[Interview] SC2 Identity/Race Design - OneVoice!

Blue: This is BlueBoxSC, bringing you ItWhoSpeaks, the author behind the Reddit-acclaimed “Identity” Series (links below!). ItWhoSpeaks, before we begin, would you please introduce yourself to the readers? Any opening statements?

IWS: Hello! I am ItWhoSpeaks; my name is Dylan Kahn and I am an avid Starcraft fan, writer, and amateur designer. I would like to thank you BlueBoxSC for having me on!

Blue: Alright. IWS, why did you write those Identity pieces? What were you trying to do?

IWS: I have followed Starcraft since I was in the 5th grade. I remember staying up past my bed time to sneak a few more hours here and there. The game (Brood War) was absolutely astounding, species from dead eras clashing across solar systems while mankind tried to hold an ever eroding line. I talked for hours with my friends on what would happen after the Brood War and when I discovered the competitive scene, I fawned over SaVior, and was wowed by the rise of the Terran God Flash. The point is that Starcraft was a major force in my life along with Halo, Magic the Gathering, and D&D. But at the end of the day, I was a Son of Aiur.

To be blunt, I lost my shit when StarCraft 2 was announced. (I remember shouting when I saw Warp In being used.) By this time I had started lurking on TL and I obsessively followed every update by Karune. Every leaked screenshot and vid clip was savored, discussed, and indexed. I can recall almost every cut unit and mechanic from the alpha, good or bad. I defended most of the strange changes to the game (MBS, Automine, pathing, massive units etc.). I was a junior in college when the beta finally hit and I pooled some $200 to get day one access. I was broke but I didn't care, I could play SC2 after three long years of waiting! I was involved in the forums (they were awful) and played a fair bit of games. But the feel of the game was a little bit off. Zerg didn't feel as swarmy after the Roach got the 2 supply nerf. Protoss felt much more fragile and dependent on cheap tricks to win fights. Terran felt good to play, but things like Concussive Shell and Stim felt impossible to fight against. I think these were the seeds that I carried with me for the past few years. What stirred me to finally write these ideas down was the huge burst of negativity in the community. People felt something was off, and reacted accordingly, but rarely offered solutions. Part of it was the growing dominance of League of Legends, and I was just watching a piece of my adolescence drift away. I had to do something...

I wanted to start a dialogue where people could start talking about solutions. I wanted people to start considering what made StarCraft such a good game to begin with, what made the experience so rich. I wanted to community to work with Blizzard to make a better game rather than just cannibalize itself.

Blue: That’s a deep goal, and those who have already read your ideas seem to agree - simply writing about the problems is the first step. Personally, you have my thanks. For the newer generation of StarCraft fans, like myself, was there anything in specific from the older games that you would like to see returned immediately to SC2?

IWS: Well, that is a big question, I suppose there are two sorts of things I would like to see receive more attention in Starcraft, Theme and Gameplay.

In Starcraft 1, you had a small set of characters that were intimately tied to one another, you, the player had a front row seat to the history of the Korprulu Sector. The great sweeping changes to the political and military landscape, the intrigue and betrayal; it was like Game of Thrones in space. Each faction had memorable personalities with distinct agendas, and there was no “greater threat” that forced all the races to band together against. It was a series of overlapping conflicts that produced such a rich and brutal story. I remember being viscerally angry when Fenix died, and I was really pissed when it seemed like Jimmy just forgot about his friend. Overall, the issue with Wings of Liberty is that the theme and narrative have become divorced from the actual gameplay. Egon, and Matt Horner don't really feel like characters so much as UI features, Jimmy's dead Protoss friend Fenix will never be avenged, and there will never be redress for the loss of the Dark Templar's Matriarch. I am hoping things become tighter and better defined in Heart of the Swarm, but if they go with the Fly Away Zerg ending, I will be profoundly disappointed.

