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Creating Starcraft II Was Like Creating A New Sport
During his talk at GDC 2011, Blizzard designer Dustin Browder talked about the design decisions that shaped StarCraft II and the team’s focus on creating an electronic sport.
“When I first started working at Blizzard,” said Browder, “they told me that we’d be making an e-sport. I said, ‘Who cares?’ I didn’t know how big [e-sports] was, but I knew that it was going to be hard, because we were trying to make a new game. It’s like creating basketball 2.”
This decision to focus on balancing the game for e-sports affected every aspect of the game – even StarCraft II’s single player story and missions were affected by the team’s e-sport focus. Blizzard wanted to make some units big, but had to keep them limited to a certain size so that they didn’t hide any action taking place in the background. “Our artists are capable of making way cooler effects than we let them make,” explains Browder, “but we needed to have and e-sport level of clarity, so the players, and more importantly the audience, could follow the action.”
Blizzard’s artist even made a cyber cat unit for the Terrens, but it didn’t mesh with Blizzard’s vision for the game, so it got cut. It’s sad, but sometime cool features get left on the cutting room floor in order to make a better-balanced game.
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