Earlier this month, MLG was taking place in Anaheim, California, where Blizzard staff were present to give interviews to various press and media. StarCraft: Legacy was able to grab a short interview with David Kim, an exerpt of which can be read below:
SC:L – So, what was the thought process behind – like, a lot of people are going to see MLG, and they’re going to see the Widow Mine and the Warhound, and it’s going to look like the Spider Mine and the Goliath to them. How can you convince those naysayers that say, “Why don’t you bring back the Spider Mine and bring back the Goliath?”
DK – The reason why we didn’t want to do the Spider Mine over the Widow Mine was because we didn’t want to buff the Siege Tank line. And, the Widow Mine right now, is really difficult to use in combination with Siege Tanks. The reason being, if your Widow Mine attaches to a bunch of enemy units, and your Siege Tanks automatically kill them, the damage doesn’t go off. So, we wanted a mine on that race that you don’t combo with Siege Tanks, specifically. We created the Widow Mine for that reason.
As far as Warhound versus Goliath goes, they’re totally different units, because the Warhound, for one, doesn’t even attack air units. And the Warhound is actually really strong against all mechanical units on the ground, which the Goliath obviously wasn’t good at. So the only thing that’s similar thing is that it’s just a medium-sized mech unit. But I don’t think that’s enough of a similarity to affect the game.
We also had a lengthy interview with Dustin Browder, who gave detailed answers to our questions:
SCL – Question about the Pylon being able to warp in up on the high ground. Is that being argued back and forth or are you guys just going to say, “Encourage Warp Prism, Pylon on the low ground cannot power buildings on the high ground?”
DB – I’m kind of hanging on to that, but we’ll see what happens. I kind of think we should say you can’t warp up on the high ground. I think that’s too destructive, I think that’s largely a cheese maneuver, and it mostly promotes cheese. And it’s not really about – I think it promotes too many all-ins, I think it’s too difficult to counter, it was never our intention for the pylon in the first place. I’d be fine with it, even though it wasn’t our intention, if I didn’t feel like it was promoting a lot of cheese and a lot of abusive builds. But we’ll see. So that’s our feeling right now is “no”, that we will stop that, but we’ll see what happens.
The interview with David Kim can be read here, and the interview with Dustin Browder can be read here.
Also, the unit stats from the Heart of the Swarm build at MLG can be seen here.
Sources:
StarCraft: Legacy Staff at MLG
StarCraft: Legacy - David Kim Interview
StarCraft: Legacy - Dustin Browder Interview
