Frank Pearce and Bob Colayco Interviewed

Wesley Yin-Poole of VideoGamer.com had a chance to interview Frank Pearce and Bob Colayco of Blizzard. You can read the entire interview here. However, if you are looking for a brief synapsis, here are the details:

• Game play will remain true to the previous version of Starcraft, but single player will be updated dramatically through an “evolved experience”.
• Single player will include a serious of choices of direction for various missions. For example, “you might be able to choose between taking siege tanks into a mission or taking Vikings into a mission”
• Battle.net will be enhanced greatly.
• Still no mention of a release date, but they stress the single-player campaign and battle.net integration is really all that remains.
• No new specifics released on the single-player campaign, as they are “not even ready to talk about it publicly”.
• A console port is not even on the table at this moment.
• A Starcraft MMO would be difficult, due to the bar set by World of Warcraft (taking 9 years of development to make).

An excerpt from the interview:

VideoGamer.com: Some people say that StarCraft 2 is too similar to the first game. What do you say to those people?

Frank Pearce: Well the first thing I would wonder is whether any of them actually had a chance to play the build. We definitely were deliberate about honouring the legacy of StarCraft. It’s a concious decision on our part to make sure the experience reminds the player of the original experience, so I guess in some ways that’s good, that that’s what they’re saying, because that’s partially what we’ve tried to achieve.

But we definitely wanted to distinguish the sequel from the original in some ways, and so there’s a lot of new units we’re implementing, that have new abilities that will provide the players opportunities for new and different strategies. We definitely wanted to deliver an evolved experience in terms of the single-player campaign and the story that we tell them and how we tell that story. We also definitely want to enhance the online experience through Battle.net over and above what was originally done with StarCraft. So when all is said and done it’ll be the total package that distinguishes it. I don’t think that you’ll be able to point to any one feature and say this is what distinguishes it.

Source: VideoGamer.com (Starcraft 2 Interview)

With game play mechanics nearly complete, a beta does not seem too far away. Could it be possible that attendees of Blizzcon 2008 will have the first opportunity to get their hands on first beta stage of Starcraft II? We will just have to see!