We attended Blizzard’s StarCraft II media event, which gave us a chance to play around with some new campaign missions, and learn more about gameplay mechanics such as research, upgrades and mercenary units. We also got to chat with Lead Designer Dustin Browder about cut units, concentration of coolness and the prospects of a release ‘very soon’.

sc2data: You’re not announcing the release date for StarCraft II yet. Let’s put it this way: Have you already booked your next vacation or is it still too early?

Dustin Browder: [laughs] It’s always a mistake to book your vacation too soon. When you’re a software developer, anything can happen. So we are not booking vacations yet, but we are getting very, very close. We are looking to put out a disc very soon. We will have some more work to do for the day-one patch, but we are very close to a final version of the game.

sc2data: What is the most important goal for your multiplayer design besides balance?

Dustin Browder: Tightness. Our goal is not the biggest game possible – that’s easy - I could put in 10 more units today. But our goal is to make it as small and tight as possible so each unit feels really cool and really special and really unique. We have units in the campaign like the Firebat versus the Hellion. They’re not exactly the same. The Firebat is way tougher and the Hellion is way faster. But they both have a flamethrower that does line damage that’s really good against Zerglings and Marines. If we had both of those in multiplayer it would feel a little same-same, not as interesting. Let’s have only one unit that does one job, and if you want that job done - that’s your guy.

»One of our mantras here at Blizzard is ‘concentration of coolness’.«

We’re looking to make it both balanced, as you say, but also the tightest game possible. One of our mantras here at Blizzard is something we call ‘concentration of coolness’. The goal is not to make the biggest cool game you can make: the goal is to squeeze all the cool into the smallest space possible. We feel like that makes the game very intense for all players.

sc2data: The Challenge Missions are supposed to be a bridge between campaign and multiplayer gameplay?

Dustin Browder: We want to teach players some of the fundamental multiplayer basics. Lots of players who play campaign think it’s OK to have 5,000 minerals in the bank - ‘If I have money in the bank in real life, I’m winning, right?’. But every mineral you have in the bank is a mineral not shooting the enemy on the battlefield. We’re trying to teach some of the basics that traditional solo play never taught. And hopefully the players will learn from those lessons and when they go out on BattleNet and lose a game, they have some ideas as to why they lost. They can look at it and go ‘Oh, I didn’t collect enough resources, I should make more workers’, and that’ll make them better players – hopefully.

sc2data: Do you remember any major design decisions that caused debates during the development process?

Dustin Browder: We did a lot of different work on the story mode environments. We tried different rooms, we tried different combinations of rooms, we talked about doing it with only one room at a time... At the end of the day, I wish we’d spent less time on it. But the creative process is not always pretty; it’s often very messy and all over the place.

»The list of cut units is long and distinguished«

In terms of multiplayer units, the list of cut units is long and distinguished. I think we’ve probably done another whole race’s worth of units, easily, that have been cut out of the game at one time or another. Those are more painless for the most part. There are some special units for certain people that they thought were going to be great but we ended up cutting out. There were Purifiers, there were Spore Beasts, there were Terran Officers, all kinds of crazy units that just didn’t quite make the cut.

On the solo play side, creating something unique for 29 different missions is not so easy. And so in many cases, we would make a mission and go ‘Wow, this is really bad. This is the worst mission I’ve ever played.’ And we’d have to scrap it and start again. Certainly the first mission of the Zeratul line, that mission went through three or four major different revisions. At one point it was a base-building mission, at one point it was just Zeratul, no Stalkers were involved... We went through many major revisions on that before we finally landed on what we have now, which is a much better experience than the other three or four versions we had before that.

sc2data: Has there ever been a new race on the table?

Dustin Browder: Not really. When I first got here, that was one of the first questions I asked. And Sammy [Sam Didier] and [Chris] Metzen and Rob Pardo told me ‘We got a lot to do with these three’. Like - We’re not done. Maybe we should have done Brood War 2 and Brood War 3 – but we didn’t. And we want to do more with these races, there’s a lot unexplored. And how are you going to make a fourth race really unique and special and different? So we talk about it all the time, no question. It’s a real challenge if we ever do decide to do it, but it was never really a serious contender for this product.

»I was like - ‘I’ll do whatever, I’ll clean your cars, what do you need?’«

sc2data.com: Is StarCraft II the first game you’ve been working on at Blizzard?

Dustin Browder: I got to work a little bit on The Burning Crusade when it was shipping. I volunteered to make some quests which was awesome – it was so much fun. It was such a great team to work with. That was me working as sort of one of the lowest level designers they had. I was like - ‘I’ll do whatever, I’ll clean your cars, what do you need?’- because I was such a fan for WoW. Here I was working in this studio and they’re like - ‘We’re trying to get this game out, we need help’ and I’m like - ‘What do you want me to do?’. So I got to work with them a little bit, I made a few quests for Terokkar, I made a few quests for Hellfire, really fun stuff. But StarCraft II is my first big release at Blizzard.