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Former Blizzard employees and StarCraft 2 veterans recently announced the establishment of Frost Giant Studios, a games company aiming to create a spiritual successor to Blizzard RTS titles such as StarCraft: Brood War, WarCraft 3, and StarCraft 2.
TL.net had a chance to talk extensively with several members of the development team from Frost Giant Studios and discuss their approach to continuing the legacy of the Blizzard RTS.
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Interview participants:
Tim Morten, Production Director: The production director of StarCraft 2 during the Legacy of the Void era.
Tim Campbell, Game Director: Worked on RTS titles such as C&C Red Alert 2, C&C Generals, and was the lead campaign designer on WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne.
Kevin "Monk" Dong, Lead co-op designer: Previously the lead co-op designer in StarCraft 2. TL.net writer and staff member before that!
Ryan Schutter, Lead user experience designer: Previously the lead designer on StarCraft 2. Creator of the Gameheart spectator mode for StarCraft 2.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Wax: You guys could have done anything after moving on from Blizzard, but decided on an RTS game. Why?
Tim Campbell: We're making an RTS? *laughs*
Tim Morten: For me, two things. First, it's my favorite genre. My favorite genre to play, but also favorite genre to work on. I just want to make another one.
The other part that's also really meaningful and motivating to me is—I think everybody feels this—it's hard to work on something and not feel a desire to want to see the community continue to thrive. All of us had to work on managing StarCraft past the point where there were going to be new, big releases. And I think we did it because we cared about the product, but we also did it because we care about the players. There really is a sincere desire to give the community reason to look forward to the future, and to build something new.
Tim Campbell: I love RTS. I've been lucky enough to have had a chance to work on several, and they're the most fun development experiences, and this is the kind of game that I got into the industry to make originally. So I had a chance to work on Red Alert 2 and the start of C&C Generals, WarCraft III, and The Frozen Throne, and I've been itching to work on another RTS ever since then. And so, the opportunity to be able to dive into this genre to build this type of game with this group of people right now, is just an unbelievable opportunity that I'm super excited about
Kevin Dong (Monk): I really kind of imprinted on RTS early in life with WarCraft 2, Brood War, with WarCraft 3, and now StarCraft 2. Again, to echo Tim's point, I guess just personally on a somewhat philosophical level, I find happiness in finding a community and having a feeling of belonging in that community. So this is kind of my way of staying in that community and trying to help the community in any way possible.
Ryan Schutter: And for me, my initials are "RTS," so I've mostly just kind of shaped my whole life around that. But my last name is pronounced 'shooter,' so if it doesn't work I've got that, I can just make a switch.
But really, I just love RTS games, I've been playing them my entire life. There's nothing else quite like it. And I really want to continue that genre into the future because I want future generations to be able to experience how awesome it is.
What was it like trying to get funding for an RTS studio in this day and age? The outside perception of RTS is that it's in decline, it's not a hot genre. What were your pitches to investors like?
Tim M: There's a few things I'll say on this. The first is about hot genres. The games industry is considered hit driven. That's true for a lot of media industries; film is like this as well. But hot at the moment doesn't necessarily mean that that's predictive of what's going to be hot in the future. You know, look at how we've gone from say, from battle royale to Fall Guys, to Among Us, there's always something hot at the moment.
It's not about what's the biggest thing right now, it's about what's got potential. And we all know that this genre is tremendously fun, has a tremendously passionate community behind it. Historically, you look at other communities, whether it's the MMO community, the CCG community, the team based shooter community, heck, the early MOBA community. These are all communities that had a passionate core, gameplay that the passionate core knew was great, and they found ways to break out.
In talking to investors, there was belief that those ingredients exist with RTS. And most of these investors have... You've got general partners and you have analysts. The general partners are the guys who make the decisions, and the analysts are the guys that make the recommendations. And a lot of these analysts, like us, came up as core gamers. And these guys, it was amazing how consistent love for RTS was across these investor groups that I talked to. And to be fair, the guys who are our lead investors, were founded by the former CEO of ESL. The next big investor was Riot Games, who took MOBA to the popularity that it's achieved. I think these guys especially get it. But it was surprisingly a better response than I even anticipated going out, when I wasn't sure what to expect.
Tim C: I think that's a big part of the appeal to the investors lies with the community itself. Other genres definitely have hit driven business models like you're talking about, Tim, with audiences going up and down. But the RTS audience and the SC2 community in particular, is among the most consistent and loyal communities that there is in games, bar none. And, that consistent audience, and the presence of that strong and passionate a player base that's still engaged now—how many years after StarCraft's release?—that is incredibly compelling to the investors, and it's something that they absolutely wanted to support
You make it sound like the investors were fans who bought in based on passion, on unquantifiable factors. But did you also have to present data to support RTS, whether it's publicly available stats on who's playing RTS on Steam, or internal information about StarCraft II from your time at Blizzard?
Tim M: The short answer is I didn't have to present that kind of information. I did have some amount of experiential information I could share from StarCraft. There is a little bit of information for They are Billions or Frostpunk or some of these other games that are indies on Steam. There are some press releases from Microsoft around Age of Empires, so there's a little bit of quantitative data there.
But I think, MOBA is a great example to take. If you look at what the player counts were on the original DOTA before HON happened, before League or Dota 2, the player base was a fraction of what RTS is today. And, if you go back early enough, that's true for autobattlers, it's true for battle royale, all of these genres that became big were small at some point.
RTS isn't small. RTS has millions of monthly active users. Even if we just had another success that was the size of StarCraft II, that's a commercial success that nobody would look at the return on and be disappointed. But I really believe that there's an opportunity to do even better than that.
So anyhow, every pitch deck an investor sees has what they call the hockey stick. You know, where people are saying this thing is THIS size now, but look at what happens as it goes up the hockey stick, and it's gonna go huge! And so, literally ever pitch they get, they're hearing that claim. I think it's about what are the claims that feel believable to them. These guys, they're games investors, it's what they do—this space. Specifically, they all agreed that this genre feels fertile to grow and to break out.
Tim C: Building on that a little bit, I think our pitch to investors was probably different than a lot of groups. Pitches in that, I've heard for years, just a recurring drumbeat of "RTS is dead," "RTS is too complicated or too hard or too intimidating," and we need to slice off this chunk, or simplify that in order to move forward as a genre.
And our pitch was none of that. Our pitch was we believe in this category, the community, the audience, the fundamentals of gameplay, the model of game that has come out of Blizzard with WarCraft and StarCraft. This is sound. This is really good. It's compelling, it's something that there's a lot of passion about, both within our dev team and out in the player base. And we can take what's already there and already great, and we can refine and advance that without having to radically hack it apart or change the formula. We can just take something great and make it even greater.
