As Blizzcon looms near, Blizzard’s key employees and community managers have been dishing out quite a few interviews and have re-iterated through almost every key aspect of StarCraft 2. Karune, Frank Pearce and others have commented on key issues such as MBS, the new Gas Mechanics, Single player and Account unification issues. However, the build used as the basis for all this coverage is none other than the WWI two-month old version of StarCraft 2.

Out of two dozen Interviews, we have picked the bits of info that shed additional light on what is already known about Blizzard’s RTS flagship.

Gameindustry Interview highlights:

So like Warcraft III, the replay functionality wasn’t something we contemplated from day one, it was an afterthought and wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been - so that’s something that we can do from day one for StarCraft II, which should be pretty cool.

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We want to take the storytelling component in the single-player campaign to the next level, so we’re talking about branching missions, decisions on the gamer’s part in terms of the technology that’s available to them - there’s a lot of buzz on the Internet around social communities, and we’ve got those social communities around our games and we want to leverage that to bring those players closer together on Battle.net.

Blizzard is definitely aiming high with its next-generation unified gaming platform. Blizzard’s new account system, the online store and the Global Achievement system. Coupled with Frank’s “social” vision, these ingredients form a recipe for a unique and unprecedented gaming platform, bringing together gamers from very different genres under one massive roof. It should be noted, however, that the social gaming niche is already being explored by services such as Raptr.

Q: Do you see lots of crossover between the different players of your games?

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Frank Pearce: We did some research, and I can’t remember which direction we did it in - whether it was StarCraft players that played WoW or vice versa - and there’s a fair amount of overlap.

In a brief reply to VG247, Pearce also confirmed one of the most obvious estimations one could make - StarCraft 2 is not planned to be released in 2008.

“This year? Like, 2008? Too much work to do,” Pearce told VG247.

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He added: “We don’t have a specific release date in mind yet. We still have too much work to do.”

StarCraftWire, Incgamer Network’s new StarCraft site, managed to score quite an informative Q&A with Karune during the PAX expo:

StarCraftWire.net: Will the Medivac Dropships be able to heal each other?

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Karune: No, the Medivac Dropships will not be able to, however, SCVs can still be brought to them in order to repair them

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StarCraftWire.net: Will it be possible to play Starcraft II at LAN Parties?

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Karune: While the idea is still there, the main focus right now is Battle.net and Multiplayer to determine whether or not LAN will be available.

Unlike StarCraft: BW’s medics, Medivacs won’t be able to keep themselves at full health throughout the battles, and will require maintenance to be kept operational. We will be seeing more SCVs coming with every Terran infantry drop in order to keep these vital support units alive.
Considering the wave of coverage about Blizzards grand account unification plans, we can expect Blizzard to pay significantly more attention to the way players interact with their centralized systems, and implement only the minimal, if any, features for closed multiplayer environments.

StarCraftWire.net: When can we expect to see more updates to the Starcraft II official website, and what can we expect to see?

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Karune: Not really sure when there will be an update to the site, although there may be misc. updates now and then for units, but otherwise waiting for closer to the Beta to really update the website.

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StarCraftWire.net: Has there been a decision on what units will make it into the final game?

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Karune: No real decision has been made really, we’re still trying to decide what units will make the cut, as you’ve seen that we dropped a couple units, one of our goals may be to try to keep the unit number closer to to that of the original Starcraft as we don’t want to have a unit be in the game and have it be useless to the battle.

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StarCraftWire.net: What is Blizzard currently focusing on in Starcraft II?

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Karune: Single player. Single player is still our primary focus right now, as it’s our main concern, afterwards, our focus will be on the multiplayer aspect which shouldn’t be too difficult, with the Editor being our final focus for Starcraft II.

Blizzard Developers’  StarCraft 2 single player efforts have long been mentioned, but it was the technical aspect that has really shown how much development and thought is invested in this somewhat overlooked aspect of StarCraft 2. SC2’s single player campaign was worth developing a separate and innovative 3D engine for, and the hype just keeps coming.

An interesting glimpse into the long term StarCraft Universe strategy is provided in this TotalVideoGames interview:

VG: You talk about expanding the lore this time around in a similar manner as Warcraft II to Warcraft III; the next step after Warcraft III was World of Warcraft, so I have to ask - is this laying down the foundations for the often rumoured ‘Universe of StarCraft’?

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Pearce: Anything we do to evolve the storyline in a franchise lays the foundation for whatever we want to do in the future. One of our goals with these franchises is to create rich, deep worlds that we can use to leverage for all sorts of things, whether it’s novels, comic books, games of different genres, or even movies. We’re also in the process of trying to have a Warcraft movie made.

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Colayco: In recent months we’ve had a StarCraft board game introduced, and manga comics. So having a greatly fleshed out lore and background to a story lends itself to all these different projects.

These are not fantasy plans, either. The WarCraft movie is due to be released some time during 2009, and is produced by none other than the makers of 300 and The Dark Knight - Legendary Studios. Serious business, so to speak. Leveraging a rich and immersive Universe to build a multi-million fan base that follows it across multiple genres and platforms is perhaps the best and most challenging long-term strategy a VP of Product Development can embrace.

