What the hell?? Blizzard is THE last developer that should be criticized about depth! Every game they've made in the last 10 years had HUGE depth, but still accessible to grandmas and grandpas.

And  why do you care about this news if you don't believe that Starcraft 2 will lose depth?

And I say this: Accessibility does not equal "Less Depth or Quality". Fallout 2 is more accessible than Fallout 1 because they made some changes and added options to make the game easier to learn, yet Fallout 2 even has more depth than it's predecessor. Don't compare Blizzard to Bethesda or Lionhead.

I was talking single-player here not Multiplayer. I know exactly how deep and how shallow their games can be at the same time. Been playing their games since WC2 came out. I didn't say that it won't lose depth. I'm saying that whether they have testers does not mean they won't make it less deep. Please leaborate on how they can make RTSes more approachabe than just dragging a box and rightcliking in the middle of the enemy base.

one might question if Civ has lost depth or not, but to me the game clearly has more depth today than in Civ2, for example, yet they have added a lot of stuff which makes the game more acessible in CivIV, from more accessible Civilopedia to clearer messages, assistants, etc.

they probably want to improve the micromanaging side, I dunno if Starcraft has barracks access to the interface (never played it that much really), but that's something Company of Heroes has, it doesn't remove depth but avoids having to alter the focus of the game.

they better not fuck up the hardcore or they will be in trouble because they are the ones that keep the game alive since 1998. I am one of them and i love starcraft hope starcraft 2 delivers, it might not be better, but hope its good enough

While the original Starcraft did not have so many insane difficult levels although saying you did not need any skill to get through the champaings is to take it to far as the last missions for both Protoss and Zerg was actully a little hard and some of the missions in brood war was nearly insane.

That's what you said about maxis and spore..... look how that got screwed up.

Starcraft II being more accessible can only be a good thing.

Npt really, no. Pong is a very accessible game.

OK?

What does Pong have to do with Starcraft?

I agree with the others, attempting to make your game more accessible is a good thing. As long as it doesn't take away from the core gameplay, get as many people interested in your game as possible. I trust they aren't screwing with the balance, as half of Starcraft's sales came from Korea, and most of them probably don't give a shit about accessibility.

As for how to go about it, well, who knows. They can simplify unit production or building, like some sort of automatic mode? There's lots of things going on in an RTS, you know it isn't as simple as *drag box, right cilck.*