The seed money of $4.7m is already probably higher than the total budget of some of the notable indie RTS games that have come out in the previous few years like Frostpunk or They Are Billions. And you say you're trying to make a "triple A" game. What specifically are you trying to do that's different or bigger than the indie RTS games that have come out post-StarCraft II?
Tim M: Just in terms of scope of SC2, for example, there were four main pillars coming off Legacy of the Void. Those were campaign—campaigns are time consuming to build, and require voice acting, require cinematics—so campaign is a pillar. Cooperative is a completely separate gameplay mode that's open-ended and takes a great deal of effort to design for, as Kevin can attest. Competitive is, again, in some cases has different units, in all cases has different balance values, different maps, different technology behind the ladder. It's just a tremendous amount of work to build a good competitive mode. And then, Arcade, for user generated content. Again, a completely different experience, different work that has to go into building that set of tools.
The scope of a StarCraft II relative to the scope of some of the other indie RTS games that have come out is substantially bigger. For us to really follow in the tradition of Blizzard RTS, it means that we really have to be thinking of that scope and not just pick one of those four pillars, but really be thinking about all of those pillars.
Tim C: I think that's pretty core to what we're setting out to do here. We are definitely inspired by the strength of the indie market. Just the string of games that have come out, even in the last year or two that have given different flavors of RTS and different styles of gameplay, and just had really interesting and new worlds and environments that they're set in. There's been a lot of interesting stuff out there, but we're very specifically trying to build a game that will appeal to you if you're a fan of WarCraft 3 or StarCraft 2.
And stepping into this model of game, like Tim was saying, stepping into that space implies certain things. It is important to us that we make sure that we're not slicing off just a part of that, but we are making sure that our game has appeal there for people who are fans of the storylines that get told, or enjoy playing on a team together with other players, or really enjoy playing competitively, or building their own content. And sometimes, developmentally, that feels like we're almost building we're signing up to build multiple types of games all under one umbrella.
The unifying aspect for those four pillars, which are semi-independent games in a sense, really seems to be the lore and world of StarCraft, not just the gameplay. How are you approaching that part of making an RTS?
We've been really fortunate to team up with Mickey Neilsen, who I think was a 25-year Blizzard veteran, and goes back to an earlier era in Blizzard. Mickey, who's close with Sam Didier, the Blizzard Art Director, brings great story perspective. He ran publishing for Blizzard, he was a writer at Blizzard, he's got a couple of New York Times best-sellers set in the WoW universe. He actually hired the guy who did all the writing for LotV. He's just been imbued with a lot of the universe building that's happened at Blizzard, and he is helping us flesh out our ideas around setting and story. That is super important to all the modes of the game, and something that we really want to get right.
How far along are you in that regard? Is there anything concrete on the table? Or are you open to everything right now?
Tim M: Totally. The first thing to know here is that the team that has transitioned out of Blizzard to work at Frost Giant, by and large, they all started at the beginning of September. So we're about six weeks in so far. Which means that it is very early. We do have directions that we are exploring, and ideas that feel like they're probably the ideas that we'll go with, but it's too early to answer exactly what direction we're going to go in.
Any chance at working with a pre-existing IP?
There's always some chance, and we have considered that possibility. But yeah, we're at such an early stage right now, that we're unable to predict exactly which direction we'll go.
What kind of important changes have occurred in the gaming industry since the release of StarCraft II that are relevant to making an RTS in this day and age?
Tim M: StarCraft 2 started in an era that was 100% about the box product, and that means two things. It means something about how content gets delivered, which was in two year bursts. That dictated how the game got built, what the scope was, and what got delivered. But it also dictated how players bought that content. They generally went to a store or ordered it online, and they got a whole CD or DVD full of content. Which meant that this idea of free-to-play wasn't even contemplated at the beginning of SC2.
And over the course of our tenure on SC2, we had to pivot this vision that had been conceived in that older era, toward a newer era where people get their games by downloading. And they don't just play the disc and then wait for the next disc. They expect the game to keep evolving. And a whole new generation of gamers came to expect that they could play a game for free, and that they would make incremental purchases in order to buy into the ecosystem and continue to support the game. We've had to adapt a lot with what we did on SC2. I think there's an opportunity in building something new to really design from the outset, to have an optimal player experience around both of those things.
But games are continuing to evolve too, and there's a lot of thinking there.
Ryan: I think another thing that's changed a lot is the way that people share games. Obviously, Twitch is huge, but the way that games spread based on social dynamics, I think, has changed quite a bit. You see games explode and succeed even years after release, depending on some of these factors. I think there's a lot of differences in the world today versus when Wings of Liberty was released, that probably need to be carefully considered. And honestly, Wings of Liberty probably helped shape some of those things to some degree.
Monk: I think to expand on what Ryan said, the rise of Twitch also kind of highlights the increasing importance of community in games. A lot of the games that are really popular these days are ones that you can play with a bunch of your friends, a lot of the viral ones like Fall Guys or Among Us in recent times. And I think part of that is relevant to the mode that I've worked on the most in StarCraft 2, the cooperative mode, and I think that's just a great way for players in RTS to get that kind of shared experience with other players.
Your goal is to make a spiritual successor to Blizzard RTS games. In terms of gameplay, what do you think are the characteristics of a Blizzard RTS?
Tim M: It's something we've been deconstructing as a team: what does make a Blizzard RTS a Blizzard RTS. There are so many ingredients in that, even just from a game mechanics perspective that there isn't one easy answer to that. I think there are a litany of things that we could point to, but we're still in the process ourselves, deciding which of those things are the essential things to Blizzard RTS, and which of those things are incidental. We're so deep in the process ourselves of trying to make decisions about what we want to do with this game, that it's hard for us to point to a specific list right now, because we're very much in the decision making process.
Tim C: We all love Blizzard RTS, so we could probably sit here and talk your ear off for an hour about all the aspects of Blizzard RTS that we love. But for me it comes down to a couple of things. Blizzard is well known, especially within the RTS category, for having really high production values, and having this special 'feel' when you're playing the game, that other RTS games just have a hard time matching. And that's a collection of many tiny nuances and ingredients that we can't really dive into those details of now. But in terms of making a game feel like a Blizzard game, that's on top of my list. And feeding into that is the level of control and responsiveness, and the speed of units responding to your input as a player. So it just feels like the game is an extension of you, it's just really responsive to you as a player, and there is not a UI you're fighting against to get through to the gameplay.
