Dustin Browder - Page 3
I went into the graphics options screen for a second because I remember how bare bones it was in the old StarCraft which I have been playing a lot lately. There are so many more choices now. It is ridiculous: reflections, shadows, everything you can turn on and off. I don't know if people really understand how exponentially different this product is. What has been the most daunting thing for you guys on the design side?
Wow. So many choices. The biggest deal, I think, for us is how much to change, what change is enough change, and what change is too much change and trying to balance that out, because we want to create a new product that has got its own distinctive flavor and styling. Yet, we want to stay true to the original game and make sure that when you come to see it, this is StarCraft. This is the game I know and love, right?
But it is also a different enough experience that as you are playing through it, there is actually stuff for you to learn, new challenges for you to overcome, new things for your to experience and enjoy instead of just a carbon copy of the original. So that has probably been the hardest thing, walking that line. I don't even know yet if we have done it or not. Many people have said that we have failed. Many people said that we succeeded. I guess we will see. That is not where I want to be. I don't want to be 50/50. A lot of that is going to be up to the fans, like when it gets into their hands and we see what they actually think when they are playing the game for real.
When we bring people in to play, the response has generally been pretty positive as opposed to people who are just reading about it on the Internet and getting scared, which I understand. But it will be interesting to see, once we get the Beta out, to see what the real response is to see, "Did we walk the line? Is there enough new that you are enjoying it, but yet it still feels like StarCraft?"
Were you saying in the theater this morning that originally or in some version of the game you are actually sort of free roaming the ship and walking from area to area versus instant travel?
Yeah. We never actually had you physically walking. We never had you actually controlling the character with the arrow keys or anything like that. We definitely had more animations with him moving. We slowly chopped it all out, like, "Go!" as opposed to like a slow, "Here I go! It is fading to black! Oh, God. You are killing me, right? Get there already!"
We have definitely done that. But there has definitely been sort of a joke we have been telling on the team that all of our feedback would be like, "I had to walk all the way to the armory." It is like, "Dude, it is one click! Oh my God!" Well it is two, technically. But yeah. It is definitely an interesting challenge in this space. RTS gamers are not always used to this kind of new experience. It has to be our own thing. We can't just say, "Oh, it is like a BioWare game," because it is not, right? We don't have the amount of content that they have. Our content is a lot more deep in some ways than theirs is.
At some point, Mass Effect is me with a ray gun. At this point, when I go into battle I have nine units, and this map, and these objectives, and this lava, and like, "Woo!" Like it is really a different experience. At the same time, the kind of gamer that comes to our game is looking for a different experience as well. So it has got to have some of those elements, but it has also got to be a little lighter in some ways.
We know about the destructible barriers like rocks, and now we have seen lava, which I am guessing is not going to be a component of multiplayer. Are there other things coming along those lines that are in the game?
For solo play, yes.
I think Chris may have told us the last time we were here that you may actually even play as one of the other races in the single player in this?
Yes.
If we were here for the rest of the week, would we be able to play through the full Wings of Liberty? All the missions are in there and everything?
Well I wouldn't let you, but yeah. You could. *Laughter* Yeah, but you could theoretically. It gets a little uglier past the point where you are at. Like, characters start talking without moving their mouths. And you have some animations like, "I thought that guy was dead. What is he doing here?" You have a few bugs like that. So it definitely gets a little rougher. But yeah, all the missions are there to some level.
There are two missions right now that are on my watch list. It is like, "We might need to redo those from scratch," which kind of blows. But you have got to do what you got to do. But I don't think that we have more than those two that need that kind of kick in the butt.
Well that's not bad, considering there are 30 levels.
Yeah, not too bad. I am not going to say they are all polished. Don't get me wrong. But there are things that don't feel right and are still a little bit nasty. But in terms of missions that might need a reboot...And even then, we might be OK. We have one being tweaked today. And if that tweak is good, then we can probably put that one in the bag and just tune and polish them now.
What are you scared of the most reaction-wise from people who haven't seen this yet?
You mean from the solo play stuff?
Yeah. Are you afraid they are just going to completely not like the new single player system?
No. That has been pretty positive. The biggest concern I have is that people will look at it and assume immediately that it is Fallout 3. You know, like, "Well that must mean I can choose good or evil for Raynor. That must mean that I can have ... there are probably 700 missions out there that I can choose between and I will only get to play half of them." I get those questions pretty consistently. They are like, "It is Fallout, right?" I am like, "No. It is not like Fallout."
I mean it looks like it a little bit I guess because there are 3D characters now and I say there is story, so you get confused. But it is not like Fallout. It is not like Mass Effect. It still is an iteration of the real time strategy genre where we have taken something cool and made it hopefully a lot cooler. And hopefully in some ways it is a little revolutionary in the sense that you get more choices about what you do. You are not just on the rail with the designers shoving a unit down your throat. But at the same time, it is still a real time strategy game.
So you are going to begin where you begin. You are going to end where you end. And you are going to make some decisions along the way. But the fate of the StarCraft universe is not in your hands. That is still in ours, because we really want the universe to have a kind of continuity. We want to end in the same place we begin for the next one, and we want the books and the novels to go where they are going to go. We want to have a story here that is real and consistent as opposed to whatever, whatever. So that is, I guess, probably the biggest fear I have, is players look at it and misunderstand what we are trying to do. And then they get freaked out that we didn't fulfill their expectation.