Rob: Karune, BlizzCon attendees had, for the first time ever, a chance to progress through a piece of the single-player StarCraft II campaign. What aspects of the campaign were they given to try out, and what has the feedback been like there?
Karune: The community and the fans were really just able to jump straight into single player. We threw them into a mission where Tychus and Raynor are defending an outpost while the Zerg are invading and stuff so it was really fun just seeing people be really excited right from the first mission. They were able to choose, go through all of the different functions between missions, choosing what they want to equip their army with for the next mission, where they want to spend their resources and so-forth. There was a bunch of excitement around how single player has changed compared to the original StarCraft.

It’s a lot more than the talking heads now, there’s a whole bunch of cinematics in between, there’s a lot of options for you to explore and really immerse yourself to the world of StarCraft. I think the fan reaction was really big.

It was also fun seeing people who won posters and stuff, we gave random drops as we do for the other titles as well. Did you guys get a chance at all to check out some of the StarCraft stuff?

Nethaera: I didn’t get a chance to sit down myself, but I knew a lot of people that had never touched StarCraft before, they sat down and they got to try the demo, and the first thing they said was “I’m going out and getting the original” because they were just so excited to find out more about the series. They weren’t RTS players, they weren’t interested in it to begin with, but they thought “what the heck, I’ll check it out since I’m here” and they are now the biggest fans.

Bashiok: Personally, I was working backstage for the entire show, so I don’t think I saw another human face for the entire show, but I’m sure it went off great! [1]

Rob: … Can you talk a little bit about that and how Battle.net will define the future of the Blizzard Entertainment gaming experience?

Karune: Yeah I really think Blizzard is going down a very interesting path right now. It is a very exciting path for Battle.net and trying to bring together the communities that surround all of our Blizzard products is going to be really ambitious, and is going to be a lot of fun. We have 11-million subscribers for World of Warcraft, and we also did announce 12-million active users on Battle.net as well. So, bringing together these communities, Blizzard did, obviously, started on Battle.net, it is a huge multiplayer platform. Being able to play online for free has been very exciting for a lot of players and that’s what kind of got people into a lot of the Blizzard games originally.

They’re building upon that, they’re really making the multiplayer very state-of-the-art as far as matchmaking. Nobody wants to go on and get beat by somebody that’s super good, play someone that isn’t matched very appropriately. So what they’re doing right now is very exciting, and I think it is very progressive as well.

In addition to that, they’re really also adding a lot of social media features. The internet has changed a bit over the last ten years.

Nethaera: Just a little bit.

Karune: For a while people thought there wasn’t going to be many changes into 2000, and all of the sudden, every two years it feels like something new is coming out and there is a new way of sharing information. With gamers, gamers want to share a particular type of information, being able to share that with their friends, to build clans and communities around that and to share in those same interests. Whether it is modding, artists, drawing fan art and so forth, or lore, I think that there is a lot of potential in Battle.net and we are taking all of that into consideration while doing that.
[1]

Rob: So we had another announcement about the voice of Kerrigan. Tricia Helfer will now be fulfilling that role, how has fan reception been about that so far?

Karune: Definitely a question that I’m sure is on a lot of people’s minds. Personally, I am a Battlestar Galactica fan as well, and I am really glad that she is being a part of the whole experience as I think a lot of us StarCraft fans were. Honestly, it was great having her on the panel, she was very nice, very easy to talk to. I think everybody is very excited, I don’t know if you guys have seen a lot of the feedback on the boards or in the forums, more or less everybody is really excited to see what Kerrigan has done in the past four years between Brood War and StarCraft II and she is very enthusiastic to take that role.[1]