 70% of their games, and we don't want that. If we can match you against your skill level, I think that's where you wanna be and you'll have a good time. So now, if I can put you in a bronze league of 100 players and all those players are your skill level, that means you have a shot of being number one in that league at the end of the season. I think that is going to be a lot more fun for people. When you go to play intramural softball, you know Sammy Sosa isn't showing up. While it might be fun for about two minutes, it would ruin the game and no one would have a good time. If we can keep everyone organized into the skill level they belong I think everyone will have a lot more fun.

Slashdot: What kind of side projects is Blizzard looking at? Any possibility of expanding things to the console, tangentially-related mobile games of any kind, or maybe another pass at Ghost?
Dustin Browder: Starcraft 2. That's about it. We're really focused and we don't mess around with a research division or anything like that. When we think of cool ideas, we build them until they are done and we don't stop. We had the mobile Armory that we announced, but that's more of a support tool than a new game or stand-alone app. For console, we certainly don't have anything that I'm aware of that's going on right now. I'm not saying we wouldn't explore it down the road; it could be a very real possibility. All of us play console games and we all love our XBoxes, Wiis, and Playstations. The gamers are there, the fanaticism exists in the building, it's just a question of when it will bubble to the surface and find a successful outlet.

Slashdot: How do you see ongoing content being developed? You have the main trilogy, but once you are done with that, do you see discrete content releases of some sort, ongoing smaller patches, or maybe even interesting things like the holiday patches in WoW? The new Battle.net framework seems to offer you a lot more options for keeping people up-to-date.
Dustin Browder: The holiday stuff is certainly something we would like to explore via free patches, just to throw it out there. Other smaller patches like new maps or bug-fixes would also certainly come quickly as it was needed. What additional content we actually choose to possibly charge for, I don't know, but I think it would have to be something of extreme value in order to get excited about that. We don't like putting out stuff that we feel dirty about. We argue about it quite a bit, what is enough value and what isn't, what did it cost us, what do we have to charge, those kinds of decisions. Most of those decisions happen above my level, which is great, but certainly the teams have a great deal of influence over those decisions. Most of that stuff, at least initially, will be more patch oriented, but if we find something that is of real value we'll discuss it.

Slashdot: With Starcraft being so data-oriented, you have already put out some really cool tools for recap and data-analysis. Is there any hope of external APIs so that third party developers can do things like scorebots, profiling, armory-type tools that don't necessarily live within Blizzard?
Dustin Browder: Certainly a lot of that stuff is exposed and is possible for players to get their hooks into. I don't know what will happen ultimately with that, but I'm certainly hopeful that we have a large, happy, thriving community of people developing third-party support tools.

Slashdot: As Linux and open source continue to gain popularity and market share, is there any hope of Blizzard allowing some of the internal Linux-based tools and clients to make their way into the public domain, even if they weren't supported?
Dustin Browder: I have no idea what the rules surrounding that are or why that may or may not happen. I don't know of any plans, but that doesn't mean they aren't happening out there. Certainly we have supported the Mac for years and years and definitely plan to continue to do so. We try to support other platforms, but at this point I don't know of any specific plans for Linux.

Slashdot: The other question that is a constant concern within the fan base of Starcraft is the question of disallowing LAN play. How are you solving problems like making sure this is a valid replacement for LAN plan; security, reliability, speed, or even people playing behind things like NAT routers?
Dustin Browder: These are issues that we continue to address as we go forward. Some of these things we have some plans for, but not all of them. It is something that we definitely plan on working on as we go forward to make sure we have things in place to handle every possible user case out there. We just know from WoW that most people can connect online and play. There are some cases out there, some legitimate-use cases — that aren't just people that refuse to buy a modem or are crazy and weird and living in a closet. We want to make sure we are able to support these legitimate-use cases for LAN play and make it accessible to those users, but we're still trying to identify all of those and decide which cases are legitimate and which are not. These are definitely legitimate concerns, and we're certainly looking to address them.