Blizzcast Episode 3 available
Blizzard has released yet another highly informative Blizzcast episode, in this latest Blizzcast, Dustin Bowder, lead designer of Starcraft II, discusses what direction the Zerg will be taking in Starcraft II and how they have evolved throughout the development process, and Jeff Kaplan, lead designer of World of Warcraft, discusses the future of raid dungeons in the upcoming WOW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and finally, Joeyray Hall, manager of video production, discusses what goes into the development of machinima for World of Warcraft.
Karune: So with the Queen unit being one of the new units that have been changed significantly from StarCraft one, could you tell us a little bit about where you are going with the Queen and how that has changed?
Dustin Browder: Sure, so the queen is a unit that the team wanted to do ever since original StarCraft. They have been talking about it for years and years and they really wanted to make more out of that unit. They felt that the original Queen didn’t really meet the name “Queen.” It didn’t really say this is the leader and creator of the Swarm in a lot of ways. And obviously, in the story evolved, the Queen of Blades became a big part of the experience and the side changed a bit, but the team still wanted to explore this idea of a classic ‘insect-like’ Queen that rules over her whole hive. So that was the original creative idea for the Queen, to see if we could create that kind of unit. It felt like it fit the kit for the race pretty well, but could we find some cool mechanics to make it work. Right now with the Queen, she is sort of a mobile buff that you can move around your base that you apply it to your base defenses making your base defenses stronger, better, possible, wherever she goes. So, she has got a lot of gameplay to her right now in the sense that she is pretty mobile and can get to where she needs to be, but she can only be at one place at once. So you got to kind of chose what is the most important place for her to be right at that moment and I suppose more interestingly, from the enemy’s point of view, the Queen can be killed. So, enemy players will often be hunting for the Queen, to remove the threat of this defensive buff, before they invade the base, which really makes for some interesting cat and mouse gameplay, between enemy players hunting for the Queen, and the Queen trying to find a good place in her base to hide out while she is preparing for the inevitable enemy attack. So it feels like the queen as the owner of the hive and master of that space is fitting pretty well to the story idea of a Queen. We’ll see what people think when people get a chance to play with it in beta, and obviously we have more testing to do internally before we’re even ready for that step.
The full transcript of the podcast is available at Blizzard’s website.
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