By Blizzard Entertainment
With the sequel (out Tuesday), Blizzard Entertainment's developers wanted to retain "a lot of the same sort of core feel of the original," says Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive vice president of game design. "We wanted it to be very fast-paced. We wanted players to be able to defeat each other in under like 15 to 20 minutes (and) we wanted to focus on base management, resource collection, big armies. Those are the things that we carried over."
STORY: StarCraft II launched for a new era
"The other thing we did was we really reimagined each of the races and all of their abilities and all of their units," Pardo continues. "The comparison I've used in the past is, 'Imagine if someone was going to reinvent chess. It still has the same board and the same deep strategy, but all of the units are different'."
By Blizzard Entertainment
Pardo: Back then everything was much smaller in scope as far as these blockbuster products go. It was a much smaller product back then. Back then the big games were Command & Conquer and Warcraft II which Blizzard had previously done. We were trying to expand the genre and do the first big multiplayer real-time strategy game that had three complete different sides and races. That was really the big ambitions back then. It certainly wasn't to set the world on fire.
What was the size of the development team?Under 30 people, so it was very small in comparison to the teams nowadays. (Today) the core development team is 60 on the development team. But we also have lots of support groups that are quite sizeable. We have a Blizzard film group that does our pre-rendered cinematics and in-game cinematics. We have an online technology group that does all the Battle.net support. Back in the original StarCraft days that was just a couple guys on the development that worked on that stuff. Now we have full-featured departments that do those pieces of the games by themselves.
How long has the development been for StarCraft II?We began working on it after Warcraft III shipped. So seven years.
And the story we left off with in that game picks up where?The way that we crafted the StarCraft II story was really with the expectation that we'd get a lot of people that probably never played the original StarCraft. We almost developed in the way you might develop a movie. We'll catch people up on the core story points that happened in the original StarCraft.
By Blizzard Entertainment
In the middle of all that is his love interest Sarah Kerrigan, who was betrayed in the previous game and has now turned into the queen of the alien race that is going to come in and invade and try to basically destroy everything.
So for those who don't know much about StarCraft II, talk a bit about the multiplayer mode.
Multiplayer doesn't have any of the story interactions and the cinematics or anything like that. That is really just a way to play a game against another player, playing one of the three major races. There's the Terrans, the Zerg who is Kerrigan's alien swarm race and there is the Protoss, the elder enigmatic race that has the most advanced technology. When you play multiplayer, you can kind of take the helm of any of those races and then play with and against other players that also are playing one of those three races.
How big can the multiplayer battles get?
In co-op, we go up to four vs. four. Generally, I think the game plays the best at 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 level.
Any advice you'd give on what race a player should pick to play as?It kind of depends. One of the things people find the most if they are brand new to the genre of real-time strategy games is you kind of learn a lot about your play style as you play through the single-player campaign. Usually we tell beginners to start by playing the Terrans, just because a lot of their units intuitively do things you would expect because they are not alien. Everyone knows what a tank does and what a space marine does.
The Zerg are a real interesting race because they are very much a swarming race. So if you like to build huge armies, they are great race. The Protoss are a little bit more of a finesse race in that they have lots of technology units and spell-casting units. So they are a little bit more advanced race to play at first, but they are just as strong as the other two races.
Do you expect professional StarCraft gamers in Korea to move over to StarCraft II right away?We don't know exactly which pros are going to move over, but we do expect to see a pretty big movement. The way that kind of works with any sort of E-sports is that the more popular the game gets, the more popular it gets as a professional sports also. If the game goes as well as we hope it will you will definitely see a very large E-sport around it and hopefully it will end up replacing the previous StarCraft in Korea and worldwide.
And there are plans for two expansions, correct? Do you have a target for releasing those?We haven't said anything yet except the typical Blizzard answer of 'When they are done.'
In other Blizzard business, what does the arrival later this year of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm mean for that franchise?I would say while the name is very dark and oppressive what it should mean for the World of Warcraft fan base is more like rebirth. We are really taking the opportunity with this expansion to make everything that is old new again. We want to go back to that old world that we launched six years ago and make it all fresh again. ... Take all the things that we have learned over the last six years, all these awesome things that we have been doing in the previous expansion sets, we wanted to bring all that back to the original World of Warcraft experience.
By Blizzard Entertainment
So what is the "cataclysm" that is happening in the game?Our big villain, Deathwing, a huge black dragon, he has sort of cracked the world, which is the story backdrop for why the world is changing. He is the big villain who has broken out of the bowels of the world and is on a rampage across the lands of Azeroth and Kallindor and has really changed the world forever now. Our hardy group of adventurers who level up to level 85 are going to have to face him and defeat him.