Those two things, I think, at a gut level, are a couple of the most important things that I aspire to with making this game in the Blizzard style.
Monk: I think a lot of the previous RTS games I played in the last five years, they just don't have the kind of crispness of a Blizzard RTS. The units don't control how you might think they would control, or there's some lag time between when you input the controls and the actions come out. I would say those are some of those kinds of 'hard' things that we really want from our game to make it feel like a blizzard RTS.
But there's a lot of 'soft' things, like are there going to be two resources in the game, or are there going to be traditional tech trees. I think we, honestly, don't know the answers to those questions, and we're going to be doing a lot of experimentation in the next few years to decide what really makes a Blizzard RTS.
Ryan: And I think actually even outside of gameplay, there's a lot of elements that you need to bring to the table to capture that feel, from UI to art, and all these different things that contribute to it. I think you can have a game that feels mechanically similar and still misses somehow. So it's really going to be a culmination of a lot of different components.
You've made it clear on the onset that you want to lower the barrier to entry while maintaining the high-end skill cap. That seems like a hard prospect, given that I consider Blizzard RTS games to be very heavy on the 'real-time' compared to the 'strategy.'
Tim M: To use your division of real-time versus strategy, even comparing WarCraft 3 to Brood War to StarCraft 2, there's definitely variants there. But I think one of the interesting observations is how different a game StarCraft is between bronze to gold level, versus masters level. The way you play the game at lower levels versus the way you play the game at high level is radically different. And, it is that experience at the low level that I think we need to optimize. I think the experience at the high level we want to stay true to the high-skill gameplay that RTS has been known for there. But because those experiences are so different, and there really is an opportunity to approach those players separately.
We've got a super long list on how to do that, at its most simplified, distilled essence it's that players who are coming in this game at a low level should be equipped with ways to play the game that mitigate some of the negative experiences we've all had with RTS over the years, but we don't want to take away any of the ability to dive into the depths and achieve the high skill that we see at the top of ladder.
Monk: Just as an example, one thing we experimented with in SC2 on the cooperative game mode is that we have a lot of abilities in our game that are by default autocast-able. And if you leave them on, you get maybe 80~85% of the power than if you manually controlled it. So, for players at lower skill levels, you can still get 80% of that power, but in order to really differentiate yourself and show your skill, you can toggle off autocast and manually cast it to get max benefit.
Ryan: And the trick to getting that to work, especially as we spread this out beyond autocast abilities, is to create a natural transition. It can't be something like "I'm gonna turn this off now because I'm better at the game." It has to be something where you transition out naturally, so it's like "I want to execute this strategy, so I need to do this one thing a little bit differently." So trying to create that transition is going to be really important to making something where we can lower the skill floor, but keep that skill ceiling at the place that it's at.
Tim C: Yeah the one thing we're not going to do, in our pursuit of smoothing out the experience for new players, is we're not going to gut the design of this, or oversimplify gameplay or make any sort of radical change that would affect core players at the upper end of the skill curve in order to fix issues at the bottom of it. It is really important to us that we approach these as two parallel topics—that we can preserve the high skill-cap gameplay that we really love about StarCraft II and RTS in general, while also finding those aspects of the game that we can tweak or change in order to smooth on the on-ramp of new players and do it in a way that doesn't affect the core gameplay.
Tim M: You think about all the stuff in StarCraft II that is important to know in multiplayer but you don't necessarily have a reason to learn in campaign. Even walling off your base as an example. Build orders, that are so different in multiplayer versus campaign. These are all things that to a great extent, players have been left to figure out on their own by trial and error, or going on YouTube to watch videos. There's tremendous opportunity to provide a better experience there. I think the list of examples like that, it's pretty substantial. So I feel pretty confident that there's fertile ground for improvement there.
After Legacy of the Void came out, StarCraft II was in a place where the resources weren't there to make any more huge changes. What are some of the lingering flaws of StarCraft II that you'd like to address in a future RTS?
Tim M: I'll start by saying StarCraft 2 is one of my favorite games I ever made, so I think of it more in terms of successes than flaws. But any time you're working on a product that's mature like StarCraft II, player expectations have already been set in a certain direction, around two year cycles. That's something where we tried to evolve it over time, and I think to a certain extent we were successful.
But designing from the ground up, there are opportunities to create motivation systems to keep players playing while getting smaller chunks of content. That's just a new thought process. And so, here we have an opportunity to build something from the ground up. It's a chance to approach that deliberately instead of approaching it as sort of after-decision, as it was with StarCraft 2.
Monk: Here are some examples from co-op mode. Co-op was kind of built from the ground up with the idea that maybe there's six commanders, maybe there's six maps, and there's maybe ten hours of content per commander—we'll see where it goes from there.
It turned out to be a huge success, but an unfortunate part of it was that it wasn't really built with longevity in mind, because of the initial uncertainty of how successful it would be. And over the years, we've kind of had to add on system on top of system on top of system, in order to prolong that longevity.
The best example is the progression system. Which is, if you think about it, four progression systems on top of each other. The leveling system from 1-15, the masteries system that lets you customize your commanders in some way, there's the ascension system which is mostly cosmetic in nature, and you have the prestige system on top of that. I think the mindset of the team each time we added a system, was "what is the next, best thing we can do for our players?" While I think in general we have achieved that, unfortunately those systems don't synergize with each other as we would have liked them to. So ideally, if we could make something from scratch, we would build an entire progression system that makes sense standing on its own.
Another example is just the gameplay of co-op. I think co-op, by nature of it being in StarCraft 2, is really based around SC2 units and SC2 interactions. I think just one simple change that you could make is maybe increase the health of the units—I think that could have dramatic effects on how commander units interact with Amon's units.
TL.net has always been focused on high end 1v1 play and esports. But I also get the impression that most people played StarCraft for the campaign, and 1v1 wasn't quite as popular. For StarCraft II, the esports sometimes seemed like something that was pursued due to prestige and the history of esports in Korea, not so much because it had some practical value. Your thoughts?
Tim M: From my perspective, campaign and competitive are important in different ways. Campaign is a bigger audience, it's roughly 75% of the audience of people who bought the game versus about 25% who are competitive. But, the people who play campaign have a tendency to play campaign and then move on to other games. And they come back when we release an expansion, or they come back for coop—I think coop resonated with the campaign crowd well.
The competitive player, they play StarCraft so frequently and so consistently that they are incredibly important as an audience. And even though they're a smaller group, the level of passion they have around the game is so substantial that their value is greater than the audience size. They're both important in different ways. I don't think there's any world where we would even consider not trying to build a great esport in a new RTS. It is a passion of ours, and it's also a passion of the community. At the same time, we also want to provide a good experience for campaign players.
