Zerg Coverage >> Dustin Browder Interview




You mentioned this as well when we [referring to that Leord and Dustin talked at BlizzCon '07] talked at BlizzCon and you said that perhaps those things that are early in development might not really be compatible with the stuff you have now, is it a lot of units that are not compatible?

Dustin: I don't know the volume actually; I often forget them because they are usually out of my head, right [smiling]? I'd have to check with the data before I can answer that one for you, that's more of a complicated question.


I was asking Chris Sigaty in the other room about the inclusion of Hero classes in StarCraft II, and he said he wanted to separate the game from WarCraft III and he wanted to make a more straight RTS game. Did at any point consider taking this any further? I would tend to view WarCraft III as quite an opposite from the original games, as it incorporated more RPG elements.

Dustin: Yeah, it was definitely very different.


Well, StarCraft seems very... "conservative" would be a good word I suppose. Were there any other concepts that you discussed at the beginning of the development process that you ended up scrapping because you felt; "no, we want it to be like it was"?

Dustin: Some... By the time I started working on the project three years ago the team really wanted to make a game that was true to the legacy of the original StarCraft. So in terms of "are we being too conservative or not?" We talked about that every day. It was a constant discussion.


It seems to be the key to your success - being conservative. I mean, look at WarCraft and the other games.

Dustin: So looking at what we're trying to do with the game at this point on the design team, I don't really thinking in terms of "conservative or not conservative?", I'm thinking "fun or not fun?". We know we want to make a game that stays true to the legacy of the original StarCraft. We want to make a game that you can look at and go "OK, I played StarCraft and loved it. Oh good, I feel like I'm at home. I'm into this game" and at the same time we ask ourselves: "Are we doing enough units and tactics? Are there enough new strategies? Have we ended up dumping something that players really love that we shouldn't have gotten rid of?" That's still an ongoing battle, that's the line we're still trying to walk.


Did you ever consider dividing the core gameplay? The current trend in RTS games seem to move towards that the strategy will take place on a more arbitrary level, more turn based and then diving straight into the tactics when you do the actual combat. Did you ever consider that?

Dustin: I think if we were making a brand new game from scratch, we might have, but for StarCraft II we didn't really think it would work out that way. We really wanted to make sure that when you came to a game that, especially a multiplayer game that it was already 'even', you shouldn't say: "oh, he got more guys then me".

Since it is such a multiplayer focused game that's sort of how we started out. So with the solo play you'll see there's a little more top level strategy, not so much that it's a strategy map, but certainly because of what we're focusing on.

Especially for the Terrans and around the mercenary force with Raynor, but certainly in terms of the technologies you can purchase, the kinds of missions and players you're going to choose to work for. It does create a little of a higher level game-play but it was really based along the story decision.


Will there be anything like that at all in the multiplayer or will you always have all the stuff from the start with?

Dustin: You will always have all the stuff at the start in a multiplayer game.


Someone asked you in the room before about the storyline, I suppose you cannot go into details about that, but were you able to say if you can play as all three races in the story?

Dustin: We're still trying to figure out how we're going to structure that exactly, there's been a lot of stuff up in the air lately and we've looked at it and tried to assign some interesting ideas for it but I don't know what exactly is going to happen with the overall structure.


Talking about the races, did you at any time consider including the Hybrids into StarCraft II?

Dustin: We've definitely talked about possibilities for additional races but pretty early on the team really decided they wanted to focus on the three core races and the thinking behind this was in a sense the core design success of the game is about how these races play so differently from one another.

If we added a fourth race, we'd risk watering down the other three races and we'd be pulling the features from those races and shoving it into this fourth race. If we don't do a fourth race then we can take all of those interesting ideas that would have gone into that fourth race and shove them into those remaining three.

I was a little sceptical at first frankly, I thought "ah, come on guys lets do a fourth race, it'll be fun" -right? However, we've certainly seen how challenging it's been to make the game that we're making now, how hard it is to get the balance right and everything the way you want it to be, so I think it was absolutely the right call and I can stand behind it at least from a creators standpoint. We think: "no, we need to really focus on these three races and make them great". As much fun as it would have been to have a fourth race it would have cost us.


Yeah, you couldn't really do the Rock Paper Scissor match-up?

Dustin: It's not even just that, of the relationships in StarCraft; lot of them aren't even Rock Paper Scissors, which is one of the things that makes the game so exciting. One of the standard RTS paradigm is that we use the Rock Paper Scissors but a lot of the relationships, especially in the early tech tree of StarCraft, are positional based. It's not so much "whether I beat you" its "where do we fight2,.

Zerglings will crush Zealots in the open field. They'll just overrun them completely, and these are both the core units. Whereas the Zealots, at the choke, will just kill hundreds of Zerglings based on the Zerglings getting all trapped up behind. So in addition to where you fight there are also the questions of micro that are really interesting.

What we are really worried about are overlapping roles, it's a constant struggle for us, but if you go there and play it now you can find a couple:

[Player]: "What about these guys"
[Dustin]: "Yes, I know!! They overlap, oh my god".

But we really try and make sure that if you got a Banshee on one side there is no equal unit on the other. Not just because it has cloak or not cloak but because fundamentally it plays in a different way from other units on the other tech trees and a fourth race would have been a lot more challenging. Maybe not even possible, frankly, to achieve this level quality with the these three races.

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