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Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty - Interview Part 1
We sit down with Blizzard's Frank Pearce, flanked by Bob Colayco, to discuss one of the biggest PC releases on the year.
Written by Andy Griffiths, 08 June 2010
GamerZines: How difficult was it to stay true to Starcraft's traditions, yet update the game to be suitable for a 2010 audience?
Frank Pearce: We want to honour the legacy of the original Starcraft, we want anyone who has played the first game to feel familiar with the sequel. To get a sense that it's similar to how they remember it, but also introduce new elements and aspects to the experience, so it feels fresh. We've got about half and half new units versus traditional units.
GZ: What new steps have been made to try and introduce new players?
FP: Historically the single player campaign has been used to bridge the multiplayer gap, but we are very conscious of that as it relates to Starcraft II. So we worked really hard on tutorial missions and challenge maps, with the intent of training people in specific elements of the experience that they may not be familiar with. We don't want them to have to pick up tactics by chance, we want to be deliberate about teaching them. If they are new to the experience altogether I'd say to try the tutorials and the challenge maps first.
GZ: People had been using the beta process as pretty much a demo and obviously that had its issues...
FP: That wasn't the intent is at all. Even in the single player if someone wants to jump right in to see the story, we have four different difficulty settings and one of those levels is casual. So if you are new to the genre, those missions will be balanced in such a way that you can still experience the story without too much investment or effort.
GZ: Blizzard has said in the past that there will be premium DLC, what sort of plans are there for that?
FP: There's no specific time-line for that, but we'd like to have a marketplace on Battle.net to provide a medium for map makers to get their content into the hands of the community. Whether map makers, community heads or the developers themselves, we definitely want to contemplate better ways to get all that stuff into the community. We're focusing on a more seamless more way to do it, so that you can get them through the game client rather than going to a website, download it and figure out which directory to put the map in etc. We want it to be integrated and seamless.
PCGZine Issue 43
For our latest Starcraft 2 coverage, click here to download PCGZine Issue 43 for free.Bob Colayco: By giving the users the option to charge for content, we hope that will motivate people to create better content and more gameplay mods, that they wouldn't if they were just doing it for fun.
FP: That is going to be a big undertaking for us, and we don't know when we are going to have that ready.
GZ: A lot of areas of the new Battle.net seem to be trying to fit in the features which you had before...
FP: We need a foundation in place, then we can start building on it.
GZ: Will Battle.net go through big changes before the Starcraft II's release?
FP: We'll definitely have the foundation of a good feature set in place for July 27th. The Battle.net team in a lot of ways is going to be like the World of Warcraft team, they're going to have a long list to implement, and they'll deliver it as they finish it.
GZ: I'm sure you're absolutely sick of the LAN discussion but over a quarter of a million people have signed the petition thus far. It's a big slice of the community, but one that Blizzard don't seem to be listening to.
BC: LAN is not something that we are looking at because we think Battle.net is the future. People get lots of benefits with Battle.net - having access to all your friends, being connected to the game your playing, ensuring that people aren't hacking, all the achievements and the community hub. There's a laundry list of benefits and there have been hundreds of thousands of people in the beta who aren't complaining about the speed, connectivity or up time of the service. It's going to be the right decision to push forward.
FP: If we do our job well and make Battle.net a really high quality experience, then people will quickly forget about LAN, because they will be immersed in the experience.
Starcraft 2 coverage available in PCGZine Issue 43 - click here to download it for free!
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