Episode 13

Chris Sigaty: Thanks a lot Rob!

Dustin Browder: Hey dude, glad to be here.

Chris Sigaty: It's huge. Any feedback we can get period is hugely helpful and largely, it's going to be looked at and put into some format that we can actually see it. Literally reading through 20,000 posts or whatever is probably not going to be realistic with Dustin making balance decisions, us making design changes to the layout if we need to in the game or whatever. So community, you guys, will be doing a lot of interfacing directly and sort of bubbling up the big points to us, but it's hugely helpful and impactful. Our hope is to react at least once a week with changes. In some cases, we'll react as much as daily or every couple of days if we need to. Most of those things will be numbers changes to help us get the balance that we're after for ship.

Dustin Browder: Right. Well obviously a beta is something we've put a lot of effort into and it takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resources for us to create one of these betas, put it out in front of people and then all of the distraction associated with us taking this feedback and incorporating it. So, for us to want to do this we have to be really excited about it. It's a ton of energy to do, it's why not everybody does a beta when they release a game like this. It really gives us an opportunity to see what the fans think of the product and it gives us a chance to really fix things before they go to a much wider audience, right. There's no accident that blizzard games have reached the quality level that they have in the past and we've had betas. Those two things go together, they're part of the same process.

Chris Sigaty: Absolutely.

Dustin Browder: The beta is what builds a lot of our quality, right. We can only take it so far before we can take it to the community and then they can add a lot more to it as well. So, it's really critical for our success, it's very key about who we are as a studio and as a team that we do these kinds of betas so we're really geeked up to get this out in front of people and see what they think and to really give us the feedback we need to be successful.

Dustin Browder: Absolutely, absolutely.

Dustin Browder: That's a difficult question to answer, it's been so long for us since that BlizzCon build. We've seen so many versions of the game come through since we did the last BlizzCon. We've been doing a lot of work on the base building and macro mechanics for the protoss. Trying to make sure that the protoss have an interesting way to sort of focus on their economy and base building. Previously, protoss players could buff all of their probes to get a resource bonus every time their probes collected resources. We've changed that, removed it completely. Put in an ability called “Time Warp” which allows you to speed up production on any protoss building that has been targeted by this ability. This allows players to choose which things they want to go faster for the protoss. Do they want to make their upgrades go faster, do they want to build workers faster, do they want to build stalkers or immortals faster, maybe void rays faster? All kinds of choices. It is like the previous mechanic, something you do have to go back to your base and use repeatedly. The difference is, previously there was no choice about what to do with it, you just had to use it on your probes. Now you will choose which building to use it on. So there's actually a lot of strategy and a lot of choice for the player about how to manage your own economy. This is something we've been focused on for StarCraft, we want to make sure that StarCraft isn't just a tactical game, but also an economic game as well. You as a player have to choose, do you want to build up your economy, get a stronger base from which to attack, or do you need military forces right now, right?

Dustin Browder: To help you defend or attack or push against the enemy. This is sort of core to what StarCraft was and what we want StarCraft to continue to be moving forward in StarCraft II and in the StarCraft II expansion. So that is one of the major changes. We've also been working very hard on the zerg and the zerg tech tree. You're going to see roaches at tier two, you're going to see hydralisks at tier two. You're going to see a lot of changes to the special abilities used by the zerg to make them a lot more sneaky and a lot more destructive when they do manage to get up close to you. Lots of changes that will fundamentally alter the way players will play with the zerg and to some extent with the protoss as well. Lots of balance changes with the numbers as well that would fundamentally unhinge a lot of the strategies that were still functional in the BlizzCon build are now different strategies. Of course, the big difference for us is we go from players getting maybe a couple hours play time over an afternoon when they manage to come and stand in line again and again and again to play the same game. Now we're going to see players who are out there really really embracing this game and really getting into the guts of it and seeing what's really going on. So that will really be fundamentally what unhinges it and shows us what's really happening in the game. All of the time, the fans will finally get to pour into the title.

Dustin Browder: This is something we've been focused on for quite a while obviously, is making sure that this game is strong and functional as an eSport. That it is not just fun for people to look over at Battle.net but it's a fun game to watch as well as a fun game to play at a very high level. Easy to learn and difficult to master has always been our mantra here at Blizzard. We've been obviously working on the easy to learn but at the same time we're working on the difficult to master. The pro player simply represent the pinnacle level of difficult to master. These guys need to be challenged, they need to be able to do things that other people would have trouble doing and they need to know that their skills can continue to grow even as they play. So we want to put this game in front of them and see if we've achieved at that goal.

