AusGamers: Thanks heaps for talking to us today Dustin, our community have a lot of questions so I'm just going to jump into it beginning with a question about dual monitors support - have you guys implemented this?

Dustin Browder: The system is in place, and you can use it, but it doesn't change the experience. It's not a focus of the presentation and it may not end up in the final game, but we certainly haven't ignored it.

AG: How will you go about getting newer players into multiplayer? It's an intimidating mode because of how popular StarCraft multiplayer is - will there be opportunities to practice mp skills offline, or anything along those lines?

Dustin: There's a slower speed setting and we have some spaces where you can practice learning what you need to learn. One of the bigger tools we have left is we have these challenge maps we're doing where we sort of show you some core multiplayer skills and then we ask you to practice them and then you can beat the challenge at different levels; you can go practice your basic levels like harvesting, defence against a Zerg rush, you know stuff like this so you can practice your macro, practice your micro and just get much better.

Then the final thing we have to service new players is we have a vastly improved score stream which gives them some really important information. Our previous score streams were fun, but they didn't really give you anything useful, they just sort of told you what you killed and what died; this score stream is going to be giving you information on how you managed your resources, how much you were floating so you know if you were spending your money well, how many workers you built, how many workers he [enemy] built - so you can see immediately if you were behind in resources, combat efficient ratios... stuff that will really give you a lot of information that will hopefully put you on the path to being a better player.



AG: What features/tools will be available for custom maps we maybe didn't see in WarCraft 3?

Dustin: Oh, we got a lot of stuff. I have a whole talk at BlizzCon about what's different about our map-editor, and you know we're still putting it together, but yeah, you know the map-editor is easily the most powerful tool we've ever done; you've gotta understand right, StarCraft and WarCraft 3 taught us a lot in terms of what we wanted to do and what we could do for the community, but I don't think anyone was prepared for the explosion of custom maps that came out of WarCraft 3. I mean the community really showed us what could be done. And so everything we've done with StarCraft 2 has been in reaction to that - like, "wow they can do that? Then what if we gave them THIS!" type of thing, so we've really gone out of our way to provide a lot more tools and a lot more power where you can literally create any RTS you want to create from this editor.

So saying that, everything we have, you'll have in your hands - it's almost a scripting system for the creation of units, you're not just dependent on our abilities anymore or having to generate your own code, you can really script all new units and abilities and at the same time we've got all kinds of crazy custom maps that are going to ship with the game and a bunch of stuff we're hoping users will take to. So the reality is dude, I have no idea what the community is going to do with this editor, but it looks like it's going to be pretty exciting.

AG: So there's no specific SDK? This is all built into the game's editor?

Dustin: Right - everything we can do with the game, you should be able to do with the game.



AG: Jumping into the singleplayer side of things: what sort of time-frame are we looking at for completion? (Based on an average RTS player's abilities).

Dustin: I don't know for sure yet - we're still working on a lot of the game's balance and the balance of scenarios, but I would guess (and this is a very rough guess) it's approximately 25 hours, 20 to 30 - somewhere in there. But I haven't watched a lot of really casual players play yet so it's hard to say. I'm always surprised at how much longer it takes the guys I'm watching play this do some of the stuff, but that would be my guess.

AG: In saying that, not having had much of a chance to see casual players hit up the game, has it been difficult to find that 'Blizzard Balance' between the truly hardcore and the casual player?

Dustin: The challenge for us is the design team know the game so well; it's hard for us to know how to balance it. So we rely a lot on external feedback. We have a lot of people in the studio who are not hardcore RTS guys who help us out a lot and so we've been going to them for feedback on what's difficult. In terms of our design process, for the solo campaign we have a set of tools that allow us to tune the game, so we have four difficulty levels as opposed to the three we had in the past, and the fourth really allows us to let the hardcore guys run free; our insane difficulty level is really just crazy - it allows them to be really, really challenged.

In addition, there's a good possibility the players will be playing off-difficulty, like, they won't be playing the difficulty level they should be - they'll just look at the values and think they should be playing Normal, when really they should be playing Hard and so what we've done is add a lot of secondary objectives throughout the campaign that really require you to stretch quite a bit to complete them and so we're hoping the players who think that the main missions are kind of boring will do these secondary objectives and kind of create their own level of difficulty based on that.



AG: The game looks stunning, and while awesome to play, firing up the old game is a stretch because it looks so dated, so are you maybe planning on re-releasing the first game running off the new graphics engine?

Dustin: It's something we've definitely talked about a whole lot - oh my God we've talked about it. And it's something we really want to do. But we believe that such a game will exist about 10 minutes after fans get a hold of the editor (laughs). And we welcome that and hope it works, but at the same time I think it's definitely something we'll be talking about internally down the road; we chose not to do it just now because of a couple of reasons, the biggest though being scope.

You gotta understand, StarCraft was so finely balanced and for StarCraft 2 we changed the pathing because of the new engine and it ruined everything (laughs), you know, the Zerglings were ten times more powerful, the Zealots were ten times more powerful and all because we changed that pathing and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the changes - there were all kinds of changes happening in terms of things like how the units move and shoot and it really just fundamentally altered the experience, especially in terms of how responsive everything was, you know scouting with SCVs in StarCraft 2 is so much easier than it was in the first game because the units move so quickly and fluidly from waypoint to waypoint; they don't stop, rotate and then move, they just sort of move very quickly from place to place.

So we ultimately just thought it would be too difficult to make that translation and make it accurate without putting a ton of work into it and I think the fans would find the same thing; if you just put out a straight translation, you know, just putting the original numbers into this engine, everything would end up broken. But it's definitely something we'll continue to talk about, I mean we want to play it too - everyone wants to play it, right?

AG: So the extended release period from 2009 into 2010 - which has been suggested to have come about to fine-tune Battle.net - could you run us through any potential changes you'll be making to the service, and obviously you'll be using the extra time to polish the rest of the game gameplay-wise, but how about visually? How far along is the visual side of things?

Dustin: We're not finished at all, and we'll keep going. And we'll definitely be using the extra time to make it ready, and we'll just keep going until we're there. We have more stuff we want to do with the multiplayer, we have more stuff the artists want to do, you know, they're still hard at work - it's not finished visually yet. We have a ton of more work we want to do on the campaign and a tone of more work we want to do on performance.

Battle.net is really the area we want to shine, and we want to do a lot more work on it, but the added time through that means we get to do all the cool things we want on the game, so we're going to be doing that .

AG: Well we're out of time Dustin, but thanks for your time.

Dustin: You're welcome man, those were great questions.

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