hen Blizzard announced at its Worldwide Invitationals in Korea that Starcraft II was in the works, the response was unabashedly enthusiastic. After all, players have been enjoying the original game for nearly a decade, and its popularity in that country is legendary. At BlizzCon, we sat down with Chris Sigaty, Starcraft II’s lead producer, and talked about the pressures of making a sequel of such a high-profile game, storytelling changes and why we won’t be seeing the game on consoles anytime soon.

Game Informer: With Starcraft, a lot of people would say that Blizzard just got it right. Was there ever a feeling at Blizzard like, “How can you improve on that?” and just not worry about a sequel?

Chris Sigaty: No, I don’t think so much. I don’t think it’s so much that we definitely have to improve on it like there was something broken and we needed to fix something, but I think we wanted to give a new experience that had similarities, that hearkened to that past experience but also would give you something new and put a fresh engine out there and a fresh bunch of other things, like how you go through the experience, like Battle.net—there are a bunch of new things on the single-player front.

So no, we’re not out to fix something that was broken—Starcraft stands on its own, it’s a great game and there’s a huge fanbase. We’re certainly not trying to get in there to say, “Throw that away, here’s this.” This is going to be different, but you’re going to have a lot of similarities in how you play. You’re going to sit down and go, “I remember this,” and then you’re going to start assigning SCVs to minerals and go, “Oh my god, now what do I do?” So it is different, and it does take time to get into this new experience.

GI: Was there ever a temptation to do something like a Starcraft 1.5, where you would basically just take the original game and just give it a graphical overhaul without touching the gameplay?

Sigaty: No, we certainly tossed the idea around of having some sort of mode where you could play it that way, too. But there will always be differences, no matter what. If we were to do something like that, the purists would say, “You’ve ruined it! The pathing is different. This unit reaction is different.” You saw it with the Team Fortress update. It turned out to be great, but there are still purists who say, “Oh, the original Quake engine Team Fortress is the best one because of this…” So there’s always that.

GI: Finding out that we could play as Terran and Protoss today is a big surprise, but of course people are always going to complain about something—like where are the Zerg? Was there any reason why you’ve rolled out the factions in the order that you have?

Sigaty: It’s just how we worked on them. We’ve been going through iterations across the races, and Protoss were the furthest along when we announced, and then Terran, and next we’ll be able to reveal the Zerg. We have worked on them, but they’re not to the level of the Protoss at this point, so they’re not really ready.

GI: Have you ever seriously entertained the idea of creating a new race?

Sigaty: We did. You know, we talked about that originally, but we felt like at least with the preliminary product, we didn’t want to sort of muddy it up and make it like one more race is the answer, that that makes it better and that’s it. The big thing about the original Starcraft is the differentiation between the races, and we thought that we could even further enhance that, there was more to add to the races. So rather than make it about another race, we wanted to play with extending those differences. Who knows what we’ll do down the line…

GI: Can you talk a bit about Starcraft II’s storyline?

Sigaty: Starcraft II picks up from where Brood War left off. A big deal here is that Jim Raynor is still around. Kerrigan is still around. There are some new characters there, and the experience is going to be very different with how you experience that story now. There’s a new interface, where you take control of Raynor, and you play through the elements of the story that you’re interested in.

One of the things about the original game is that despite the fact that you sat in briefing rooms and it was a linear story, it was a surprisingly deep story and there was a lot of elements to it that were character rich and environment rich but maybe you couldn’t see or understand where all these planets were or what some of these characters’ motivations were. So what we wanted to do was immerse the player, so you actually control Jim Raynor. You go up to the members of your crew on the Hyperion and talk to them. You find out about the things that you’re interested in finding out about. You pick the missions that you want to go on and earn cash—you are a mercenary band in the beginning. Based on the missions you play, you earn money, and with that money you will purchase the technology that you see and use on the levels.

Currently, that’s a broad overview of what we intend for the campaign, which is very different from starting at level one, then at level two we introduce you to siege tanks, and so on, like in the original game. It’s more you pick and choose now. So when you and I have a conversation, you can say, “Oh, I didn’t even find that, I didn’t go to that planet,” or whatever. Or, “Oh yeah, that was a tough mission, but luckily I had Vikings and I was able to land on the back of their base and take them out,” and you might say, “I didn’t even have Vikings, I actually went with siege tanks, and I did it this way.” That’s an element of it. But the biggest thing that we’re planning for single player is letting you be more immersed in that story, and we want it to be as rich or richer than the original game.