You said esports will be a part of the RTS you are making. Could you elaborate on the play? Everyone who makes a game with multiplayer these days says they're going to "do esports," but that could really mean anything.
World Championship Series was actually one of the most lucratively prized systems in all of esports, relative to the viewership. Are you looking for that kind of big developer subsidization, or are you more focused on the 3rd party market?
Tim M: Keep in mind we're six weeks in *laughs*. So we're a long way from having our game defined. But what we do know is we came up on WCS and on StarCraft esports. Obviously Tim Campbell was around for War3 esports as well. But what Blizzard achieved is our model for what we hope to accomplish. What that means is we want to be popular, and we want to have a fanbase that is passionate about what we're building. But what the right shape of a league looks like—Blizzard esports went through a lot of evolution over our time there. I think in the years it takes us to develop this game, we'll see more evolution in esports as a whole. I think it's too early for us to say what a league system to look like.
Even just in the past few years, we've seen the emergence of leagues that are in essence funded by professional team owners. What's the trend going to be over the next few years? What's going to happen with viewership, sponsorship? I think we want to achieve great success. We will evaluate what is the best way to achieve that, and if it is direct investment, that's something we'll have to figure out how to approach. If it's another model, we'll just have to be open-minded and observe what happens in the years ahead.
I feel like we haven't mentioned WarCraft III enough as an influence. There hasn't been an RTS in that particular style in the near past—what are some elements of WarCraft III you'd like to bring back?
Tim M: It's interesting to look at the intersection between SC2 and War3 in terms of co-op adopting a kind of hero driven model. I think there's something interesting there. I think as we've deconstructed WarCraft 3, StarCraft 2, and other games, you look at things like depth of tech tree, you look at things like the health of units and damage done, and I think there are things that players liked and didn't like about both games. Part of the process that we're going through is trying to determine what are the best aspects of each that we can potentially take advantage of in what we build.
Tim C: There are obviously a lot of differences between WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2, and we're not approaching the game we're building by just copying or trying to be derivative to one or the other. We're looking at the space and deconstructing it, identifying the best parts of each, and finding a way to work those elements together into our own game. So that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty numbers, it gets down into a lot of details on how tech trees are structured, how heroes and progression works, and to what extent we want to involve them. But we're right in the early stages of this, so I wouldn't say that we've really committed hard to anything—we're just in the process of putting the plan together, and making sure we have the best approach based on our experiences.
Monk: One thing from WarCraft 3 that I really enjoyed that is missing from the StarCraft franchise is how each race's workers interact differently with both resources and with base defense. Human and Orc workers mine very traditionally, by having workers walk to the gold mine. Night Elf wisps hide inside a gold mine, while Acolytes are stationary outside a gold mine. Human Peasants can be temporarily turned into Militia to fight, while Orc Peons can shoot from inside burrows. Night Elf Wisps don't do any damage in combat, but they can drain enemy hero mana. Undead's most basic combat unit, the Ghoul, also doubles as its lumber harvester.
I think WarCraft 3 gets criticized for all its units being very similar across the races, but I think the worker differentiation is one part of WarCraft 3 that's really interesting and doesn't get enough credit.
What's the community's role going to be in development? Any considerations for early-access? Blizzard has been notably secretive in the past, and not particularly collaborative. What's your approach?
Tim M: We feel like this is one of those ways in which the industry as a whole has shifted over time. And we feel like it is important to be more collaborative. In the beginning we are such a small team, it is important for us to keep enough bandwidth to keep prototyping and making forward progress on what we're building. But we are also going to be having some regular conversations with the group of folks who gave us feedback at StarCraft 2 community summits in the past, and we are going to be posing some broader questions to the community at large to get opinions back. But just from a philosophical point of view, our goal here is not to be secretive, our goal here is to provide an opportunity for us to learn and get feedback from the community.
Monk: I think one of the coolest parts of our dev team is that not only do we have experience as Blizzard devs, but we have experience being members of the community as well. Ryan and I were members of the community before we joined Blizzard, Cara has also been part of the community in a big way, and one of our engineers, Austin, comes from the modding scene. I think one of the biggest strengths of our company is that we know the criticisms of SC2 and we thought about how we would address those both from the community angle and from the developer angle. And we’ve thought long and hard about how we would address these both in StarCraft 2 and if we were to build a new game.
Tim M: Even in the post-Legacy of the Void process, we really tried to increase the priority of taking community feedback and communicating back while we were inside Blizzard as well. I think as a team, we really value hearing from others.
It wouldn't be a TL.net interview without some Brood War elitism. There's some prominent SC2 figures who will tell you off the record (or even on the record!) that Brood War is still the better game, at least partially due to how difficult the game is mechanically. While I seriously doubt you guys are going to backtrack on things like multi building selection, how do you reconcile this dilemma where the interface being janky is actually part of what makes Brood War good?
Tim M: I think we want to give high skill players an opportunity to shine. But I think we want to do that in a way that is deliberate. Meaning that we have designed opportunities for them to shine. I think a lot of the ways that high skill players could shine in BW were accidental, they weren't necessarily pre-designed. It doesn't mean they're bad—clearly BW has endured for 20 years. It's an amazing game. But in setting out to build something new, you can't count on happy accidents. So I would take it back to that initial sort of mission statement of maintaining a high skill ceiling while lowering the skill floor. We absolutely want there to be a high skill ceiling, but just want to be deliberate about how we maintain the high skill ceiling.
Monk: I think that we haven't given enough credit to Brood War in this interview. I do think there are actually quite a few advantages that Brood War has over StarCraft 2, though not necessarily the UI elements that you're referring to. For example, I think Brood War is great with the level of defensive advantage a player can have, both due to its awkward pathing and how ramps work, so certain defensive units like Lurkers can easily defend single points with a much smaller army. Brood War also has a tendency to be much less deathball-y, and the difference in the movement patterns between the three races is more significant across matchups. The variety in how you control units can be said to be more diverse. And I do think there is merit in how Brood War handles its economy system over StarCraft 2.
However, I think those are all lessons we can take and try to implement in an intentional way, instead of the kind of happy coincidences of Brood War.
Okay, any final messages to TL.net, the oldest bastion of skeptical, cynical, and elitist StarCraft fans?
Tim M: We're going to need the community's help to make this a great game. As I said, we're small at the beginning, so it will be hard for us to engage in a big way with the community. But as time goes on and as we grow, I think the best way this can succeed is with help. So we look forward to working with the community to make this a great game.