Chris Sigaty: Yeah, and I think we've established great communication lines, we have an eSports team now. It is a different world than it was back when we launched even Warcraft III or even the expansion. We have a lot better method of communicating with the eSport playerbase. So that will be a focus we're rolling them in right away and effectively they'll get a lot of focus during the beta so that we can hear that feedback.

Dustin Browder: Well there's a lot of abilities in the game that have some subtle uses that we haven't seen a lot of yet. We saw some of it at BlizzCon, we had some proplayers playing on stage using blink to move away from enemy attackers, perfectly managing your stalkers away from an enemy attack saving the stalker by just a little bit of health and continuing that to keep a force alive much longer than it could possibly survive. We have an ability in the game now called “Acid Spores” which the zerg can cast on enemy forces and it creates these fungal growths on a person's body and then it will spread throughout your force. But if you manage to kill the guy who's infected really quickly, it won't spread at all. But it's only a fraction of a second you have to make that decision and make that move. This is not something that most people inside the studio can do quickly and efficiently, but I expect the pros to be able to do these things. So I think we'll see some of these very small little timing differences suddenly become a very big deal at that level of game play. It will be very interesting to see what that does to our balance, how it changes what we're trying to accomplish with the game and how we're going to react to that. Because it really is a completely different skill level these guys are operating at and these little subtle details can suddenly make an ability unbelievably powerful or unbelievably useless depending on how fast they can be at reacting to it. So, we're going to be watching that very closely and see these timing differences and how much of a difference they really make.

Chris Sigaty: I think the other thing the eSports community will bring to it as well is all the little details that Dustin's talking about but also getting more quickly to the abusive stuff.

Chris Sigaty: Exactly, even at just the numbers level of unit vs. unit, they may find ways to abuse a particular unit type because they're building to it faster. They're just exploring much more quickly than the community at large does so it gets us to that point more quickly and hopefully it allows us to catch some of those things before four weeks in and we find out that, “Oh crap, the best build is blah.”

Dustin Browder: Well a bunker push using salvage I still believe is probably pretty broken, right. You can salvage right now for a hundred percent return on every one of your bunkers and we're still not seeing a lot of bunker pushes. I think this is largely due to the power of the marauder and the medivac and even marine with shield combination that it really allows you to stay mobile and keep moving around the battlefield. We're seeing largely mobile terran armies these days cruising around destroying everything that gets in their path. But, it's really hard to say at this point what's going to be out there. I know that hallucinate on the protoss is unbelievably dangerous these days and I think there's probably a lot of hidden abuses yet to be used in that. I've definitely seen if you can find the right time to push a void ray attack can be unbelievably devastating especially against zerg. There's definitely areas where we'll be watching, areas where we're nervous, we're pretty convinced that we may have made a terrible mistake but we're going to keep watching and see what happens. So far, things that I am convinced must be broken have not yet proven to be so. This is largely I think because other units are overshadowing them and preventing them from being that powerful, right. As the community plays, we'll see what they find to be truly powerful and then we'll see what really shakes out of it. The landscape has changed, the original StarCraft was such a tightly balanced game. You change a handful of numbers in that game you change the entire game. We've dropped whole units, let alone changing the balance on a lot of the original units from the original game. We're looking at a whole new game here in terms of game balance and it's going to be an exciting time for us and I think for the fans as well.

Chris Sigaty: One thing to add that came up as a specific example is warp in. We've been watching some really impressive games lately and our company's adopted doing a lot of warp in up cliff levels.

Dustin Browder: Yep, uh huh.

Chris Sigaty: And the game with Ali where he was doing warp in in the back of the base and hiding his pylon. There's been some of those games that have been really impressive, but I can't even imagine when we start getting into the hands of some of these pro gamers and even just players after having a month. We are developing games at the same time so everybody is only on their free time. I think there's going to be some people that have more of that free time that can experiment and develop some really crazy stuff that we can't even anticipate.

Dustin Browder: Absolutely. We've got our Thursday night play sessions, right. You and I have been surprised a couple of times by some of the things we've seen and we've thought we've seen everything, right.

Chris Sigaty: Oh, yes! Really cool too.

