On the eve of StarCraft II: Wings Of Liberty’s UK midnight launch, we met up with lead software engineer, Carl Chimes and vice president and managing director of international operations, Mike Ryder in London to discuss the burden of developing a sequel to an institution, how e-sports have fed into its development and how Blizzard hopes to attract less hardcore players.
Did you feel any pressure developing the sequel to a game which has become an e-sports institution in South Korea?
Carl Chimes I think the development team is it's own worst critic, and whatever pressure we felt came from within. But yes, there was a tremendous amount of pressure from ourselves to do the best possible game that we could.
Carl Chimes, lead software engineer on StarCraft II
How did StarCraft’s e-sports uptake affect the development process of the the sequel?
CC Both the professional players and the amateurs are very important to us and we did a number of things to get it to both audiences. On the pro-gaming side we greatly enhanced our replay functionality; you can look at people's replays, you can bring up a leaderboard, you can see where they were at with their resources and unit counts and you can fast forward and rewind and so on.
We took the core of StarCraft as far as the multiplayer aspect goes and decided to live by our design philosophy of ‘concentrated coolness’ - keep those three races but re-imagine them and think about how we can make them more distinct from one another yet retain the finely tuned balance that we had in StarCraft - the same fast paced action game with hundreds of units battling it out on the map. Generally speaking, Blizzard games are easy to get into but difficult to master. We also have further plans going forwards which will really support the e-sport community.
And how about players not earning a living from their Zerg army?
CC On the more casual side, we've made it much more approachable. So for example there are lots of tutorials in the campaign that teach you how the UI works with the mouse, how the units move around and stuff. And once you're done with the campaign, we have nine challenge maps which teach you things like unit balance, how to defend against rushes and how to use the hot keys - they're meant to guide you towards the skills that you need to play competitively online.
Protoss carriers attack a Terran base
Once you're done with that, you can team up with your buddy, make a party and play against the AI or other players cooperatively and competitively at the same time. And once you're done with cooperative play with your friends, you can also choose to play competitively [against strangers]. We've designed a state of the art matchmaker which finds players of a similar skill level to your own, so you're always playing on the edge of your seat but against somebody you can beat.
Also, the editor we're releasing with StarCraft II is the same tool our developers used internally. We released it with the beta, and we’ve seen all kinds of new genres that people are coming up with like racers, puzzle games, first person shooters, side-scrollers etc. So we think the community itself is going to make all these great games, and as soon as you make a game you can publish it to Battle.net and then everyone can enjoy it.