Karune Interview

Over at GC 2008, MyStarCraft.de had an opportunity to interview with Kevin ‘Karune’ Yu - the Blizzard Community Manager. A familiar face around the official Battle.net Forums, this an interview interview for anyone looking to dig up a little more on Blizzard’s public face.

While not much is revealed in regards to new StarCraft 2 news, it still acts as a good read. Below are the question and answers that related specifically to StarCraft 2, but I encourage any avid Blizzard fan to read the entire review. Keep in mind, this has been translated from German

And you have the possibilty to watch a liveraid with SK Gaming and things like this. That’s really great for the crowd I guess. Let’s get to the topic of SC2. What do you think are the main differences between the original starcraft and the second part?

Well I know it’s definately been a huge challenge especially for Dustin to reimagine Starcraft and to really be able to bring back a lot of what Starcraft 1 feel the competitive nature in the game into SC2. I think they’ve been doing a wonderfull job. Obviously it’s still work in progress there’s still work on it and they’re making tons of changes. Hopefully by the time we get to beta you guys will be really happy with the state of the product in beta. And into beta we will get a lot of feedback from a lot of the fans, including eSports community, pro players and so forth. Hopefully it will be everything you guys are really anticipating.

we still have 3 races in sc2, the zerg, the protoss and the terrans. They got a lot of changes and new units and stuff like that. The zerg got the queen, the protoss the warp. What do you think is the main feature of the terrans?

The dropship is something that I think is quite underestimated. The dropship and also the medivac which is the medic right now provides a lot of mobility for the terrans. And those dropships heal like twice as fast as medics back in  Broodwar. So they’re really quite lethal and the marines themself I mean all the units kinda have more hitpoints now, they’re a lot stronger. A lot of people underestimate it especially if they haven’t played the game hands on.  We’re granting this still a lot of balance but I think there’s a lot of potential there to see those drops. Every race like you said really has an additional aspect of mobility like the warp and the nydus canal where you can move you’re whole entire army across the nydus canal. We’re still gonna have to see what everybody makes of these mechanics but it seems very promising so far.

Do you actually work together with the professionals of the original StarCraft or even the WarCraft III Scene to improve Starcraft 2?

Yeah definately. We’ve already been talking quite a bit with the professional players for both WC3 and for Starcraft but honestly most of the cooperation is going to be in beta where we really invite them to play and give us lots of detailed feedback. But they have already played so far at events like WWI, they’ve played at BlizzCon and so forth. Most of the reactions have been pretty good and again their voice is very important to us as well because they will be representing the game on the big screens.

What do you like most in Sc2?

Well personally one of my favorite things is that i think that the development team has done a such a great job of making each of the races feel so powerful. There’s new mechanics, like you know protoss  for example having warpin, being able to warp in your army and to really surprise the enemy in many different places. Protoss is usually considered a slower faction in the original StarCraft but I think this new added sense of mobility really is intimidating. It’s a different type of intimidating than like a shuttle whith the drop and kinda things but it’s still quite the same that where you have to make sure you’re always covered, you’re always scouting, you’re always watching and so forth. And I think they’ve done a great job of adding this type of element to all three sides in a very unique ways as well. The game definitely still feels very StarCraft but the new elements they’re introducing really go along with what’s already there quite well.

The protoss have the mothership. There were many changes with this unit in the past months. What do you think what role has the mothership know?

Well currently it’s a very support role. It’s able to kinda recall you’re army to the motherships position. It’s a slower, very slow moving unit that’s also very powerfull as far as hitpointswise. So it’s a great unit to support you’re army. We are moving are kinda moving away from the original mothershop having the black whole, planet cracker and so forth. But who knows, I mean a lot of these abilities we’re still playing with them a lot we’re still balancing and we gonna find the best place for the mothership. Currently we’re testing that support role and it seems that goes.

With every week we’re moving towards the beta. Can we get a specific date or is it still closed?

Unfurtionately you know we at blizzard  do well of these dates but when it’s ready for beta it’s gonna be out. We do wanna make sure that the game is quite playable and we can make he most use of the feedback especially for a lot of the balance and stuff. Finding that magic formular of those units so they’re working together in a way that’s very positive to make the game both competitive and fun. Fun for new people that are just joining in, fun for the people who already been playing StarCraft very hardcore. Once the dev team is confident enough that they have that down than I think that’s when beta is gonna kick around.

Source: MyStarCraft.de (Interview with Karune - English)