Dustin Browder: Really fun stuff. I fully expect it to be that times a hundred when we go live and when we're out there and people are playing.

Chris Sigaty: You know, a total aside, but those games that you're talking about, those Thursday night games, have been awesome to watch because they were largely created outside of the dev team and had Blizzard folks from all over and we're a large studio at this point. Watching those games and seeing some of those strats there that are so different than the strats we see constantly on our own team is revealing at just how big this beta and how many varied things can come in through this beta.

Chris Sigaty: So the editor is something that we're talking a lot about. We would like to potentially release it in what we're calling our major content patch update that's planned for pretty late in the beta to be honest with you. The question really is, will it be far enough along and in a spot where we can allow people to look at it and publish and will we have enough time to react to that? So it's something we're looking at closely. We've discussed it, but I can't say that it will or will not happen at this point, I don't know. It's a goal, but on the periphery of whether it will happen or not, that's probably my best answer to that. What we hope to get from having the editor out there early is get some people started on some cool ideas for maps so that when the game launches they can have some cool stuff up very quickly on the service basically, so that other players can download it and have some other options out there. We feel like we're going to hit a lot of the cases that players would have not only with just their multiplayer maps but we will have some cool mod maps that we're going to do on our own, but they're largely just glimpses at things rather than entire answers. The earlier we can get the community started, the better, it's just the time window is shorter than we have talked about.

You haven't asked this question yet, but I'll answer it ahead of time. We were targeting three to five months for the beta, we're really at a three month period of time for the beta at this point. We are still targeting the first half of this year, so with that in mind, it really shortens the window of time with our major content patch coming out pretty close to the end whether it's even worth it putting out the map editor at that point.

Chris Sigaty: Yeah, there's a couple of major features that people won't see in the beta that we're actually working on right now or starting actually right now. One is the map publishing system for the editor, it works but we're putting the polish on it for the end user to see. Largely how maps get up on the service and how you store maps for yourself, that sort of thing, that's one of the major ones. Achievements is really the big one that I'm really super excited about as well. Achievements, we hope to have some level of them come online during the beta but they won't be there at the launch of the beta. That has huge ramifications once it does come online, it really does help direct play. To me it's that exciting thing like, “Wow! Maybe I can try and get twenty-five games as zerg and win those twenty-five games as zerg.” This time it's a lot deeper than the stuff we saw in Warcraft III or the expansion of just getting a couple of portraits for wins on the ladder. There's a lot of stuff that will be specific to...

Dustin Browder: Cooperative play has a bunch of achievements associated with it.

Chris Sigaty: Yeah.

Dustin Browder: Obviously the campaign at the different difficulty levels has a bunch of achievements associated with it. The usual things that we've done in the past, that you guys have done in the past with wins on the ladder has a bunch of achievements associated with it. We've also got stuff that happens in game, right. Very clever play or very challenging play can win you achievements as you're actually in live in a battle. All of these things together really open up a lot of possibilities for players to seek, explore, and try to take on the game in new ways, maybe in ways that hadn't occurred to them.

Chris Sigaty: Exactly, that's what makes me so excited about the achievement system is it really can direct play into areas where people would maybe not take themselves normally.

Dustin Browder: And hopefully have a good time once they get there.

Chris Sigaty: Exactly, exactly. And then to answer the second part of your question of what to leave as a parting word to the community at large I think is hopefully you guys are all as excited as we are about getting into the beta. This is a huge milestone for us, we're super excited. We were doing some work ups for the beta and had some internal play when we have a hundred maybe a hundred fifty people at most on the service, that's fun, but when we have thousands of people it's going to be a whole different playing field and we're really excited to get there. And I fully expect that it will attract a lot more than just the few of the dev teams. I think everybody's real excited across all of blizzard to get on there and mingle with the community at large because now we're playing against this group of people that has a huge appetite and is equally excited and we can get into those matches where it's not all of the best players of the company playing all the time. I think that's going to be a huge milestone and we're really excited to be online with you guys, the community.

Dustin Browder: So we'll be out there, we'll be playing. You'll never know when you're playing against a developer.

Chris Sigaty: [laughs]

Dustin Browder: We'll be anonymous out there so you'll never know when you run into us so hey when you're out there and you're playing people, show them some crazy stuff, it might be one of us, right. We can see what you're doing and we can use it to improve the game.

