hile were at the German Games Convention in Leipzig a little while ago, we had a chance to meet up with Blizzard. The company has been behind some of gaming's biggest franchises, and it's currently working on sequels for three of them. Here, we talk with Blizzard senior vice president Frank Pierce and Blizzard PR's Bob Colayco.

Game Informer: How important was it for you to stick with the formula of the first StarCraft game when working with the sequel?

Frank Pierce: Yeah, that’s pretty important to us. We really want to maintain the pace of the experience and maintain the duration of which the matches typically take place. You know, we have a lot of passionate fans with the StarCraft franchise, and it’s pretty important that the experience we deliver to them stays within certain boundaries of what they expect.

GI: That said, Korea is such a huge, competitive market for your games. Were any of the design elements in StarCraft II designed around their gaming culture and how they view it as a national sport?

Pierce: I would say that some of the design elements that we’ve put in place don’t necessarily target the Korean region so much as the concept of e-sport, because StarCraft and WarCraft III are both very popular in Korea and Asia as e-sport titles. So we’ve tried to incorporate units with abilities that offer the expert player the opportunity for more advanced strategies and also tried to add functionality to each of the three races that also offer opportunities for additional strategy. So that will definitely have an appeal for expert and pro players and also passionate communities like Korea.

GI: So what do you think of that? In America, we’ve tried so hard to push professional gaming as a national pastime, and it doesn’t seem like it’s really caught on, but in Asia it was picked up right away?

Pierce: You know what I heard recently that I didn’t realize? One of the things that was done in Korea that really helped the concept of e-sport become more broadly accepted was they added it to high schools as a competitive event at the high-school level. So a high school in Korea might have a soccer team, but they also have a StarCraft team. When they’re coming out of high school, you have kids who have played StarCraft competitively as part of the educational experience, and it’s also made it more accepted by the parents, because they recognize the value in that. We haven’t done that in the U.S. yet. Maybe if we try that in the U.S. we’d see some of that, too. There’s definitely a passionate community in the U.S. as far as e-sport players and e-sport fans, but we haven’t really figured out how to take it more mainstream.