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Incgamers has conducted a very informative interview with Blizzard’s top developers: Dustin Browder (Lead Designer), Chris Sigaty (Lead Producer) and Samwise Didier (Art Director). They ask some important questions and receive detailed responses. Here are the major highlights:
The Mothership seems like an extremely powerful unit, are there any counters to it?
Sure! It has been changed significantly since BlizzCon. You can use Corruptors, Hydras, Vikings or Phoenixes, depending on your race. It is a unit that you only should build if you have air superiority, as it can relatively easily be defeated if you can’t defend it. It is not a unit you make unless you have air superiority as it will be run over. You wouldn’t choose to make a Mothership without backup.
The Mothership has clearly not been designed to be cost-effective in battle, unless it is able to survive long enough to make good use of its powerful abilities. The Mothership will probably not be used by smart players unless the player is confident of his air superiority or in his the ability to repel direct attacks against the Mothership. Such problematic design might condemn it to the role of a mere coup de grace unit, a common fault in RTS games.
Are there any changes to Creep as such?
Creep has the same functionality as before, besides the new graphics, and how it spreads.
Creep, unlike in StarCraft 1, can now spread through ramps between different height levels.
The Queen seems very much like a Hero Unit, like in WarCraft III, is that the meaning of the Queen?
The Queen can die just like any other unit, and isn’t “resurrected” like Heroes of WarCraft III. If she dies you need to make a new Queen and upgrade her again, to the former unit’s strength. While she definitely isn’t invincible, she can easily take on an Ultralisk for example. She is mainly a really good base defence as she can heal a building for 100 HP very fast early on, and do it several times. What can happen is that your opponent start hammering your building, taking the HP all the way down, and then it’s up all of a sudden, so they might have to beat it down several times. During this time, they could possibly already be dead from the other base defences, or that the Queen’s player have time to do some other action.
Her Deep Tunnel ability makes it possible to escape most dangerous attacks, by just tunnelling to another building, or tunnel between bases. Still, you should be careful with that, as it will be 15 seconds before she can use that ability after it has been activated. In worst case you might find yourself loosing the Queen as you got attacked at a bad time. You’ll find that the Queen can be used in offensive action, but she is better designed for defence, as she walks slowly, and her abilities require creep or buildings, like making poisonous creep.
The Queen is tough enough to fight small forces and even powerful units, like the Ultralisk, but due to her cost and the fact that the Zerg rely on her for some of their most important abilities, it’s better to quickly tunnel away from battle rather than try to engage anything more than a minor enemy company.
What is the Overlord’s new role in StarCraft as it doesn’t transport or detect?
The Overlord can also be mutated into an Overseer, to give you detection. They currently have the ability to slowly increase their sight radius as long as they remain stationary, so you can see more. If you move with the Overseer, you will loose the sight you got by staying stationary, and will have to regain it slowly when it stops again. The main reason the Overlord/Overseer was split is to make cloak more useful, as the Zerg are somewhat “detectorific” if they just send a bunch of Overlords with their units. This way it matters a bit more with cloaking and detection.
The Zerg of StarCraft 1 had what amounted to free detection. Since Overlords were abundant, cloaked attacks were rare (compared to the other races) unless a specific effort was made to get rid of the Overlords first. The Overseer, especially with the new sight radius increase mechanic, provides both a fairer and a more interesting approach to detection for the Zerg.
Can Corruptors corrupt any unit on the field? For instance, can they corrupt a Mothership?
Yes, they can corrupt any flying unit. It depends on the unit’s HP regarding on how long it takes to corrupt it, but all units can be corrupted.
Which race do you feel has changed the most since the original?
The Protoss maby? That is the race we feel has had the most success in development, and currently feel the most developed and most “crisp”. It is really hard to say. You guys are the ones that really should tell us about these things!
That’s how we at the SC2Blog feel as well. The Protoss have been by far the most “stable” race, and we can safely expect that Blizzard is doing all it can to bring the Terran and Zerg to the same level of “crispness” prior to releasing the beta…
Next up, three GameTrailers interviews with Chris Sigaty [1|2|3]. Here are the highlights:
- Blizzard is experimenting with even faster game speeds than the StarCraft 1 “Fastest” setting.
