In a recent interview with Shacknews, Starcraft 2 lead designer Dustin Bower revealed some interesting details regarding Blizzard’s highly anticipated RTS.
Battle.net
Bower told Shacknews that the new Battle.net still has a way to go, and it is unclear when Blizzard will be happy enough with it to go ahead with the multiplayer beta testing phase.
Shacknews was shown a running version of the latest Battle.net, only to be told afterwards “What you saw today is not where we’re going. It’s a version that we have that has a lot of problems that we don’t like. It was never meant to be the final version, but we’re getting further and further away from that being close to the final version”.
Single player campaign
The most interesting details to emerge from the interview were in regards to StarCraft 2’s single player campaign.
Bower revealed some Terran mission concepts that Blizzard is excited about.
“The kinds of things you’re going to be doing in missions, I think is pretty cool stuff that maybe players aren’t quite prepared for,” Bower said, going on to elaborate:
“We’ve got a mission right now where every five minutes, lava rises and kills everything on the ground. Everything dies. You’ve got to get to the high ground or die.”
“We’ve got a mission where infested Terrans are attacking at night, but they’re hiding in the ground by day, so you need to just hold out all night long like you’re in I Am Legend. Like, “I’ve got to live!” and then day, “Get ’em! Kill ’em while they sleep!” And you run out and you burn everything as fast as you can, and then when darkness starts coming you have to get back and hide out.”
“We’ve got missions where you’re trying to defend a Terran colony that’s getting infested one piece at a time, and you’ve got to try to put out all these fires while fighting off these infested units.”
“We’ve got this mission where you are a lone ghost trying to influence the course of an entire battle. So each of these missions is like a little minigame.”
Bower stated that Blizzard is trying to avoid repeating mission types as much as possible. This was arguably the biggest downside to the free-roaming campaign style implemented in Dawn of War II. While players could choose where and when to perform certain missions, after a few hours it became apparent that many of the side missions were simply repeating a very simple formula.
When asked if Star Craft 2 would avoid repeating such “mission archetypes”, Bower responded by saying “I’m sure there’s repeated content, but it’s not by choice. As much as we can we try to make them different. So if we have a hold-out, we try to make the hold-outs different as much as possible.”
“We come up with a little mechanic that sounds really cool, and we go, wait a minute, what if I just do this and build the 200 food and I’ll win. [sighs] It’s a constant check and balance between what is fun, what feels unique, and what’s too fancy. What’s just over-the-top too complicated, can’t possibly understand it. So I think for a lot of players it’ll be a pretty unique experience. It offers a lot of choice for the player.”
At present Star Craft 2’s single player campaign structure is sounding similar to that employed in Dawn of War 2 but with more ambition and less repeated content.
To read the full interview visit Shacknews
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