Q&A: StarCraft II Lead Designer Dustin Browder
Wired: First off, you guys revealed the trilogy plan today. Is there a concern that ... I wrote a post on the announcement and a lot of people were saying “they’re gonna totally screw us and hold back information to put into the expansion.”
Browder: No. Not at all. No, fuck that. We’re not doing that at all.
The game, the Terran campaign, just got too big. It’s just too big for it. We coulda nerfed it. We totally could of. It was within our power. We talked about it, about like “we should make this a 12, 10-mission campaign, we’ll just go cram it all in,” but we just couldn't bring ourselves to do it. It would have sucked, right? It is not going to be cool. There’s just so many things that go on with Raynor and the marooned ships he has out there and the other characters.
Plus, we wanted to do new stuff and introduce some new characters with their problems and see them interact.
It was just too rich and too big and we started falling in love with it and we wanted to do it, so we looked at it and said, “Well, we can play the game and try to do it all. Like “a lot” play the game. And I don't think we want to do that. I don’t think the fans would be happy either.
Or, we could just cram it down, which is something we are not going to do, so that’s done.
Or we can break it up into 3 different products and have this really bitchin' Terran campaign. So that’s what we decided to do. And, y’know, looking back on it, there was much concern when we talked about it. We were all freaking out, saying “we can’t do that, but we have to, but we can’t!” We really went back and forth on it a lot.
Looking at it now, after I’ve seen how much further we’ve come in the campaign, I am absolutely convinced it was the right move.
Wired: Why’s that?
Browder: Because it’s such a better experience, because it can breathe a little bit, because it’s not so constrained, because we’re not trying to jam one epic moment after another into a 10-mission campaign until it doesn’t make sense anymore.
(...)
Wired: So is that -- assuming this all works -- it seems kinda reminiscent of what Valve is doing with Half-Life 2 where they originally stated it was episodic, but then they decided to make the episodes their own games. Is that the direction Blizzard wants to go with their games?
Browder: I don’t think we've thought of it in that sense. It’s not like we considered the philosophical choice of whether we want to be more or less like Valve. We just looked at this product, this problem, and this was our solution.
I mean, definitely, what Valve is doing came up in our discussions. “They’re doing this, is that something that would work for us?” but it’s not like a premonition of things to come. This means nothing to Diablo -- unless it does. Unless they go “Hey, we’ve got the same problem, maybe that would solve it for us.” But I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case.
(...)
Wired: You guys have said over and over again that you don’t really do consoles. There were console releases of earlier Blizzard games that, well, they worked, but they were obviously not the main focus. EA has recently had a lot of success (or at least financial success) bringing their RTS games to consoles, like the Command & Conquer series. Is there any thought to doing that with StarCraft II?
Browder: Well, we’ve obviously thought about it, but we felt that the control scheme just wasn’t there. Command & Conquer may be comfortable with it, and it may even work for their game, but we don’t think it would work for ours.
StarCraft is so freakin’ fast, and the control is so important. We just kinda felt that it wasn’t going to work for this game. In the future if we find a game that it will work for then we’ll talk about, but right now, for us, it’s all about the quality of the experience when we put out anything.
And our whole business is built on quality, right? So we can’t put out something that ultimately is going to be a B+ or a B- just because we could make some money doing that. It’s just not allowed. Nothing but the best, and that’s it.
Colayco: Y’know, if you’ll meet me on the floor tomorrow, I wanna take you to see some of the pro players who are playing War III or StarCraft ...
Wired: Oh, I’ve seen those guys. They’re insane.
Colayco: I just want you to see -- don’t even look at the screen -- I want you to watch their hands and what they’re doing. Then tell me if you could do that with a controller.
Browder: Yeah, there’s absolutely no way.
full interview here: http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/qa-starcraft-ii.html
Great interview.
