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BlizzCon Interview
with Matt Morris
with Matt Morris
StarCraft: Brood War is without a doubt the greatest competitive game of all time. Nearly twenty years after its release in 1998, it's still being played competitively around the world by seasoned pros and challengers alike. It’s the game that jumpstarted esports in Korea and paved the way for the current esports landscape across the globe.
But if we’re honest, the game hasn’t aged well. Despite an active ladder supported by a dedicated community of followers, issues like port forwarding, lack of OS support, and an outdated resolution continued to plague users and prevent newcomers from enjoying the game experience.
That’s where StarCraft: Remastered came in. Ten years after the last balance patch, Blizzard picked up the game and decided to update it for modern computers and even took it a step further with a complete graphics update.
However, the last seven months after release have been a rocky, bug-ridden ride full of complaints. While numerous threads have popped up discussing the remaster and its successes and failures, no one has really been able to speak directly to the devs and get their thoughts. Luckily, while I was at BlizzCon, I got a chance to sit down and talk to Lead Designer on the Classics team, Matt Morris, to understand what his goals are and what we can expect as a community.
Miscellaneous
- The Classics team has about 25 people on it.
- Nobody knows the game better than the community.
- “One of the biggest things for the devs was to always listen to the community because nobody knows these games better than the community.”
Goals
- The original goal for SC:R was to update it for newer computers and eliminate the “tech debt”. This includes things like port forwarding, optimization for newer versions of Windows, etc.
- “The original goal for StarCraft: Remastered was servicing the game. This was one of Blizzard’s pinnacle esports game. It’s a classic...so StarCraft was something special to the company.”
- “We were starting to learn that some of the newer computers—some of the newer hardware, some software—just couldn’t run the game, and this started to become problematic...and then questions started being asked, ‘Is there something more we can do?’
- “The original goal for StarCraft: Remastered was servicing the game. This was one of Blizzard’s pinnacle esports game. It’s a classic...so StarCraft was something special to the company.”
- As they delved further into alleviating the tech debt, they decided to add more things like 16: 9 widescreen resolution, updated graphics, matchmaking, observer mode, hotkeys, and integrating it into the “Blizzard ecosystem”.
- Morris believes the team did a good job based on the original goal. Since release, the goal posts have moved further, and the team has struggled to identify and fix the issues.
- No one is happy with where they’re at right now, and they have plenty more to do.
- “No one on the team is 100% happy with where we’re at right now. That’s why we’re still working on it, we’re still trying to make some updates, we’re still trying to fix the hardware, we’re still working on the turn rate. We’re getting there.”
- They are still focused on keeping the core gameplay intact.
Matchmaking
- The Classics team isn’t done with matchmaking yet and are constantly working to improve it. Matchmaking is at the top of their list.
- “We realize there’s still some issues there that we need to clean up there with the global matchmaking. It’s been a bit of a challenge for us...we’re still not done. There’s still some room for improvement there, and the guys are aware of it. They’re not just like, ‘nailed that one’.”
- The league/ladder system for SC:R was designed as an experiment. More to come, including matchmaking up to 4v4.
- “We don’t have the league system in yet. Right now, it’s the Frontier League. So it was kind our idea that this was the ‘beta’, so to speak. And so, that’s still not there. That’s coming around the corner. We want to do matchmaking for teams. We want 2v2 matchmaking, 3v3, 4v4. We want to start doing all that stuff, so...the team’s not done with the game.”
- The goal for 2v2 matchmaking is sometime in 2018, no specifics.
Complaints about SC:R
- Morris does not consider the current iteration of SC:R to be a “beta” but rather the best representation of what the pro players in Korea wanted.
- “I wouldn’t say this has been an open beta. If there’s any disappointments, then their expectations were a little off-aligned from what our goals were, and our goals were to talk to Korea and the pro players in the scene who have really been holding up this game for us for so long. We were locked in sync for over a year going over to Korea often...for our expectations, we matched that, but the rest of the world has different expectations than what Korea had.”
- “I wouldn’t say this has been an open beta. If there’s any disappointments, then their expectations were a little off-aligned from what our goals were, and our goals were to talk to Korea and the pro players in the scene who have really been holding up this game for us for so long. We were locked in sync for over a year going over to Korea often...for our expectations, we matched that, but the rest of the world has different expectations than what Korea had.”
- If people are disappointed in SC:R, it’s probably because their goals were off-aligned with what the dev team’s goals were.
- The Classics team worked closely with Blizzard Korea and the Korean pros to decide what to implement into the remaster.
- Now they’ve shifted their focus to address what people in the West need including ping issues (dynamic turn rate).
- “Korea was happy-ish. They liked it, and then the rest of the world started adding players to it, and now we’re listening to what they have to say, and a lot of those expectations were, ‘We’re okay if you mess with the game a little bit. We want a little bit better experience instead of a true 1:1 classic experience.’ So we’re having to weigh those two.”
- “Korea was happy-ish. They liked it, and then the rest of the world started adding players to it, and now we’re listening to what they have to say, and a lot of those expectations were, ‘We’re okay if you mess with the game a little bit. We want a little bit better experience instead of a true 1:1 classic experience.’ So we’re having to weigh those two.”
Ping Issues
- The team is aware of matchmaking issues due to the global pool of players. Blizzard is the only team that has done true global matchmaking so far.
- Dynamic turn rate introduced—”we’re still not done yet”
- Blizzard issues are not compatible with third party solutions.
- “I can’t really speak to how those other platforms [Shield Battery, Fish, other latency-reducing platforms] have dealt with their issues. I know that in all my experiences on dev teams that as they start building their tech infrastructure, there’s always [different problems]. My problem would be definitely different from your problem even if we’re working on the same thing just because of the way you put things together, and that slowly tends to start moving things out of whack, so to speak.”
- Blizzard is aware of communities and groups like Shield Battery and Fish and willing to talk to anyone who wants to talk to them.
- “We’re well aware of these groups. We talk with them, we communicate with anyone who wants to talk with us.”
Hotkeys
- It was assumed that hotkeys were a standard quality of life change, but pushback forced them to reconsider.
- “We had a list of things that we’d want to do, what we kind of identified as, ‘this is not necessarily messing with the core gameplay, but [something] we felt like most games out there have’...like observer mode, the matchmaking, and when hotkeys came up, we were like, ‘oh yeah, of course you’d want hotkeys’. We thought that was the norm, but then later on, we find out it’s not the norm.”
- All of the pros they talked to didn’t mind the implementation of custom hotkeys.
- “Once we started talking about it, we got a lot of pushback. So we really had a hard look with them. We actually went back to Korea, and we got a lot of these pro players—because we were at that point where we were pretty far along, and we wanted to make sure that the game was [playable]. So they got to play it, and we would ask these questions about hotkeys down the road with all these guys, and they were all like, ‘it’s fine.’ But the forums and everywhere else had the perception that this would be awful and that certain pro players would start dominating.”
Warcraft 3
- WC3 is receiving several updates to maps and items as well as some QoL patches.
- The Warcraft community seems more open to core gameplay changes compared to the StarCraft community.
A huge thanks to Team Liquid for giving me the opportunity to interview Matt. He's an incredibly tall guy with lots of personality. I also want to extend a thank you to Back2Warcraft for helping me come up with a wall of Warcraft questions—it's a shame that I wasn't able to use them, but I hope we get to see something cool for Warcraft 3 very soon!
Banner credit: BlizzPro
Banner credit: BlizzPro