- When the Blizzard strategy team started making StarCraft 2, they decided to remove the hero system of WarCraft III and other mechanics that were added to that game in order to keep franchises separate. They wanted to go back to the “micro heavy, huge army fighting of StarCraft, with more base management“.
- The team did learn a lot from WarCraft III, and added a plenty of UI and battle.net features into StarCraft 2.
- “The ability for players to easily get into matches is key”
- “We have a beta coming up and we look forward to seeing feedback“
And we are looking forward to showing it to you, Chris.
29 Comments to “Post-Zerg Q&A and Interview with Blizzard Developers”
Blizzard 2008 Worldwide Invitational Tickets On Sale »
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“Such problematic design might condemn it to the role of a mere coupe de grace unit”
French : Coup de grâce (= killing blow)
“We have a beta coming up”
“We have a beta coming up”
“We have a beta coming up”
“We have a beta coming up”
!!!!!
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about… Does the Protoss Anti-Grav ability make any ground unit/structure into a flying unit/structure ? If so, we could have some very interesting possibilities with anti-air units. Specifically, could a Protoss and a Zerg player ally to mass-corrupt everything ? Probably not, but it could be a cool mechanic.
Four letters:
BETA!
OH MY GOD!
I WANNA SEE THIS BETA! \o/
SO BAAAAAD!
this is great news. keep it up with the blog:*
Zerg may have had free detection, but on the other hand, the Zerg were the only Race in SC, that didn’t have a cloaked unit. (burrowed units don’t count as cloaked; they coudn’t even attack)
Great news, thx sc2blog.
“the Zerg were the only Race in SC, that didn’t have a cloaked unit. (burrowed units don’t count as cloaked; they coudn’t even attack)”
Lurkers?
And Zerg was the race having the fastest cloaking ability with burrow, and yes burrow speed-lings is a winning combo.
They had no mobile cloaked units, ok.
Cloaked units or not, this is indeed a much fairer approach to detection. While races in StarCraft always had some abilities that the others didn’t, this is a core game issue that deserves to be handled better.
I am guessing the Queen will be able to create detectors (maybe one of the defensive buildings she can whip up very quickly).
The only question is how soon the Overseer can be evolved from the Overlord.
“air superiority”, pssh. the protos already are the dominant air power (so far) mothership, carriers, warprays, phoenix. a group of motherships would destroy anything (planet cracker, black hole, etc)
Since Colossi are vulnerable to air attacks, can corrupters corrupt a Colossus? Also, does the “corrupting” projectile go through shields?
It doesn’t make sense that the corruptor attack would go through shields, since that seems like it would make protoss units overly easy to corrupt for the cost, (protoss unit shields are effectively hit points that work slightly differently from the other hit point category.)
Hopefully motherships will be designed to be cost effective for certain functions (say, having 1-2 motherships to time bomb stuff while the other units destroy the enemies, or having motherships be specialized but good air to ground unit)
B E T A
BigExcitementToAll!!
The game is getting nearer and nearer to finish.
My hands are getting itchy!!
PS: Terran still needs improving
Protoss seems secure
Zerg undergo major changes but are still a bit fragile
Overall: Blizzard’s cool, keep up the progress…remember!!!
Operation Can’t Wait Any Longer (CWAL) We are
waiting….
shame that the beta prolly wont b the one at the invitational.
I really hope that my blizzcon beta will go to sc2 over WotLC or the new undercover project they’ve been developing.
I suppose blizzard developers don’t need a degree in english to program excellent games. The grammatical errors contained within the blizzard quotes were numerous and misleading.
Personally, I think the race with the most change since Starcraft is the zerg and not the protoss. Currently, the zerg stands out too much from the other 2 races with different upgrade schemes, the queen unit that almost parallels the heroes of W3 thus making it a super unit, and completely different defense function. Compared to the zerg, the protoss and terran seems too similar thus making zerg the odd one out. If the upgrade schemes for zerg is going to be unique, I suggest the devs to do the same with either the protoss’ or terran’s scheme. Furthermore, I really hate it when game designers copy a skill from one of their previous games and put it in with a new name (SC2’s Anti-Gravity vs W3’s Cyclone). SC2 should be a new game, not partial recycle of older non-related games.
Furthermore, I really hate it when game designers copy a skill from one of their previous games and put it in with a new name (SC2’s Anti-Gravity vs W3’s Cyclone). SC2 should be a new game, not partial recycle of older non-related games.
