Dustin Browder, the design director for Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming mega-RTS StarCraft II: Wings of LIberty, took time out of his busy Zerg-nerfing schedule to speak with us about the philosophy behind the game. Strap yourselves in, because we're in for several pages of exclusive info on one of the biggest PC games of the year.

What's the biggest change you've seen in the way the StarCraft II beta plays compared to high-level StarCraft play?

We're seeing all kinds of crazy strats. We don't know if they're real, if the counters have been found out yet, or if it'll all shake out in the end, or if we need to make fixes. Obviously, StarCraft II is a more mobile game in many ways than the original StarCraft was. This is in some ways a function of the types of units we have. There's a lot of mobility in this game in terms of moving and dancing, attacking and retreating. We're seeing lots and lots of dancing between players as they vie for position, as they try to get in good flank attacks, and as they try to get in behind their enemies and prevent them from escaping. That's probably the single biggest global change that you see, but as I said we're also seeing lots of crazy rushes that we haven't really seen before. We're seeing lots of warping in stuff early on in enemy bases. We're seeing lots of early attacks that weren't really possible in the original game and we're trying to decide, "Are these permanent problems? Are they problems that we need to deal with right now, or will they shake out in the end?

Is that change in overall mobility something you intentionally built into the game?

No. Our creative process on StarCraft II was very different than the creative process I've used on other RTS games I've worked on or even on WarCraft III. We didn't set out with any goals in mind, and I'm sure that this will upset the fans terribly. What we did instead was that we said, "We want to make a bunch of cool units, and we're going to make each unit as cool as we can possibly make it, and then we'll see how it all works together, and we'll tune as necessary from there." So it was never our intention specifically to do anything exactly with the races. Our goal was to make the units as interesting as possible and as different from one another as we possibly could. From there we could see how the races changed and evolved. That's definitely how it has worked out.

The Zerg, I think, are a lot more methodical in StarCraft II than they were in the original StarCraft. The Terrans have a lot more of a commando feel to them in a lot of cases than the original Terrans ever did. I know that's something that a lot of the fans look at and say, "Oh my god, you've changed the Zerg!" but there's really no way to re-make this game and to change the units without fundamentally changing the character of the races. So our goal initially was, "Each unit is as different as it can be from all the other units in the game, and each unit has its own unique role and its own unique abilities, and each unit hopefully feels as cool as it possibly can feel, and then we'll see where the races end up and hopefully it won't feel too different from where they should be conceptually." But we didn't really have a set goal when we started, and right now I'm very happy with how everybody is playing out. Everybody feels very different from one another, the kinds of strats you see in the different race matchups are fairly different. We're obviously looking to continue to push those even further. For example, we're seeing the Roach-Hydralisk combo for Zerg is pretty core to a lot of the matchups, and we're going to do some things to try to break that up a little bit. But against Terrans we're seeing very different strategies as a Protoss player as opposed to playing against a Zerg player.

Were you sad to see anything have to go in the name of balance?

Early on we obviously weren't as worried about balance as we are at this point in time, but for instance the Thor was a unit that went through a lot of changes. We had these big cannons on the back of the Thor that did massive, long-range AOE [area of effect] attacks because that looked cool and it sure was fun to play with. It stepped on the Siege Tank in the worst way. You really didn't need a Siege Tank if you had a Thor, or if you had a Siege Tank you didn't need a Thor; one or the other. So we ended up scaling those back to be a single-target, high-damage stun attack, which feels pretty different from the Siege Tank, but it doesn't quite match the visuals as much as I would like. But it's a much better player-based experience.

I would say that those are some of our biggest struggles with StarCraft, that the art will imply a certain look and feel, like what's supposed to happen, and it doesn't always match the best gameplay goals. We'll often go with the gameplay, which means that the art is sometimes a little bit out of sorts with what you imagine it could do. For example, if I build six Battlecruisers, a lot of players look at that and imagine, "there's nothing in the world that can defeat this. Look how big they are! I will crush all with this! No-one can stand before my might!" And they're quite surprised when they run into 30 or 40 Hydralisks and they get rolled, and they think, "What?! That can't be, that's not right!" But we're not willing to make the Battlecruiser look wimpy just because if he encounters ten times his cost, he's going to lose. Those are some of the challenges we face, and that's the area you'll see we've done something and we have to go back on it a little bit, just because we thought it would look cool and we thought it would play cool. If we thought it didn't play cool, but we still think it looks great, we'll keep some of the visuals but we'll change up the gameplay to make it a better experience.