On gameplay, I feel like rule of cool dominated the design process. The Thor, the Mothership, the Roach are all cool units and certainly have a place in the game and setting, but they feel shoe-horned into places that produce inferior gameplay experiences. The Thor used to be a titanic super unit that was too big for the factory, and then was scaled down to be a fat Goliath. As a result, SC2 mech is less supply efficient and the diversity of the match ups is lessened. The Roach has contributed to the “don't get caught droning” play style of Zerg because it is such a limited unit power-wise at its current tier. It has to be a two supply unit to be remotely balanced, but it hogs so much supply, it is rarely cost effective just to build a few of them. The other issue is Force Field, which I really like as an ability. It is like a more negotiable stasis. However the fact that it isn't destructible and it is made from a low-tier gateway unit makes the whole Protoss early game rely upon it, rather than the badass warriors I played with in Brood War. In short, I would love to see the races regain some of that identity they used to have while still retaining the many contributions Wings of Liberty made. I want to see a small but powerful force of Protoss hold the line against unending waves of Zerg. I want to see a Siege Tank line slowly buckle and break under a continuous onslaught, hold, and then begin to push back. That was the magic of Brood War, and I think with the UI changes in Wings of Liberty, we can hope to see that sort of gameplay be seen more often, not just the top .5% of the scene.

Blue: I didn’t expect an answer about the story. As someone who never played the original campaigns myself, I can’t comment. But the “rule of cool” is something we’ve all noticed. How do some of your proposed changes solve these problems with fundamental SC2 units?

IWS: Certainly! A good number of them are pretty simple, others are a bit more complex. A good example is swapping the Hydralisk and the Roach's Tech requirements.
The Hydralisk traditionally has the stats to merit being a 1 supply unit. It fits the non-Terran standard: Tier 1: Melee unit, Tier 2: Ranged Generalist unit. It allows for Zerg armies to be much larger, and smooths out the general lack of good AA from the ground. (Currently Zerg uses a caster as its primary means of GTA defense which is pretty silly). We have also tweaked Hydras to be more responsive in their firing animation, allowing speed hydras to stutter-step, which looks awesome!

Everything that felt strong and good about the beta roach made it unfit for its place in the tech tree, it simply couldn't feel cool and balanced at the same time. Now freed of the balance constraints of a tier 1.5 unit. The Roach can finally be what it was intended to be: a durable front line assault unit that can transition into harassment and ambush tactics.

For Protoss, we really wanted to make their early game stronger. In small numbers, we want Protoss to feel terrifying, almost unstoppable. This is why we retooled the Immortal to swap places with the Sentry and moved the Stalker up to Twilight. The Immortals are supposed to be the Dragoons who survived the fall of Aiur. They are a constant reminder of what the Protoss have lost, and we felt they deserved to fill the role that their ancestors did. Mechanically, it does a great deal to make Terran mech viable in PvT. Immortals at Cybernetics Core start with 4 range (Kydarian Charge increases it to 6) and must have their Hardened Shields researched prior, giving Terran a huge window to attack or defend effectively against them. Since Hardened Shields is at Twilight, Terran has plenty of time to field Widow Mines, Ghosts, or Ravens (Immortals attacks are now projectiles and can be blocked by PDD.) to support their Mech army. Overall, it just feels right to have a beefy, good damage tier 1.5 unit.
Finally, we wanted to introduce more ways of making fights last longer. Lowering the damage and attack speed of units like Immortals and Hydras seem to lead to longer fights, making games a bit more back and forth. It isn't BW yet, but we are working on it every day.

Blue: Can you explain the difference between what BW was and what you’re trying to create with your writings/mods?

IWS: Professional BW felt like watching a war documentary, where you saw empires rise and crumble as waves of units moved and crashed into each other. Long games involved the whole map and the struggle was layered. You had Science Vessels scouring the ground for Defilers, Scourge sweeping across the sky, hunting stray ships, small contingencies of Marines and Vultures encroaching on far flung hive clusters, and dark clouds of insectoid creatures blotting out the sun as Ultralisks thundered into Tank lines. Each game was a story of Generals, Executors, and Cerebrates as they fought endless campaigns across war-torn systems. Frankly, it was like Warhammer 40K but better because it the violence was less pornographic. Fights had meaning in BW because they were so involved, not because the units took forever to kill, but because there were so many of them, and the optimal way to play the game was to fight on multiple fronts.

In WoL, there is unfortunate tendency for conflicts to last for five to ten seconds and then the winning side steamrolls into the base of the loser and that is that. There are fewer things going on across the map because the optimal way is to fight with a single massive army. This is partly due to units like the Thor and Colossus being required in their respective compositions. You can't just attack with a handful of units and a Thor, you have to have a single, powerful army to support and protect your signature units. We are trying to change this dynamic by giving the races more position-based defensive power at the cost of raw DPS. Fighting with numerical values is pretty flat, and you saw a lot of that in early SC2. Positioning and the navigation of space is what makes the game really sing, and there is a profound lack of that in WoL.