I don’t get why a good chunk of people are picking out the “anti-grav = cyclone”, and complaining about spells copied from warcraft 3, there are so many games out now that any type of spell suggested will seem like a copy of some other one if looked for enough. The “lifts unit off gound, prevents it from doing anything” ability makes sense in starcraft with anti-grav, so there doesn’t seem a need to worry about it too much.
I would like to see the other two races (Protoss/Terran) get some kind of a new toy like the zerg did. Right now, the zerg has go the cool factor, a new type of game play with the new queen, etc. While Terrans is just … terrans, and protoss is just same old protoss.
How about giving some new abilities of another dimension of game play to these two races?
example (for arguement sake)
Terrans: Research Center, a building, once you build it, you can accumulate research results, and it will give bonuses to your units or buildings. There are many many things to research which will cost some money here and there, but in the end, it will have some important consequences. If this building is destroyed, then some research will have to start over, but some will stay. Example research items: Anti-carapace rounds, (does some extra damage on zerg.) Anti-shield technology, will be able to rock down the protoss shields faster.
Having this will make the building a primary target for the enemies, which will add some interesting new style of game plays.
Protoss: Mothership boost.
as long as the mothership is in the lower orbit, all units will get stronger shields, and maybe even decreased mana cost for abilities. keep the mothership unique, this way every protoss player will want to build the mothership asap, but again, it will be a major attack target by most players, but this kind of ‘fear factor’ will be cool. Maybe even have it so when the mothership is created, a warnring messege can be sounded like the nuclear launch, something like “A protoss mothership has descended into lower orbit.” Will sure cause an enemy to change strategies here and there.
Cool ideas.
I wonder how much Blizzard will really divert from the core design from now on…
A beta can fix any problems with balance– some units may end up getting nerfed so hard they don’t get used, but still balanced. Battle.net is where we need to see some results. Blizzard has been very hesitant to suggest any of the improvements there, but I’d really like to see some network latency and bs/harasser reputation built in. Also, map distribution in the form of on the fly visible Torrenting (instead of clients automatically uploading the entire file, regardless of bandwidth) or perhaps a URL for the file itself to be gotten automatically (DOTA updates frequently mean you can’t join a game until you have the map, but everyone is too impatient to allow someone to download a new map so this should get sped up.)
With that said, when this game is released, I’m buying a new iMac and SC2 even if Blizzard goes radio silent today.
Those of you who have played Dawn of War will recognise this, but I think that it would be cool if Terran buildings (apart from ur starting ones) were dropped from orbit (like I said, Dawn of War, play space marines and you will see)
This also goes for units-It adds realism, I mean protoss warp their warriors in, and zerg literally grow them, but terran warriors seem to just magically appear at the barracks or whatever.
Although I know, Blizzard can’t just copy Relic’s ideas, so maybe think of other way to make terran unit production realistic, unless there are women in those buildings…
women or cloning facilities (cough)
i think that the barracks are juz facilities to fit in armour for the marines. they were there all the while in the barracks juz that they havent been trained nor outfitted yet
i wonder if queens shuld hav infest ability like teh corruptors, juz mech units. if they suffer enuff dmg, they becum corrupted and fails to operate
“I would like to see the other two races (Protoss/Terran) get some kind of a new toy like the zerg did. Right now, the zerg has go the cool factor, a new type of game play with the new queen, etc. While Terrans is just … terrans, and protoss is just same old protoss.”
My sentiment is similar, though not identical, to this one. It seems that with every race revealed we’ve gotten a really cool “badass” unit to go along with it. First the Mothership, then the Thor, then the Queen. Unfortunately, fans saw the mothership first and started whining about it being too powerful. Then fans saw the Thor and started whining about it being too much like siege tanks. Whether or not they were right, it seems like both these previously badass units were nerfed into simpler, more expendable units to compensate for balance and fan fears about the dreaded “superweapon.”
Now that the Queen has been revealed, I agree that it’s time to put the “bad” and the “ass” back together again when it comes to the Thor and the Mothership. I think all three races should have one unit which meets these criteria:
1) It’s important in gameplay (and not just used by players who have functionally won already)
2) It feels COOL, as in has a wide range of interesting abilities or is just more powerful in some badass-feeling way
3) Although tougher than most units, it should be easily balanced so that players who choose to build ONLY that unit (e.g. 8-year-olds with no strategy but getting the most of the most powerful unit) or don’t support it properly will find their superunit destroyed en masse by a lower tier of units
Anyway, those are my three qualifications for the “superunit” or, at least, “badass new unit” that each race should get, which, if I understand Blizzard correctly, are represented by the Mothership, Queen, and Thor respectively.