Monk: Teamliquid sucks, SC2GG forever! Just kidding, but also please cheer for us, we hope to make a great game.
Learn more about Frost Giant Studios at www.frostgiant.com.
TL.net had a chance to talk extensively with several members of the development team from Frost Giant Studios and discuss their approach to continuing the legacy of the Blizzard RTS.
Interview participants:
Tim Morten, Production Director: The production director of StarCraft 2 during the Legacy of the Void era.
Tim Campbell, Game Director: Worked on RTS titles such as C&C Red Alert 2, C&C Generals, and was the lead campaign designer on WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne.
Kevin "Monk" Dong, Lead co-op designer: Previously the lead co-op designer in StarCraft 2. TL.net writer and staff member before that!
Ryan Schutter, Lead user experience designer: Previously the lead designer on StarCraft 2. Creator of the Gameheart spectator mode for StarCraft 2.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Wax: You guys could have done anything after moving on from Blizzard, but decided on an RTS game. Why?
Tim Campbell: We're making an RTS? *laughs*
Tim Morten: For me, two things. First, it's my favorite genre. My favorite genre to play, but also favorite genre to work on. I just want to make another one.
The other part that's also really meaningful and motivating to me is—I think everybody feels this—it's hard to work on something and not feel a desire to want to see the community continue to thrive. All of us had to work on managing StarCraft past the point where there were going to be new, big releases. And I think we did it because we cared about the product, but we also did it because we care about the players. There really is a sincere desire to give the community reason to look forward to the future, and to build something new.
Tim Campbell: I love RTS. I've been lucky enough to have had a chance to work on several, and they're the most fun development experiences, and this is the kind of game that I got into the industry to make originally. So I had a chance to work on Red Alert 2 and the start of C&C Generals, WarCraft III, and The Frozen Throne, and I've been itching to work on another RTS ever since then. And so, the opportunity to be able to dive into this genre to build this type of game with this group of people right now, is just an unbelievable opportunity that I'm super excited about
Kevin Dong (Monk): I really kind of imprinted on RTS early in life with WarCraft 2, Brood War, with WarCraft 3, and now StarCraft 2. Again, to echo Tim's point, I guess just personally on a somewhat philosophical level, I find happiness in finding a community and having a feeling of belonging in that community. So this is kind of my way of staying in that community and trying to help the community in any way possible.
Ryan Schutter: And for me, my initials are "RTS," so I've mostly just kind of shaped my whole life around that. But my last name is pronounced 'shooter,' so if it doesn't work I've got that, I can just make a switch.
But really, I just love RTS games, I've been playing them my entire life. There's nothing else quite like it. And I really want to continue that genre into the future because I want future generations to be able to experience how awesome it is.
What was it like trying to get funding for an RTS studio in this day and age? The outside perception of RTS is that it's in decline, it's not a hot genre. What were your pitches to investors like?
Tim M: There's a few things I'll say on this. The first is about hot genres. The games industry is considered hit driven. That's true for a lot of media industries; film is like this as well. But hot at the moment doesn't necessarily mean that that's predictive of what's going to be hot in the future. You know, look at how we've gone from say, from battle royale to Fall Guys, to Among Us, there's always something hot at the moment.
It's not about what's the biggest thing right now, it's about what's got potential. And we all know that this genre is tremendously fun, has a tremendously passionate community behind it. Historically, you look at other communities, whether it's the MMO community, the CCG community, the team based shooter community, heck, the early MOBA community. These are all communities that had a passionate core, gameplay that the passionate core knew was great, and they found ways to break out.
In talking to investors, there was belief that those ingredients exist with RTS. And most of these investors have... You've got general partners and you have analysts. The general partners are the guys who make the decisions, and the analysts are the guys that make the recommendations. And a lot of these analysts, like us, came up as core gamers. And these guys, it was amazing how consistent love for RTS was across these investor groups that I talked to. And to be fair, the guys who are our lead investors, were founded by the former CEO of ESL. The next big investor was Riot Games, who took MOBA to the popularity that it's achieved. I think these guys especially get it. But it was surprisingly a better response than I even anticipated going out, when I wasn't sure what to expect.
Tim C: I think that's a big part of the appeal to the investors lies with the community itself. Other genres definitely have hit driven business models like you're talking about, Tim, with audiences going up and down. But the RTS audience and the SC2 community in particular, is among the most consistent and loyal communities that there is in games, bar none. And, that consistent audience, and the presence of that strong and passionate a player base that's still engaged now—how many years after StarCraft's release?—that is incredibly compelling to the investors, and it's something that they absolutely wanted to support
You make it sound like the investors were fans who bought in based on passion, on unquantifiable factors. But did you also have to present data to support RTS, whether it's publicly available stats on who's playing RTS on Steam, or internal information about StarCraft II from your time at Blizzard?
Tim M: The short answer is I didn't have to present that kind of information. I did have some amount of experiential information I could share from StarCraft. There is a little bit of information for They are Billions or Frostpunk or some of these other games that are indies on Steam. There are some press releases from Microsoft around Age of Empires, so there's a little bit of quantitative data there.
But I think, MOBA is a great example to take. If you look at what the player counts were on the original DOTA before HON happened, before League or Dota 2, the player base was a fraction of what RTS is today. And, if you go back early enough, that's true for autobattlers, it's true for battle royale, all of these genres that became big were small at some point.
RTS isn't small. RTS has millions of monthly active users. Even if we just had another success that was the size of StarCraft II, that's a commercial success that nobody would look at the return on and be disappointed. But I really believe that there's an opportunity to do even better than that.
So anyhow, every pitch deck an investor sees has what they call the hockey stick. You know, where people are saying this thing is THIS size now, but look at what happens as it goes up the hockey stick, and it's gonna go huge! And so, literally ever pitch they get, they're hearing that claim. I think it's about what are the claims that feel believable to them. These guys, they're games investors, it's what they do—this space. Specifically, they all agreed that this genre feels fertile to grow and to break out.
Tim C: Building on that a little bit, I think our pitch to investors was probably different than a lot of groups. Pitches in that, I've heard for years, just a recurring drumbeat of "RTS is dead," "RTS is too complicated or too hard or too intimidating," and we need to slice off this chunk, or simplify that in order to move forward as a genre.
And our pitch was none of that. Our pitch was we believe in this category, the community, the audience, the fundamentals of gameplay, the model of game that has come out of Blizzard with WarCraft and StarCraft. This is sound. This is really good. It's compelling, it's something that there's a lot of passion about, both within our dev team and out in the player base. And we can take what's already there and already great, and we can refine and advance that without having to radically hack it apart or change the formula. We can just take something great and make it even greater.
