Episode 14

Chris Sigaty: From my perspective the beta was probably our best experience yet as far as betas go, certainly in our RTS games. It's been very difficult to get to a balanced point in our previous products and this time through, we put out a number of patches, listened to a lot of feedback from the community and are at a very good launching point for the game.

Dustin Browder: You know what's so great about the StarCraft II beta was that the community was so knowledgeable about not only the game, even before they got to the beta because they knew so much about the original StarCraft, but they're also so knowledgeable about what some of our design goals were in making the game. They understood immediately what we were trying to accomplish so they were quickly able to jump on board, get really good at the game and really help us with some great feedback and great ideas with how to move the game forward.

Personally, playing the beta was probably one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had as a gamer, being able to get online, play with these thousands and thousands of gamers every night, and see the kinds of strategies they were doing. Play through 1v1 and 2v2 games, it was just a lot of fun for everybody here at the studio to be able to play with the fans, finally in this game we've been waiting for, for so many years.

Dustin Browder: : I think examples that I'm sure a lot of the community members have already experienced maybe first hand, was there were lots of protoss warping strategies using gateways built in the enemy player's town. There were lots of and there still remain many reaper strategies, especially against protoss trying to beat that first stalker out which you can definitely do with that first reaper and seeing how much damage you can do before that first stalker comes online and takes you out. But surprisingly, we didn't see that many dangerous zerg rushing strategies at the end of the day. Obviously, seven pool zerg rush is still a very viable strat which we're happy to leave as a viable strategy.

There were some timing pushes that still remain that we're sort of waiting to see how those sort of shake out. Timing push, for those of you who don't know, there are moments in the game where one player may have a core economic or slight tech advantage that they can use to really take advantage of their opponent who, for just a thirty second window, may not be quite ready to go and if you know that timing you can really do some damage. So we're still seeing a lot of those shake out, but I think what we were surprised about, particularly amusingly, a lot of the early protoss building of gateways, pylons, different sort of structures inside the enemy town as a way to early push. Especially against terran, remembering the early days, even almost day one, it was a couple of gateways in your town with the pylon usually built on low ground outside of the town fundamentally and the poor terrans were just seeing zealots in many cases before they had their first marine, which was terrifying for that poor terran player. So we saw that early on which I don't think we had anticipated. We obviously internally are trying to beat each other, but we're not trying to win in thirty seconds or less or four minutes or less quite as much as you are when you're playing online. So by getting it into a live environment where you're suddenly incentivized to just try and win games as quickly as possible, we started to see a lot more early game breaks than we'd ever seen before.

Chris Sigaty: I still think that there are still other things out there.

Dustin Browder: Absolutely.

Chris Sigaty: Even though it is a beta, people still get ultra competitive and they just want to stick with what they think they know wins. So, a lot of people didn't experiment as much as I was hoping they would. I mean there was a lot of innovative stuff and interesting ideas, but I still think, and we were saying this last time we sat down, that there's a bunker strat out there, I still thinks that's there. I think we're going to see things develop after the game launches where people kind of toss aside, playing custom or say, “I don't care about my record that much, I just want to be investigating different concepts.” and we'll see interesting stuff still develop even after launch.

Dustin Browder: Yeah, even throughout the beta we did see some big changes in the way the game was played based on the few players that were using strats that we hadn't seen before. For a long time for instance, the terran versus terran matchup we were really excited about because it was almost every unit got used at one point or another, there were a few exceptions of course, but many, many of the units were used. It was marauders, it was thors, it was siege tanks, it was medivacs, everything got used. And then some more clever players came along and said, “Hey you know what you really need? You need Vikings, you need siege tanks.” and they broke it down to that, so we're sort of waiting to see. In many cases I think this will continue to happen during the next phase of the beta, after launch, and for years to come.

Chris Sigaty: Sure, yeah.

Dustin Browder: We will see the strategy of this game continue to evolve and that's one of the things we're excited about. And part of our challenge as designers on the game is to make sure that we don't try to react to every change. We saw over the ten years plus of StarCraft and Brood War how many times the game changed for people. That the community sort of changed what was the correct and expected strategies. Really almost no balance changes in many cases happened for those changes to occur. So, our goal is to try to create a game that's big enough, that's got enough options to it, that the correct way to play can change multiple times and we're not doing anything.

Chris Sigaty: Right.

Dustin Browder: Right, and the community's the one inventing the game, the community's the one that's sort of in control of the right way to play because they discovered the strategies and the game is deep enough they can keep playing it and discovering new strategies for years to come.