We have read through many StarCraft interviews, articles and videos in order to extract the maximum updates from the recent news wave, which to remind you, is still based on the WWI build.

Brace for Blizzcon.

Blizzard’s co-founder, Frank Pearce, has come out with a statement sure to excite StarCraft fans in an interview given to VideoGaming247.

When asked about the possibility of a 4th race in StarCraft 2, Frank deals the usual response:

We talked about the possibility of a fourth race early on, but we felt like we had a finite amount of great ideas and wanted to make sure we focused all the cool, best ideas on the existing three races rather than diluting those ideas across four races.

However, for the first time, Frank gives hope when it comes to the inevitable StarCraft 2 expansion:

We don’t have the resources or time to add a fourth race to the launch of StarCraft II, but I’m sure in the event that we decide to do an expansion set it’s a feature that’ll come up for discussion.

This is the first time a Blizzard representative has not completely denied the possibility of adding a new playable race to StarCraft 2. Blizzard have been very adamant in their choice of sticking with the three original StarCraft races, which they decided to further explore and differentiate between. It will be interesting to see how they tackle the challenge of introducing a completely new race to the delicate balance currently evolving amongst the three existing races in StarCraft 2.

Next up, we have a few bits of information about StarCraft 2’s most recent gameplay tactics, straight from the mouth of Blizzard - Karune, Blizzard’s community manager. First up, Karune discusses a sneaky tactic employed by the Terran.

Thought I’d share with you guys that in internal gameplay, we’ve had some poor souls find out the hard way that apparently if you are playing Terran and you immediately lift off your command center to a close by high yield mineral field, you will easily make up the difference of the time lost from collecting minerals during that period, and essentially be able to out produce any other race very quickly. Thus far, it seems like it is easy to defend this new fast expansion strategy. Nonetheless, I’m sure it will be balanced in the coming weeks, but thought it was funny so I thought I’d share.

The yellow, high yield minerals currently provide 50% more resources than the normal, blue variants. Since the Terran Command Center, like all Terran buildings, has a natural ability to lift off, maps with a closeby yellow mineral patch make this almost a crime not to abuse.

Karune has received a few suggestions to “fix” this issue on the forums and responded to them:

Making lift off a researched ability and hard coating the minerals both seem like interesting ideas - I’ll be sure to forward that along to the devs. Like I said before though, this has only worked on ‘certain’ maps. If anything, those maps could be modified slightly and it would probably fix it.

Knowing Blizzard, this strategy will likely still be viable on certain maps, but in a balanced way that allows the other races to respond to it without being at an obvious disadvantage.

Karune’s next post discusses the Mutalisks’ ability to bunch up tightly and function like a single unit, attacking targets for very high damage, as well as utilizing their attack cool-down time to move. This tactic requires some micromanaging skill to accomplish, and has become a favorite discussion point in Q&As. This is what the situation is like, currently:

There has not been extensive testing of this yet, but in terms of Mutalisks, players will be able to stack, but it will be much harder to keep them clumped up. As more info surfaces about this, I will keep you informed.

Also, Mutalisks at first in StarCraft II while slowed down a bit before they attacked, but the code has been fixed to allow it to attack on the move like the original StarCraft.

It seems like Mutalisks will still be able to attack and move if used by skilled, agile players, but creating a Korean Mutalisk super-unit will be significantly more difficult.

ATI - AMD’s “Advances in Real‐Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games Course“, during the highly technical SIGGRAPH 2008 conference, included a whole chapter dedicated solely to the implementation of the shader framework and the rendering techniques used in StarCraft 2.
As the name implies, the paper, which won’t be an easy read even for seasoned programmers, is a part of a course with the following prerequisites:

Prerequisites
This course assumes working knowledge of a modern real‐time graphics API like OpenGL or Direct3D, as well as a solid basis in commonly used graphics algorithms. The participants are also assumed to be familiar with the concepts of programmable shading and shading languages.

The StarCraft 2 engine definitely has a split personality, and for a good reason - there is a fully interactive, playable “Story Mode”, which requires a completely different form of real-time rendering. Rendering four high-resolution characters and a detailed static environment is quite unlike rendering two hundred units with hundreds of constantly changing lighting sources, but both of the above scenarios must be supported by the same engine.

Starcraft II is supported by an engine that in many ways has a split personality; during normal game play we typically render scenes from a relatively far away distance, with high batch counts, and a focus on action rather than details. At the same time, we really wanted to push our storytelling forward with Starcraft II, and this is where the game’s
“Story Mode” comes in. In this mode, the player generally sits back to take in the game’s rich story, lore and visuals, interacting with other characters through dialogues and watching actions unfold….


…story mode generally boasts lower batch counts, close‐up shots, and a somewhat more contemplative feel – all things more typical of a first person shooter.

All technical details aside, Chapter 5 includes one over-quoted statement which presumably reveales the GPU system requirements for StarCraft 2.