The seed money of $4.7m is already probably higher than the total budget of some of the notable indie RTS games that have come out in the previous few years like Frostpunk or They Are Billions. And you say you're trying to make a "triple A" game. What specifically are you trying to do that's different or bigger than the indie RTS games that have come out post-StarCraft II?
Tim M: Just in terms of scope of SC2, for example, there were four main pillars coming off Legacy of the Void. Those were campaign—campaigns are time consuming to build, and require voice acting, require cinematics—so campaign is a pillar. Cooperative is a completely separate gameplay mode that's open-ended and takes a great deal of effort to design for, as Kevin can attest. Competitive is, again, in some cases has different units, in all cases has different balance values, different maps, different technology behind the ladder. It's just a tremendous amount of work to build a good competitive mode. And then, Arcade, for user generated content. Again, a completely different experience, different work that has to go into building that set of tools.
The scope of a StarCraft II relative to the scope of some of the other indie RTS games that have come out is substantially bigger. For us to really follow in the tradition of Blizzard RTS, it means that we really have to be thinking of that scope and not just pick one of those four pillars, but really be thinking about all of those pillars.
Tim C: I think that's pretty core to what we're setting out to do here. We are definitely inspired by the strength of the indie market. Just the string of games that have come out, even in the last year or two that have given different flavors of RTS and different styles of gameplay, and just had really interesting and new worlds and environments that they're set in. There's been a lot of interesting stuff out there, but we're very specifically trying to build a game that will appeal to you if you're a fan of WarCraft 3 or StarCraft 2.
And stepping into this model of game, like Tim was saying, stepping into that space implies certain things. It is important to us that we make sure that we're not slicing off just a part of that, but we are making sure that our game has appeal there for people who are fans of the storylines that get told, or enjoy playing on a team together with other players, or really enjoy playing competitively, or building their own content. And sometimes, developmentally, that feels like we're almost building we're signing up to build multiple types of games all under one umbrella.
The unifying aspect for those four pillars, which are semi-independent games in a sense, really seems to be the lore and world of StarCraft, not just the gameplay. How are you approaching that part of making an RTS?
We've been really fortunate to team up with Mickey Neilsen, who I think was a 25-year Blizzard veteran, and goes back to an earlier era in Blizzard. Mickey, who's close with Sam Didier, the Blizzard Art Director, brings great story perspective. He ran publishing for Blizzard, he was a writer at Blizzard, he's got a couple of New York Times best-sellers set in the WoW universe. He actually hired the guy who did all the writing for LotV. He's just been imbued with a lot of the universe building that's happened at Blizzard, and he is helping us flesh out our ideas around setting and story. That is super important to all the modes of the game, and something that we really want to get right.
How far along are you in that regard? Is there anything concrete on the table? Or are you open to everything right now?
Tim M: Totally. The first thing to know here is that the team that has transitioned out of Blizzard to work at Frost Giant, by and large, they all started at the beginning of September. So we're about six weeks in so far. Which means that it is very early. We do have directions that we are exploring, and ideas that feel like they're probably the ideas that we'll go with, but it's too early to answer exactly what direction we're going to go in.
Any chance at working with a pre-existing IP?
There's always some chance, and we have considered that possibility. But yeah, we're at such an early stage right now, that we're unable to predict exactly which direction we'll go.
What kind of important changes have occurred in the gaming industry since the release of StarCraft II that are relevant to making an RTS in this day and age?
Tim M: StarCraft 2 started in an era that was 100% about the box product, and that means two things. It means something about how content gets delivered, which was in two year bursts. That dictated how the game got built, what the scope was, and what got delivered. But it also dictated how players bought that content. They generally went to a store or ordered it online, and they got a whole CD or DVD full of content. Which meant that this idea of free-to-play wasn't even contemplated at the beginning of SC2.
And over the course of our tenure on SC2, we had to pivot this vision that had been conceived in that older era, toward a newer era where people get their games by downloading. And they don't just play the disc and then wait for the next disc. They expect the game to keep evolving. And a whole new generation of gamers came to expect that they could play a game for free, and that they would make incremental purchases in order to buy into the ecosystem and continue to support the game. We've had to adapt a lot with what we did on SC2. I think there's an opportunity in building something new to really design from the outset, to have an optimal player experience around both of those things.
But games are continuing to evolve too, and there's a lot of thinking there.
Ryan: I think another thing that's changed a lot is the way that people share games. Obviously, Twitch is huge, but the way that games spread based on social dynamics, I think, has changed quite a bit. You see games explode and succeed even years after release, depending on some of these factors. I think there's a lot of differences in the world today versus when Wings of Liberty was released, that probably need to be carefully considered. And honestly, Wings of Liberty probably helped shape some of those things to some degree.
Monk: I think to expand on what Ryan said, the rise of Twitch also kind of highlights the increasing importance of community in games. A lot of the games that are really popular these days are ones that you can play with a bunch of your friends, a lot of the viral ones like Fall Guys or Among Us in recent times. And I think part of that is relevant to the mode that I've worked on the most in StarCraft 2, the cooperative mode, and I think that's just a great way for players in RTS to get that kind of shared experience with other players.
Your goal is to make a spiritual successor to Blizzard RTS games. In terms of gameplay, what do you think are the characteristics of a Blizzard RTS?
Tim M: It's something we've been deconstructing as a team: what does make a Blizzard RTS a Blizzard RTS. There are so many ingredients in that, even just from a game mechanics perspective that there isn't one easy answer to that. I think there are a litany of things that we could point to, but we're still in the process ourselves, deciding which of those things are the essential things to Blizzard RTS, and which of those things are incidental. We're so deep in the process ourselves of trying to make decisions about what we want to do with this game, that it's hard for us to point to a specific list right now, because we're very much in the decision making process.
Tim C: We all love Blizzard RTS, so we could probably sit here and talk your ear off for an hour about all the aspects of Blizzard RTS that we love. But for me it comes down to a couple of things. Blizzard is well known, especially within the RTS category, for having really high production values, and having this special 'feel' when you're playing the game, that other RTS games just have a hard time matching. And that's a collection of many tiny nuances and ingredients that we can't really dive into those details of now. But in terms of making a game feel like a Blizzard game, that's on top of my list. And feeding into that is the level of control and responsiveness, and the speed of units responding to your input as a player. So it just feels like the game is an extension of you, it's just really responsive to you as a player, and there is not a UI you're fighting against to get through to the gameplay.
Those two things, I think, at a gut level, are a couple of the most important things that I aspire to with making this game in the Blizzard style.