Blue: So, you’re working on a mod with the changes you’re proposing? Can you tell us about that?

IWS: After the my second piece on Zerg, I started getting PMs on Team Liquid requesting a custom map, it is something I had always wanted to do, but my handle of the editor was pretty limited. (I am learning how to use it now). So my changes were rudimentary at best.

FoxyMayhem was the first person to join up, and between the two of us, we worked out the first test map, which was really rough balance wise, but had the basics: Swarming Zerg, Elite Protoss, and more Supply Efficient Terran Mech.

As time went on, Topsecret221 joined us to do media work. (We are currently working on a gameplay trailer like Blizzards HotS update, showing what the changes do to the gameplay.) He has also been an avid tester and always open to testing new ideas, even if they are bad. Things really started going when RandomFlyingTaco (I still chuckle at that name) signed on, his knowledge of the editor and understanding of numbers really served to tighten the gameplay. We all owe him a great deal for the current state of the mod.

The mod seeks to establish these Brood War-like dynamics while preserving the fresh feel of StarCraft 2. It does it by taking the standards and game play philosophy of BW and applying it in modern game frame work where it is less about bugs as features and more about legitimized and advertised mechanics. Things like counter-play, precision, readability, and area control are all being stressed in our mod. We hope to have a complete write up of all the changes going into the mod, explaining why we think it is worth testing as well as our hopes and concerns for the dynamics that will follow.
We have created an email address to help with this. Should someone be interested enough to ask questions, criticize a particular dynamic or request changes to the mod, they can send it to onevoicemod@gmail.com and a member of my team (or I) will personally respond to them. It's all about getting everyone who is interested engaged and involved. That way, Blizzard can be more sure that there is actual community support for the changes that this mod is exploring. We want Blizzard to have another opportunity to hear us, and we want to be accountable to the community. Should we succeed in gathering a large and diverse player base. We will gather and send that game data to Blizzard to show them that we care enough to look at different ways of making StarCraft the best eSport in the world.

Blue: Is there a publicly available version of your mod on NA/EU?

IWS: There is an in progress version on Cloud Kingdom under custom games on the NA server. It doesn't have the fancy changes to high tech units, but the fundamentals are there and current. Currently there is nothing in the EU, but that will change once OneVoice hits the Arcade.

We hope to have it a publishable state by early December.

Blue: Okay, so you have to spend a decent amount of time on this. How does this work into your life? What do you do outside of SC2, and how deeply does the community affect your life?

IWS: I just finished work for a political campaign in the greater Seattle area as a Field Coordinator. Before that I studied History and English at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma WA. It was there that I learned how to think, read, and write critically. My only regret is that the private sector is more skeptical of being trained in the liberal arts. Currently, I am looking for work in the game design industry. So much of my development as a child and as a young adult was due to well-designed games, and the social interactions they fostered, there is so much untapped potential with the medium, and eSports is one of the great frontiers. I check TL, and r/Starcraft dozens of times a day. I watch tourneys whenever I can, and I follow my favorite player's streams (Hero, TLO, Dragon, iNcontroL to name a few.) The community has been a big part of my life for years, and I want to be confident that we will thrive for another decade or three.

Blue: Hopefully you’re able to use OneVoice to further those aspirations! =)
Before we wrap things up, do you have anything else you’d like to cover or talk about?

IWS: Yes, one thing has come up enough to warrant a response. Some folks are irritated or upset that we used the name OneVoice. Some have said it sounds arrogant or pretentious. Others simply feel like we can't or will not represent them. I just wanted to clarify that it is true that we can't speak for the community, and our goal was never to do so. Since day one of this community project, we wanted to provide the community with another way to express their hopes and concerns to blizzard, preferably in a way that is constructive and is supported by hard data. I want to see less drama and more growth in our scene, and I strongly feel that the best way of doing that is acting like adults and rationally considering different changes in and beyond the game.

Blue: I thought the name was great. I think it could even go the other way - you and your team are just “OneVoice” out of many, just helping the greatest community that ever existed. It might sound cheesy, but I like the name a lot, for that reason.

I’d like to thank you for coming on, ItWhoSpeaks. Good luck with your career, and wishing immediate success with your custom maps! :D

And readers; look forward to more interviews of the same style in the future. <3