Dustin Browder: Thank you!

Chris Sigaty: Thank you!

Zarhym: Hi.

Zarhym: We're going to flow.

Zarhym: That is correct.

Zarhym: Well we had our QA guys working long hours making sure the fight was very cool. Our developers were obviously very invested in it. We're really excited to see our players taking on the Lich King right now. For those who have yet to get there and actually face the Lich King, I would say “prepare to die, like, a lot.”

Zarhym: Die a lot. Repair bills. The whole sha-bang.

Zarhym: [chuckle] Ok.

Zarhym: You’re still going to need to heal for me in the guild so you’re not done with the game.

Zarhym: I still personally have a use for you. As far as other players go, we hope players continue to plunge through Icecrown Citadel. There’s still plenty of gear to get, there’s upgraded rewards and then once you actually kill the Lich King you can unlock hard modes and you can’t fight the Lich King on hard mode until you have killed all of the other final bosses on hard mode. So that’s going to take even the more experienced guilds probably quite a bit of time before they are able to kill the Lich King on hard mode. We really hope a lot of people will take a chance at actually going through the hard modes for Icecrown Citadel.

We do have another patch coming. It’ll mostly introduce some Battle.net infrastructure to kind of coincide with the StarCraft II beta. We’ll probably have a few minor class adjustments as needed, but the big thing is Icecrown Citadel for now and we think it will keep people occupied for quite some time.

Bashiok: It’s real fun.

Bashiok: I’ve been enjoying it.

Bashiok: I don’t know about everybody else.

Bashiok: Not really. We’re still working on the respec system for Diablo III. For those who haven't seen the Diablo II 1.13 patch the respec system in there, which is still on the PTRs by the way (or maybe not), is you can get three different respecs by completing the Den of Evil quests and then any additional ones beyond that by picking up item drops from bosses and using the horadric cube to combine them. For Diablo III we don't have it really nailed down yet but some of the main points we do want to hit are that it's more than just a gold cost for changing your mind. Although that will be a major component of it. That it's targeted for specific skills so you're not resetting your entire skill tree, but you're able to target specific skills to reset those ones specifically. To also scale the cost of respecing so early on in the game it's cheaper and easier to respec and as you go farther into the game it will be harder and more expensive. And all of those things together make it a very challenging system to implement, hitting all of those notes. And those are all pie in the sky, I guess, hopefuls for the respec system we may not get all of them in. We don't have any specifics on what the actual respec system will have but those are sort of what we're shooting for and of course it's all up in the air still.

Bashiok: Right, exactly.

Bashiok: They're all going pretty well, none of them are finished. We're still working hard on everything. The witch doctor is probably the most solid which probably makes sense because he’s using mana. But we don't have mana potions so we need to work on his recovery of mana. So he has, some people might have seen soul harvest as one of those at BlizzCon and that might be part of a larger group of recovery systems. The monk is probably actually the next most solid which might seem weird since he was the most recently announced. But his resource system just kind of worked right when it came out of the gate. But nobody has seen it yet, and we haven't talked about it yet... aside from this right now. [laughs] So we're still not announcing what it is, we still have some work to do but it's pretty solid, it's looking pretty good. The barbarian is close. We have a new revision going in soon and we're hopeful for that. And the wizard is probably the hardest right now. It's been a struggle trying to get that nailed down but it gets closer with every revision. And the fifth class of course would be... nah I'm just kidding.

Bashiok: No announcements today. [sad sound]

Bashiok: Yeah, that kind of has a silly answer. Just because it’s not in there now doesn’t mean we won’t have it. It’s not in there now because it’s sort of a silly mechanic to put in early while we’re doing a lot of heavy testing even for the playable demos. In the playable demos we’ve had, there’s no NPCs around to repair items; it’s pretty much an action kill fest in the demos we’ve had so far. To put durability on items right now would be sort of silly. It’s one of those farther down the line economy stabilizing...

Bashiok: Right and we could have it in there realistically, but it’s just not necessary yet. That goes along with a lot of other different economy stabilizing -- I’m trying to avoid the word gold sink -- economy stabilizing features.

Bashiok: Uh huh, that’s how I spin things.

Bashiok: I just come out and say it and then... [laughing]

Bashiok: Uhm, no. I'm looking forward to all the forum posts asking why we didn't ask some specific question.

Bashiok: Aww, I love you.

Bashiok: Bye!