StarCraft 2 Articles
Dustin Browder Interview
4th Jul 2008 05:28 PM GMT | Leord | 0 comments
Coverage WWI 2008 >> Dustin Browder Interview
Dustin Browder Interview
If you recall the Fansite Q&A With Browder, we are now back to interview the same man, but not in a group of people. Stressing between all the press-related stuff we found Dustin Browder, Lead Designer of StarCraft II, and talked about his favourite subject: Game Design! Seeing as we are fansite crew, we were not afraid to bring him in to specifics on things like the Map Editor, map protection, modding, extra races, the complicated Mothership, the Queen and much, much more. One of the more interesting pieces of information is that the Map Editor possibly could be released before the game!
As with all Blizzard developers, they are warm, open and humorous (I mean, some even play in the Blizzard metal band L80ETC!), and Dusting is no exception, despite being the "newbie" among the bosses of the company. His attitude to the game is healthily no fanatic, and will probably be able to make better gamemaking decisions for it. Let's continue with the interview:
A question about replays, with StarCraft and WarCraft III they always have the problem with a new patch the old replays are not working. How do you consider on handling that with StarCraft II?
Dustin: There is a problem and we've talked about it. I don't know what the answer is yet. That's not the answer that you want to hear, but we know about it, we understand that its real and it's a challenge for us to obviously to make it work since the data would be out of sync. If we could have done it already we would have in previous games but I know that we've just been talking about it so we'll have to see what can be done. But we do take it seriously and it is a problem. If we can't get it done then it couldn't be done but we want to try harder to make it happen.
You mentioned in one of the Q&A sessions with Kevin that you're hoping to have some integrated map protection for map authors.
Dustin: That's all Battle.net stuff, I don't know what the final deal on that will be yet but we'd love to. Obviously map authors are a huge part of Battle.net right now; we've even hired guys out of the mod community to work on our team. So we really want to continue to support the mod community as best we possibly can and the kids need to flaunt their style.
We have a pretty cool map editor which is coming along really well right now; I can put a unit together in about 10 minutes. It's very very powerful right now but I don't know how user friendly it is at the moment. But very very powerful so I'm going to ship that with the game as well.
We also do make a lot of conscious decisions on the team when we talk about any new feature or anything we want to add to the game, like; "how can this be used to support the modders?" If it's something that we could convert easily from one version to another and we often just go back and re-do things because we know that; "that works for our needs for a solo play mission but if we put in another couple of hours work then that could be something that modders could use across the board."
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