OMG StarCraft.com

The third iteration of Blizzard's podcast, Blizzcast, is chuck full of great questions and even better answers that are definitely worth your time. The first 15 minutes or so are spent with Karune and Blizzard's developer, Dustin Browder. Browder answers lots of great questions about the Zerg and the general state of the game as of today. Also, the last 7 minutes or so are spent directly answering fans questions from the Battle.net boards, so that is certainly worth your time. Everything in the middle of the podcast discusses WoW: Wrath of the Litch King, so if that interests you then you'll be pumped to listen to that as well.

I'll try here to quickly make some bullet points of the things I thought were key in the podcast. If you rather just skip them and start listening to Blizzcast #3 feel free to scroll to the link below them.

Important things of note about the Zerg:

• The devs want to keep the feel of aggression, speed, and adaptability the true definition of the race. How quickly they can expand across a map will be their signature.
• Infestation will be a bigger focus in SC2 to keep the "Zerg feel" the devs are going for.
• Giving the ability for buildings and base defenses to pick up and move to anywhere in the creep and taking it away from the Protoss phase cannons it has made the Zerg really feel like the much more aggressive race that it should be.
• The Queen didn't live up to the name in SC1 and they wanted to make her prominent in SC2. She will create cat-and-mouse gameplay because the Zerg player will use her to maintain base defenses and opponents will try to hunt her down and kill her to handicap the Zerg.
• The devs recognize that since the Ultralisk is at the end of the tech tree it's less played then a Zergling so making it more relevant and useful has been a big focus for this unit. Adding its new cleave attack has helped change the unit for the better.

Other important things of note from Browder:

• Macro/micro management concerns: Basically they've thrown around a lot of ideas on how to help maintain a good balance between the two but so far Browder doesn't have any concrete answers that have worked. It's going to be a big focus moving forward.
• Browder feels that at this point the biggest challenge in developing the game has been offering enough new strategies so that it feels like a new game, but still feels like StarCraft. Right now he doesn't think it feels different enough from StarCraft 1 and they haven't struck the right balance yet.
• Like you would think, the Protoss are the most complete, the Terran are fairly complete and the Zerg are still a big work in progress. It doesn't seem like a Beta test is in the near future.

Important note from the Q&A section:

• Zerg players will be able to walk base defenses and the queen onto enemy Zerg players' creep. Creep is creep so sending drones to an enemy's base and building your own structures is certainly possible. So far it's not practical but that's not to say a strategy won't be developed by players that takes advantage of this.

Listen to BlizzCast #3 here.

If the link doesn't work just keep trying. The site has been having a lot of traffic so some times it doesn't work.

• << prev
• next >>