Monk: I think a lot of the previous RTS games I played in the last five years, they just don't have the kind of crispness of a Blizzard RTS. The units don't control how you might think they would control, or there's some lag time between when you input the controls and the actions come out. I would say those are some of those kinds of 'hard' things that we really want from our game to make it feel like a blizzard RTS.
But there's a lot of 'soft' things, like are there going to be two resources in the game, or are there going to be traditional tech trees. I think we, honestly, don't know the answers to those questions, and we're going to be doing a lot of experimentation in the next few years to decide what really makes a Blizzard RTS.
Ryan: And I think actually even outside of gameplay, there's a lot of elements that you need to bring to the table to capture that feel, from UI to art, and all these different things that contribute to it. I think you can have a game that feels mechanically similar and still misses somehow. So it's really going to be a culmination of a lot of different components.
You've made it clear on the onset that you want to lower the barrier to entry while maintaining the high-end skill cap. That seems like a hard prospect, given that I consider Blizzard RTS games to be very heavy on the 'real-time' compared to the 'strategy.'
Tim M: To use your division of real-time versus strategy, even comparing WarCraft 3 to Brood War to StarCraft 2, there's definitely variants there. But I think one of the interesting observations is how different a game StarCraft is between bronze to gold level, versus masters level. The way you play the game at lower levels versus the way you play the game at high level is radically different. And, it is that experience at the low level that I think we need to optimize. I think the experience at the high level we want to stay true to the high-skill gameplay that RTS has been known for there. But because those experiences are so different, and there really is an opportunity to approach those players separately.
We've got a super long list on how to do that, at its most simplified, distilled essence it's that players who are coming in this game at a low level should be equipped with ways to play the game that mitigate some of the negative experiences we've all had with RTS over the years, but we don't want to take away any of the ability to dive into the depths and achieve the high skill that we see at the top of ladder.
Monk: Just as an example, one thing we experimented with in SC2 on the cooperative game mode is that we have a lot of abilities in our game that are by default autocast-able. And if you leave them on, you get maybe 80~85% of the power than if you manually controlled it. So, for players at lower skill levels, you can still get 80% of that power, but in order to really differentiate yourself and show your skill, you can toggle off autocast and manually cast it to get max benefit.
Ryan: And the trick to getting that to work, especially as we spread this out beyond autocast abilities, is to create a natural transition. It can't be something like "I'm gonna turn this off now because I'm better at the game." It has to be something where you transition out naturally, so it's like "I want to execute this strategy, so I need to do this one thing a little bit differently." So trying to create that transition is going to be really important to making something where we can lower the skill floor, but keep that skill ceiling at the place that it's at.
Tim C: Yeah the one thing we're not going to do, in our pursuit of smoothing out the experience for new players, is we're not going to gut the design of this, or oversimplify gameplay or make any sort of radical change that would affect core players at the upper end of the skill curve in order to fix issues at the bottom of it. It is really important to us that we approach these as two parallel topics—that we can preserve the high skill-cap gameplay that we really love about StarCraft II and RTS in general, while also finding those aspects of the game that we can tweak or change in order to smooth on the on-ramp of new players and do it in a way that doesn't affect the core gameplay.
Tim M: You think about all the stuff in StarCraft II that is important to know in multiplayer but you don't necessarily have a reason to learn in campaign. Even walling off your base as an example. Build orders, that are so different in multiplayer versus campaign. These are all things that to a great extent, players have been left to figure out on their own by trial and error, or going on YouTube to watch videos. There's tremendous opportunity to provide a better experience there. I think the list of examples like that, it's pretty substantial. So I feel pretty confident that there's fertile ground for improvement there.
After Legacy of the Void came out, StarCraft II was in a place where the resources weren't there to make any more huge changes. What are some of the lingering flaws of StarCraft II that you'd like to address in a future RTS?
Tim M: I'll start by saying StarCraft 2 is one of my favorite games I ever made, so I think of it more in terms of successes than flaws. But any time you're working on a product that's mature like StarCraft II, player expectations have already been set in a certain direction, around two year cycles. That's something where we tried to evolve it over time, and I think to a certain extent we were successful.
But designing from the ground up, there are opportunities to create motivation systems to keep players playing while getting smaller chunks of content. That's just a new thought process. And so, here we have an opportunity to build something from the ground up. It's a chance to approach that deliberately instead of approaching it as sort of after-decision, as it was with StarCraft 2.
Monk: Here are some examples from co-op mode. Co-op was kind of built from the ground up with the idea that maybe there's six commanders, maybe there's six maps, and there's maybe ten hours of content per commander—we'll see where it goes from there.
It turned out to be a huge success, but an unfortunate part of it was that it wasn't really built with longevity in mind, because of the initial uncertainty of how successful it would be. And over the years, we've kind of had to add on system on top of system on top of system, in order to prolong that longevity.
The best example is the progression system. Which is, if you think about it, four progression systems on top of each other. The leveling system from 1-15, the masteries system that lets you customize your commanders in some way, there's the ascension system which is mostly cosmetic in nature, and you have the prestige system on top of that. I think the mindset of the team each time we added a system, was "what is the next, best thing we can do for our players?" While I think in general we have achieved that, unfortunately those systems don't synergize with each other as we would have liked them to. So ideally, if we could make something from scratch, we would build an entire progression system that makes sense standing on its own.
Another example is just the gameplay of co-op. I think co-op, by nature of it being in StarCraft 2, is really based around SC2 units and SC2 interactions. I think just one simple change that you could make is maybe increase the health of the units—I think that could have dramatic effects on how commander units interact with Amon's units.
TL.net has always been focused on high end 1v1 play and esports. But I also get the impression that most people played StarCraft for the campaign, and 1v1 wasn't quite as popular. For StarCraft II, the esports sometimes seemed like something that was pursued due to prestige and the history of esports in Korea, not so much because it had some practical value. Your thoughts?
Tim M: From my perspective, campaign and competitive are important in different ways. Campaign is a bigger audience, it's roughly 75% of the audience of people who bought the game versus about 25% who are competitive. But, the people who play campaign have a tendency to play campaign and then move on to other games. And they come back when we release an expansion, or they come back for coop—I think coop resonated with the campaign crowd well.
The competitive player, they play StarCraft so frequently and so consistently that they are incredibly important as an audience. And even though they're a smaller group, the level of passion they have around the game is so substantial that their value is greater than the audience size. They're both important in different ways. I don't think there's any world where we would even consider not trying to build a great esport in a new RTS. It is a passion of ours, and it's also a passion of the community. At the same time, we also want to provide a good experience for campaign players.