Chris Sigaty: Super excited. There's amazing stuff out there, I'd encourage anybody who hasn't come along and looked on YouTube or looked on any of the resources out there. There's just some amazing stuff coming online and it's still an early version of the editor. Like the game itself, we intend to add a lot of features over time as we go into the future, as we patch the game. It's already super exciting what we're seeing and I think down the line the potential is massive.

Dustin Browder: It's definitely the most powerful editor that this team has ever produced so yeah, you're seeing action games, you're seeing the classic tower defense games, you're seeing side scrollers, you're seeing first person shooters in some cases. Just some amazing, amazing game types done by this unbelievably creative community, and I think we're all just waiting to see how these guys do when it goes live. They have better tools, they have more time ultimately to embrace and understand all the power that's been put into their hands. I think we're going to see some really fun stuff over the next many years.

Chris Sigaty: Challenge mode is something we've talked about in the past, but I think it's one of the most exciting features that we have in the game from my perspective because I feel like we've finally admitted that single player, the campaign itself, does not teach you how to play online, it does not teach you to be a good multiplayer player. And I think challenges are an attempt to bridge that gap and give players the opportunity to learn some of the things that they weren't paying very close attention to in the campaign. The campaign does teach you some basics, it teaches you that you have to build up units, that you have to acquire resources, but it doesn't tell you how to do that well. And in fact, we really tried to stay away from it because you're already overwhelmed. There's so much to learn there, we're throwing a lot at you with new things in the campaign, with a lot of player choice in there, so we don't want to get you caught up into these things like, “How many workers should you have harvesting minerals or gathering gas?”. In putting challenges in there, they start to get into the specifics and let people understand what they may want to be paying attention to when they get up into competitive play, so, super excited about seeing that do its job hopefully here after launch.

Dustin Browder: Right, yeah it definitely gives players an opportunity to learn the things they need to learn. So it gives them a chance to practice some of these things as well, but more importantly it exposes a wide group of players to some of the basics that maybe they didn't understand. The importance of resource gathering, how powerful it can be if you will use hotkeys. How much more dangerous you can be if you understand some of the basic unit counters in the game. It won't turn a brand new player into a diamond player by any stretch, that's not its goal, but it will give you a view into the world of competitive gaming and give you some ideas as to the kinds of skills that you need to work on and give you a chance to practice some of those skills. But it will give you a view of those types of skills and give you some practice with those skills to get you online so that you can one day become a much better player.

Chris Sigaty: Well there are a couple things about the tutorial from my perspective that makes this our best attempt yet for new players. One is, it's in your face, it's right there at the beginning. Our whole menu system presents it so that new players that get into the game see it right away. The other thing is there's an immersive tutorial that's playable where you can pick the different sorts of things you want to learn about. If you know how to select units and move units you can skip that and move onto the more advanced, and when I say advanced we're really talking about the basics for players, the more advanced, basic things you need to know to play.

What we've also done is we put videos into the game as well and those are available so that players even if they've done the tutorial or they've skipped it and they get into the middle of playing the campaign and get stuck and they're not quite understanding how do I move units and how do I attack. We actually have videos available that they can watch for reference so that they can understand that as well. I think the sum total of those things presents the best roll out of information to new players coming into our RTS games for sure.

Dustin Browder: We also have a really extensive tips system that we use throughout the game to bring up information that you may need about maybe how certain mission objectives work or maybe some strategies you could use to complete those objectives in a couple of cases. For the very newest users, we have a lot of text popping up on the screen in key moments. We did some usability testing with people here in our studio, not as sophisticated as some studios I know do it, but we did do some usability testing where we watched new users play and we could see where they were getting confused or making mistakes and we tried to provide them with some additional tools especially on some of the easier difficulty settings that will show them what they need to do to succeed.

I guess the final thing that we have that is our last attempt to help players new to the experience, is we have now four levels of difficulty in our game which is more than we've had before which will allow users to select the difficulty level that's hopefully appropriate to them. You can also change the difficulty throughout the campaign at any time you want, you can go up or you can go down to try out different difficulty levels. We have the ability to replay the missions you've played already at a different difficulty level if you want to as well so you can test and see, “Am I really ready for hard or do I want to just stay at normal and that's my skill level?”. So we've given them a lot of tools to help new users out. We know that strategy games can be challenging to play and learn. We've watched enough new users to understand how scary it can be for a lot of people to do this, but we've put a lot of stuff out there to really let you get into the campaign and understand it and hopefully give users enough tools through challenge mode and through our matchmaking system ultimately to allow them to, at some point, when they're ready, graduate into online play.

