Adding a healing unit made a lot of sense for the Terran, the race that leaned toward more defensive play styles.īut for StarCraft II, Browder and Kim wanted to go somewhere else with the healing role. The team started to design and build units to specifically serve as counters, or to simply shore up specific race’s weakness.
#STARCRAFT 2 COMPLETO PATCH#
"In a lot of ways, Brood War was like the first official update, the first real balance patch for StarCraft,” Fitch says. Bob Fitch says that they simply didn’t have enough time to put her in. The Medic, an iconic Terran unit introduced in StarCraft’s expansion Brood War, was initially meant to be part of the original game. Medic and Dropship: The Merging Is Complete
#STARCRAFT 2 COMPLETO SERIES#
“So it’s on us to make it work in the game.”Ĭreating StarCraft II’s units was a series of negotiations just like this-figuring out how many new things they could add, what they could cut out to keep each race’s unit count manageable, and what they had to change to make it all work together. Making the unit smaller or faster would change its identity entirely-which would go against the whole point of keeping it in. “It’s so iconic to the universe that we ultimately said, ‘It’s staying,’” Browder says. The Battlecruiser was a relatively rare sight in competitive StarCraft or Brood War, however, so when Dustin Browder, StarCraft II’s game director, and David Kim, its lead multiplayer game designer, started working on the sequel in earnest-and with the explicit goal of designing it for intense, skill-based esports-they couldn’t help but wonder whether, or how, they could replace it. The Battlecruiser, for example, is present in the original StarCraft for an understandable reason: space opera demands massive, lumbering battleships that equal the scale of their epic stories. They knew they had to create new units and buildings, as well as introduce new approaches to gameplay for each race, but they also had to stay mindful of what made StarCraft StarCraft. The team behind StarCraft II, on the other hand, had a weighty legacy to contend with.
When the original StarCraft team started designing the three races at the game’s core-and the units that populate their armies-it was all about throwing anything and everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. We wanted to leave the earth and go out into space.” We’d watched Starship Troopers, we’d watched Aliens, we’d watched Star Trek. “We’d done high fantasy twice already by then,” recalls Bob Fitch, lead engineer for the original StarCraft. Really, their main goal was just to try their hand at making a cool science-fiction game. When a small team of 20 or so developers at Blizzard set out to conceptualize the original StarCraft, they didn’t face many limits beyond their own imagination-and a tight timeline.