You said esports will be a part of the RTS you are making. Could you elaborate on the play? Everyone who makes a game with multiplayer these days says they're going to "do esports," but that could really mean anything.
World Championship Series was actually one of the most lucratively prized systems in all of esports, relative to the viewership. Are you looking for that kind of big developer subsidization, or are you more focused on the 3rd party market?
Tim M: Keep in mind we're six weeks in *laughs*. So we're a long way from having our game defined. But what we do know is we came up on WCS and on StarCraft esports. Obviously Tim Campbell was around for War3 esports as well. But what Blizzard achieved is our model for what we hope to accomplish. What that means is we want to be popular, and we want to have a fanbase that is passionate about what we're building. But what the right shape of a league looks like—Blizzard esports went through a lot of evolution over our time there. I think in the years it takes us to develop this game, we'll see more evolution in esports as a whole. I think it's too early for us to say what a league system to look like.
Even just in the past few years, we've seen the emergence of leagues that are in essence funded by professional team owners. What's the trend going to be over the next few years? What's going to happen with viewership, sponsorship? I think we want to achieve great success. We will evaluate what is the best way to achieve that, and if it is direct investment, that's something we'll have to figure out how to approach. If it's another model, we'll just have to be open-minded and observe what happens in the years ahead.
I feel like we haven't mentioned WarCraft III enough as an influence. There hasn't been an RTS in that particular style in the near past—what are some elements of WarCraft III you'd like to bring back?
Tim M: It's interesting to look at the intersection between SC2 and War3 in terms of co-op adopting a kind of hero driven model. I think there's something interesting there. I think as we've deconstructed WarCraft 3, StarCraft 2, and other games, you look at things like depth of tech tree, you look at things like the health of units and damage done, and I think there are things that players liked and didn't like about both games. Part of the process that we're going through is trying to determine what are the best aspects of each that we can potentially take advantage of in what we build.
Tim C: There are obviously a lot of differences between WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2, and we're not approaching the game we're building by just copying or trying to be derivative to one or the other. We're looking at the space and deconstructing it, identifying the best parts of each, and finding a way to work those elements together into our own game. So that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty numbers, it gets down into a lot of details on how tech trees are structured, how heroes and progression works, and to what extent we want to involve them. But we're right in the early stages of this, so I wouldn't say that we've really committed hard to anything—we're just in the process of putting the plan together, and making sure we have the best approach based on our experiences.
Monk: One thing from WarCraft 3 that I really enjoyed that is missing from the StarCraft franchise is how each race's workers interact differently with both resources and with base defense. Human and Orc workers mine very traditionally, by having workers walk to the gold mine. Night Elf wisps hide inside a gold mine, while Acolytes are stationary outside a gold mine. Human Peasants can be temporarily turned into Militia to fight, while Orc Peons can shoot from inside burrows. Night Elf Wisps don't do any damage in combat, but they can drain enemy hero mana. Undead's most basic combat unit, the Ghoul, also doubles as its lumber harvester.
I think WarCraft 3 gets criticized for all its units being very similar across the races, but I think the worker differentiation is one part of WarCraft 3 that's really interesting and doesn't get enough credit.
What's the community's role going to be in development? Any considerations for early-access? Blizzard has been notably secretive in the past, and not particularly collaborative. What's your approach?
Tim M: We feel like this is one of those ways in which the industry as a whole has shifted over time. And we feel like it is important to be more collaborative. In the beginning we are such a small team, it is important for us to keep enough bandwidth to keep prototyping and making forward progress on what we're building. But we are also going to be having some regular conversations with the group of folks who gave us feedback at StarCraft 2 community summits in the past, and we are going to be posing some broader questions to the community at large to get opinions back. But just from a philosophical point of view, our goal here is not to be secretive, our goal here is to provide an opportunity for us to learn and get feedback from the community.
Monk: I think one of the coolest parts of our dev team is that not only do we have experience as Blizzard devs, but we have experience being members of the community as well. Ryan and I were members of the community before we joined Blizzard, Cara has also been part of the community in a big way, and one of our engineers, Austin, comes from the modding scene. I think one of the biggest strengths of our company is that we know the criticisms of SC2 and we thought about how we would address those both from the community angle and from the developer angle. And we’ve thought long and hard about how we would address these both in StarCraft 2 and if we were to build a new game.
Tim M: Even in the post-Legacy of the Void process, we really tried to increase the priority of taking community feedback and communicating back while we were inside Blizzard as well. I think as a team, we really value hearing from others.
It wouldn't be a TL.net interview without some Brood War elitism. There's some prominent SC2 figures who will tell you off the record (or even on the record!) that Brood War is still the better game, at least partially due to how difficult the game is mechanically. While I seriously doubt you guys are going to backtrack on things like multi building selection, how do you reconcile this dilemma where the interface being janky is actually part of what makes Brood War good?
Tim M: I think we want to give high skill players an opportunity to shine. But I think we want to do that in a way that is deliberate. Meaning that we have designed opportunities for them to shine. I think a lot of the ways that high skill players could shine in BW were accidental, they weren't necessarily pre-designed. It doesn't mean they're bad—clearly BW has endured for 20 years. It's an amazing game. But in setting out to build something new, you can't count on happy accidents. So I would take it back to that initial sort of mission statement of maintaining a high skill ceiling while lowering the skill floor. We absolutely want there to be a high skill ceiling, but just want to be deliberate about how we maintain the high skill ceiling.
Monk: I think that we haven't given enough credit to Brood War in this interview. I do think there are actually quite a few advantages that Brood War has over StarCraft 2, though not necessarily the UI elements that you're referring to. For example, I think Brood War is great with the level of defensive advantage a player can have, both due to its awkward pathing and how ramps work, so certain defensive units like Lurkers can easily defend single points with a much smaller army. Brood War also has a tendency to be much less deathball-y, and the difference in the movement patterns between the three races is more significant across matchups. The variety in how you control units can be said to be more diverse. And I do think there is merit in how Brood War handles its economy system over StarCraft 2.
However, I think those are all lessons we can take and try to implement in an intentional way, instead of the kind of happy coincidences of Brood War.
Okay, any final messages to TL.net, the oldest bastion of skeptical, cynical, and elitist StarCraft fans?
Tim M: We're going to need the community's help to make this a great game. As I said, we're small at the beginning, so it will be hard for us to engage in a big way with the community. But as time goes on and as we grow, I think the best way this can succeed is with help. So we look forward to working with the community to make this a great game.
Monk: Teamliquid sucks, SC2GG forever! Just kidding, but also please cheer for us, we hope to make a great game.
Learn more about Frost Giant Studios at www.frostgiant.com.
