For the uninformed Dustin Browder is StarCraft II’s lead designer. A lot of fantastic stuff in this article, a must read.
VG247: Are you seeing any specific trends from the beta?
Dustin Browder: We’re seeing all kinds of feedback. Some of the feedback we’re taking very seriously; quite a lot of it, of course, we’re not. Players are still learning the game and they’re going through a lot of the stages we went through in development, when we learned the game. What we’re definitely seeing right now is a general weakness in Terrans versus Protoss and Zerg, and this is from stats we have internally.
Our internal stats show us that Terrans are down in 1v1 versus Protoss and Zerg, and our internal stats also show us that Terran-Terran teams are also taking a hit in almost every match-up. This we believe to be largely because of map design. The Terrans lack some of the mobility to come rescue their allies in the early game, and we do have fortress maps in the beta, but we have several maps that aren’t fortress-style maps. We’re going to change the maps a little bit and see if we get different results, but the Terrans being down is something we’ve started to address and we’re going to continue to address in the coming weeks.
So far, the beta numbers we’ve been looking at have been very, very positive. We’re close to a 50 percent win ratio for almost every race.
What level of concurrency to you want to get to before the end of the beta?
Dustin Browder: I think we want to maintain about 10,000. It’s sort of our goal, and we’ve just about hit that at this point. I can see we’re at 9,000-something right now, and 10,000 is the goal.
How are you seeing people responding to the general speed of the game? Most modern RTS is much slower than StarCraft. How are you seeing people cope with the speed?
Dustin Browder: For the casual players we have a 20-plus-hour campaign that we want them to play before they get into online play, to get used to the gameplay experience. We have a wide selection of AI opponents, five different difficulty levels of AI opponents, which we encourage people to try out their chosen race with before they get into online play. We have our Challenge mode, which has a bunch of maps that teach you some of the fundamentals of competitive online play, that we encourage you to play before you get into online play.
Are you actually going to be removing or adding any units before you launch?
Dustin Browder:
I don’t know if we’ll add or remove. We could very easily add or remove. I certainly hope not to. I don’t foresee removing. I could see changing or adding significantly if it came to that.
Is the Campaign actually finished yet?
Dustin Browder:
It’s not finished. I’m doing a play-through right now on Hard difficulty, and I have pages of notes. But yes, all the missions are in, all of the game mechanics are in and working, and all the audio is recorded.
Glad to know that Blizzard is keeping extensive tracking of stats in SC II, not so happy about the possibility of less Beta keys going out however…