“example (for arguement sake)
Terrans: Research Center, a building, once you build it, you can accumulate research results, and it will give bonuses to your units or buildings.”
I think this idea isn’t really this different from how terran upgrades usually work.
But I had another idea: I think it would be interessting, if terrans would have different paths they could follow, but which are all mutually exclusive. Just imagine it as if in SC1 you could have only build a covert ops OR a physics lab but not both, just a little bit more complex.
Like beeing able to specialize in Anti-Protoss or Anti-Zerg fighting, which helps getting bonuses against this specific Race, but getting weaker against the other (or not specializing at all, gaining nothing and losing nothing). Another example would be Anti-Air/Anti-Ground, or even more than just two paths: Reseach for Speed/Research for Armor/ Research for damage.
So even if there are multiple Terran players in a single game, they could still differ greatly from each other, making it necessary to apply different strategies and therefore increasing the complexity (and fun) of the game
I don’t understand why people are so afraid of the New Queen Idea. It has been stressed over and over it is NOT a super unit, It is an UNIQUE unit. Which is very different from WC3’s Hero. Major Differnce is in WC3 hero player has quite bunch of HP to start with (500 or so), thus can take quite some pounding; where as A Zerg Qeeen has only 160 HP at first stage which is same as a zealot, Protoss’s first offensive unit. and 250 HP at Lair Stage which is not a lot of HP considering it’s at early mid portion of the game. (info acquired from: http://starcraft.incgamers.com/forums/vbarticles.php?do=article&articleid=17) if you checked out pro-gammer in some gameplay video, playing SC2. You will find Queen dies easily. I saw queen died 3 times, IN ONE GAME!!! And twice in other game. She died to about 4-6 zealot. It was pro-gammer who was playing, not some random people who never played SC before. The thing is Queen was moving very slow and with low HP, it took zealots no time to surround her in her own base. I was disappointed when I saw queen died one time after another, but then I thought it’s a new concept and we just gotta see how it works out, instead of kept on saying “It’s a super unit, it’s not fair to other race, give some other things to other races.” And Blizzard did keep on repeating they are separating Queen from Heros in WC3, thus it is not a super unit, and they do not intend it to be in any possible way.
I bet if the sequence of introduction of Zerg Queen and Protoss Mothership were switched, people would be complaining Zerg doesn’t have anything special, please give something to Zerg since Protoss got New Toy, the “MOTHERSHIP”. Queen seems like special and COOL cause it is NEW, just been introduced in past week, that doesn’t mean Blizzard didn’t give anything COOL or NEW to Terran or Protoss. Zerg players has been waiting for their race to be introduced for almost one year. Think about the shock we had when we first saw Mothership.
I am not saying people doesn’t have the right to suggest or complain. I am merely saying do some research before come online and make false claims (ie Queen is a super unit). I trust blizzard will make the Queen concept work and it will be as balanced as they could wish it to be.
Nice idea, annonymous, the one about multiple paths to follow.
research paths i mean
for the terrans
BRAINWAVE!
(or really mostly jus expanding on anonymous’s idea)
Expanding the idea of anonymous’s (or just giving some examples) where terrans have different paths to follow, How about:
THOR: choose to be either anti-air (like in the current build) or anti-ground (like at BlizzCon). So basically you build a Thor, but the guns on its back aren’t online yet. (It can still use railguns on arms and move.) So you upgrade it to bring it’s dorsal guns online, and you calibrate them for Flak-Cannon rounds OR plain old artillery shells for bombardment.
MARINE: like the Thor, except you upgrade them to either have a better gun, or grenades (basically increasing ranged attack) OR give them bayonets and possibly shields (basically increasing Melee)
There could be different ones for different units, but I think a whole new dimension to gameplay, allowing you to counter againt the enemy more effectively. Your Terran enemies building a whole lot of Banshee’s late in game? send in the Flak-Cannon Thor. Zerg player building Banelings? upgrade Marine’s ranged moves to kill the banelings before they get near enough to pulverize you.