Dustin Browder: There are a lot of different things it does for us, as it's done for many other games that have come before us who have used similar systems. The goal is to get players to try things they haven't tried before, to learn a little bit about the game because they're perusing the achievements. They might learn things that exist that they didn't even know were possible in the game. It's also to give players rewards for having done behavior that hopefully is already fun for them. We are definitely trying to provide players with achievements that are focused on things that we know are fun for players to do already. We are definitely trying to keep away from achievements, I'm not sure we've been 100% successful, but we're working to be as close to this as we can, to get them doing achievements that are already fun experiences. The goal is to just get them out there and get them playing lots of different ways and get rewards for doing that.

In terms of my favorite achievements, I am always shooting for the 1v1 and team-play portraits. The best looking portraits we could find we put into that area of the game to really encourage a lot of the players to play the competitive play. There are a lot of really great portraits and rewards to be had just by playing through the game. There is one really great portrait for the challenge mode.

Chris Sigaty: Which one would that be?

Dustin Browder: The Spectre portrait actually, it's really, really cool.

Chris Sigaty: [laughs] Oh, I thought you were going to say something else.

Dustin Browder: [laughing] No, no. There is a great portrait of a mercenary Goliath out that everyone I think should get at some point, but I think that's high up on the team-play list it's going to be hard for people to get.

Chris Sigaty: Are you talking about that really scary looking one?

Dustin Browder: It's the scary looking one, yeah the scars. Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Sigaty: The one with a professional model guy that we brought in.

Dustin Browder: [laughs] Yeah, that's the one. We're really hoping players will get out there and try to get a lot of these different portraits, there is a lot of really fun stuff in the achievement system. Certainly, the achievement system for us hasn't been online the whole time, we've been working on it as we've been developing the game. We've played for many, many months or even years in many of the game modes without any sort of achievement system and now we've been able to play with the achievement system now that it is online. It really does change the way that you want to play the game, it really makes it a lot more enjoyable. I know for me, playing through the beta, I was obsessing about my win-loss ratio, worried that I wasn't winning enough games and just freaking out about this. But when the achievement system came online, I became much more interested in getting one more win so that I could get closer to that next achievement.

For me, it was a much more positive experience because I knew I was going to win about half my games. That's the way the ladder and matchmaking is set up, we try to match you against evenly-skilled opponents which means, if we're doing our jobs correctly, and you're playing as hard as you can, we should be able to give you a fifty-fifty win-loss record, which can sometimes be a little scary. Playing through, I kind of wish I could win 70% of my games and I don't care what happens to the other guy. I kind of just want to win more than my share. But now with the achievement system it's much easier to focus on trying to get that next portrait, trying to get that next decal, trying to get that next reward, and I think it's just a much more fun experience.

Chris Sigaty: Well, we're definitely going to patch. I think that's one of the things that is part of Blizzard's magic, is we continue to support the game for a long time. Obviously, we have expansions coming out, along the way, we'll be releasing patches. Some will have features in them, some will only address balance, they'll ebb and flow as far as how big they are. We have something planned probably a month or two out already with some minor features being added in there, just tweaks to things. There will also, I'm sure, be some balance reaction in there. And then, before the end of the year, we're intending to put out a fairly larger size patch, which has some things related to tournaments or, really, the eSports community. So, the specific features we're still working on for that patch, I don't have any specifics to go into, but that's something we hope to drop before the end of the year. Something every two or three months will definitely be coming out.

Dustin Browder: Yeah, absolutely. In terms of balance, we'll do whatever is necessary at the time. Obviously, we're going to continue to be as cautious as we dare, where we want make sure the community has had the chance to play with new stuff, and they get a chance to play with it, and that they are, in fact, identifying a problem for us correctly. But, the minute we know a problem is real, you know that we're convinced that it's got to be changed, we're going to try to get a patch out there as soon as is humanly possible because we don't want people playing with stuff that we know is broken. It drives us crazy as much as it does the guys playing it because we're playing with you guys every night too. So, if I'm getting Zealot rushed and I can't win a game as terran, you can better believe I'll want to make a change tomorrow morning.

So, we'll definitely be looking to do whatever we can when it makes sense for us to do, so we'll try to be as aggressive as we can with problems. And then, like Chris says, making sure that we are keeping up a consistent patch structure to solve bugs and add little features and that kind of stuff.

Chris Sigaty: Thank you.

Dustin Browder: Alright, thanks.