Zerg Coverage >> Chris Sigaty Interview

Morten
Are you going to support any type of macros in the game, like World of WarCraft has?

Chris
We don’t have plans to have it. We were talking about potentially putting in so you can set up your own hot-keys through the user interface, but not a macro in the sense that you can do several things at once with the push of a button.

Andreas
Have you ever thought of making a “classic mode” or anything like that?

Chris
We have definitely talked about it, and we think that StarCraft exists to cover that and we want StarCraft to continue to do that. We are not trying to wipe it out or trying to erase it. No matter what, it’s going to happen [a “classic mode”] because the editor that’s shipping with StarCraft II is even more powerful than the WarCraft III editor! We know for *sure*, that the community will create [a classic mode] and we’re tossing out the idea ourselves on how would we support that if we wanted to? I don’t mean we have come to a decision but i guarantee you that when the game comes up there will be classic modes that somebody will put out there. Probably within the week [laughter from all].

Gunnar “Leord” Petzäll
Do you have a lot of knowledge of the specific unit stats?

Chris
Somewhere. You can fire away on it.

Leord
Do you know if Battlecruisers will be able to switch between Yamato guns and…

Chris
They pick a path and then that specific unit is is set that way. So it is a *per unit* basis. So for example, if you go Yamato Cannon, then that particular Battlecruiser will always have Yamato Cannon. The Plasma Turret fire air to ground AoE basically, and you have that choice. So you cater your army a little bit at that higher level to…

Leord
So if you need the food to do something else, you basically need to send them to a suicide mission to kill them off?

Chris
Something like that, yeah.

Leord
‘Cause you can’t salvage them or something like that?

Chris
No, you can salvage buildings only, no units can be salvageable. Even Thors are not salvageable, currently. I mean the idea of salvage is pretty unique to Terrans right now, but I can’t see that it would be impossible to apply beyond the building level.

Leord
Do you know if the Marauder’s Concussion Grenades will slow down attack speed as well as movement speed?

Chris
It’s just movement speed, currently. But you know what, that’s a good one to ask Dustin specifically, I don’t know right now.

Patrik Hellstrand
What do you think of the community support so far?

Chris
Do you mean by the actual StarCraft community? There are a lot of avid fans and we have been getting a lot of interesting questions because there is such a big community that exists already. I would love to hear a little bit more from the fans, what the fansites would like as additional support. We have Kevin Yu [Karune] that is giving out information as much we can. Myself personally, I am a little concerned about how we’re giving info, because we are actually saying a lot more than we have in the past. And in fact, even this press event is an example of that. So our website, the Colossus does a particular thing, it now shoots in a line damage AoE and our page shows him shooting in a sweeping beam that follows units. There are a lot of outdated things on our website because we are being so forthcoming about where we are. Compared to especially the hardcore community and the fansites, I think we look really outdated, so luckily you guys are running with the info and getting it out there so people are able to get to a source that has it right. It’s hard enough keeping good quality, screenshots, footage and information up on our site. If we had to iterate at the level that you guys do, we wouldn’t do anything else.

Leord
Yeah, we spend more work hours in the community than you web team ever could do…

Chris
Yeah, absolutely, that’s right! Well, it’s not the web team… Well actually yeah, they did screw things up [laughter from everyone].  It’s us too, I mean like these press events and just us releasing info, it takes a lot of time. I mean our team ends up saying: “alright, we want to work on the things that makes it more up to par on how it will look when it ships”, and we end up concentrating on that. In the meanwhile we are not concentrating on something else, so it’s difficult to walk that line.

Morten
It goes without saying that you are heavy about getting a very good fanbase to your games, here at Blizzard.

Chris
M-hm.

Morten
But at the same time, would you say you are also heavy about the hardcore fans? I’m thinking in some times they might be a bit detrimental to your progress.

Chris
You know, you have to take each thing with a grain of salt and recognize what they are, because in each community, there are the people that never really played, and we want those people to have an easier time than they had with StarCraft. StarCraft *is* pretty hardcore if you go back and check. You have the average gamer that has played it, and the hardcore player with very specific needs, talking about the littlest detail. I think you have to value the voices to some degree and I don’t…

Morten
...That takes a lot of time though, doesn’t it?

Chris
It does, it can take a lot of time, but I think it’s important that we *do* hear that, because they understand the game at a level that others don’t. So, if these average gamers or some of the middle-of-the-road gamers make the jump up to being at the hardcore level then it’s important that the hardcore gamers have identified our intentions.

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