Written by LordofAscension |
Wednesday, 22 September 2010 18:38
News -
StarCraft II
Every so often mainstream gaming publications produce something that surprisingly has great value to the hardcore.
GameInformer recently talked to
Dustin Browder,
StarCraft II's lead designer about the design choices evident in
Wings of Liberty and the direction going forward into the two expansions. The interview is quite good; the questions are insightful and the answers are honest and mostly forthright. The questions posed to Browder span a wide range of topics and in general, they avoid the usual mainstream fluff. From the interview:
You mentioned how players make choices throughout the game. One of the few complaints I’ve heard echoed about StarCraft II is that those choices that you make are based heavily around the plot that’s developing, but they end up having very little effect on the story. Instead, the choices decide mostly gameplay-related elements. Was there ever any plan or had you ever discussed having the story branch off more based off the player’s choices?
We did, and there were a couple of factors that went into why we decided not to go that route. One of them, of course, was simply the cinematics we’d have to do. If we had a really widely varying game, we’d have to create multiple end cinematics, and if we wanted those to be pre-renders, that wouldn’t have been feasibly possible for us. At that point, they could have been in-game cutscenes, of course, which I think look pretty good. That’s an option we could have chosen.
But the second factor is more of a creative choice. We’re even now struggling with this a little bit with what has happened in Wings of Liberty. There isn’t really a canon. We felt like a lot of our players and we ourselves wanted to know what happened. We wanted to have that sense of story. While other games – Mass Effect being a great example – do embrace that sort of player-chosen story, and that’s really one of the core hooks for their entire game – that’s really what their game is about – we didn’t feel like that made as much sense for our game. We felt like people want to know, “How did StarCraft end?” not “Which ending did you get?”
That’s very subjective. I don’t know why we felt like that was right for StarCraft, but obviously for Mass Effect that’s not the case. Some fans out there look at games and want to say, “One size fits all.” Some people ask where storytelling in games is going and think it has to go one way or another. That’s not a satisfactory answer for them. It’s either the Mass Effect way or the StarCraft way, and that’s what it has to be. We view it as more of a continuum. It can be any way that makes sense for the game. What makes sense for Mass Effect may not feel right for StarCraft. I don’t have a harder, math answer for you, but it felt right to us that StarCraft had a canon, that there was an ending that everyone can understand.
All in all, it's a great interview coming from a non-StarCraft themed publication and well worth even the read for a hardcore fan. While, the answers won't please everyone, it is clear that Blizzard is committed to supporting the game going forward, as well as improving the experience with each release. What Blizzard has to share at BlizzCon, regarding
Heart of the Swarm could also set the stage for some productive discussion now that we have
Wings of Liberty.
Source:
GameInformer - Afterwords: StarCraft II
Add comment