Yet we also wanted to utilize the full potential of any available hardware to ensure the game’s looks were competitive. This meant supporting a widerange of hardware, from ATI Radeon 9800/NVIDIA GeForce FX’s to the ATI Radeon HD 4800s and NVIDIA GeForce G200s, targeting maximum utilization on each different GPU platform.

The above statement effectively puts the minimum requirement bar at an ATI Radeon 9800 or at Nvidia’s GeForce 5 family - cards which have been introduced more than 5 years ago. Blizzard’s developers are staying loyal to their tradition of aiming for the mainstream and putting an emphasis on gameplay instead of intense system punishment.

Reports from the Game Convention in Leipzig are streaming in, but considering that the presented build is actually identical to the World Wide Invitational one, nothing major is expected to be either announced or discovered during the event.
IGN’s brief interview with Frank Pearce, Blizzard’s senior vice president of product development, hasn’t revealed much, but it did confirm that there is no super-secret  StarCraft 2 closed beta testing group, and that the beta is months away at best.

Currently, the testing for StarCraft II doesn’t include that many people. “It’s like a limited internal alpha phase,” says Pearce. “The development team that’s working on it is playing it and we’ve released some alpha builds to some other development teams internally and then the quality assurance department is also playing it.”

…We asked when the field of testers might expand to beyond Blizzard’s walls. “That’s months away,” said Pearce. “We still have to expand our internal alpha to include the rest of the organization, iterate on that feedback, and then we have to evaluate what kind of beta we need, whether we need one at all. There’s a pretty high level of certainty that we’re going to need a beta and then we have to decide if we want to do a host beta or a closed beta or both. So, months.”

Another interview was given to VideoGamer, with Frank’s line remaining consistent - things are going well, but the game is far from being being ready to be released.

VideoGamer.com: Which leads me nicely on to the next question which is when will they get the chance to play the game? Do you have even a rough ballpark for when the game’s gong to be released?


FP: Not really. We still have a lot of work to do. Anyone that’s had the opportunity to play it at any of the shows we’ve shown it at might think wow, this feels pretty good, this feels pretty complete, so why don’t they just release it? But we still have a lot of work to do on the Battle.net side and we still have a lot of work to do on the single-player campaign side. And until that stuff is done, the total package isn’t there.

The second part of the interview, however, is interesting, and sheds quite a lot of light on the development and decision making processes inside Blizzard. When the interview touches WoW and the possibility of a StarCraft MMO, Frank puts things in perspective by reminding that World of WarCraft has been in development since 1999, and says that bringing the StarCraft Universe to the same level won’t be easy.

VideoGamer.com You’ve made it difficult for yourself!


FP: Yeah, we’ve made it very difficult for ourselves and it’s an overwhelming thought! I’ve been there at Blizzard since we started on WoW and it’s been a very long and arduous journey. And to think about taking that journey again with the StarCraft franchise is a little scary! It makes an RTS like Starcraft 2 seem very achievable [laughs].


VideoGamer.com: Fans say a StarCraft MMO would be great, but they don’t see your side of things do they?


FP: The World of Warcraft team is 135 people. The StarCraft 2 team is 40 people.

During the interview, Frank also confirms that unlike StarCraft (which was ported to Nintendo 64), StarCraft 2 is not planned to be ported to any sort of console, mainly due to the game’s fast pace.

FP: It’s not something we’re specifically planning for right now. The development team is working on the game and the interface with the PC and the PC interface peripherals in mind.


BC: One barrier to entry there is just the speed of the game. If you look at how the RTS genre has evolved a lot of it has slowed things down, make things a little bit more, not a plodding place, but a little bit more of giving players more of a chance to evaluate. StarCraft is really action packed.

All in all, It looks like once again, StarCraft 2 fans are going to have to wait for BlizzCon for real news and information about the game.

Blizzard hand picks the events which are used to showcase its pre-beta stage games, and it is not often that StarCraft fans are presented with the chance to play the current StarCraft 2 build. One such event, however, is about to take place on the 20th of August, 2008, in Leipzig.

An announcement on WoW Forums by an official Blizzard poster, confirms that 

We’re excited to be able to showcase some of Blizzard’s games at this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig from 21 to 24 August. We’ll be providing playable demos of StarCraft II(http://eu.starcraft2.com/) and….

This is not the first time that the Leipzig Games Convention is used by Blizzard to showcase StarCraft 2. Even though last year’s event was anything but exciting, the comfortable location provides a great excuse for European gamers to attend one of the fastest growing and important events in the industry.

The most important thing you should know about this event is… the pricing. This is the cheapest way to play StarCraft 2 - tickets go for as low as 4,50 Euros, and you can pre-order here.

Day ticket** 12,00 €
Day ticket, reduced rate* 8,50 €
Evening ticket (from 3.30 p.m.) 6,00 €
Day ticket, child rate  4,50 €
Day ticket parents (adults in the company of children) 8,50 €
Four-day ticket** 29,50 €

Children up to the age of five years have free admittance with the company of an adult.

* Concessions apply to schoolchildren, students, pensioners and the unemployed
** Cards in the advance booking available