Posted on Jan 2nd 2009, 6:43pm by Tom Phoenix :: 31 Comments
Last month, the Blizzard Community Manager on the Korean Battle.net forum Kicho replied to a thread regarding the Zealot Charge ability. Normally, we would not know what he/she had to say. However, EternalLuna from BlizzForums was kind enough to provide a rough translation of Kicho's reply. So gratitude goes to EternalLuna!
It seems that in the current build, the Zealot has both the Leg Enhancements (although it is not certain it is still called that) and Charge.
Through Twilight Council's research, Zealot will gain 2 improvements:
Zealot's Movement speed increase (Leg upgrade in Previous StarCraft)
Charge Ability
Furthermore, Kicho explained that Charge is a passive ability and has a 10 second cooldown.
Zealot's Charge ability has not visible cool time, and it is about 10 seconds.
...
I also thought about that, since charge ability is a passive ability, it would be harder to control directly, but by the micro controls, it will be available with many other ways.
Kicho ended his/her post by explaining how Charge can be used to quickly retreat Zealots from combat.
Source: Battle.net (original)
BlizzForums (translation)
Posted on Dec 31st 2008, 11:49am by tha177c :: 34 Comments
This interview offers a few screenshots of interest. One of them shows the Terran Tech Purchase UI that allows you to buy units and upgrades once you have acquired enough resources doing mercenary jobs.
When pressing one of the units or upgrade buttons, a rendering of the unit is displayed to the bottom left. To the right you get to read stats info such as credits cost, a profile, HP, armor, special bonus attributes.
1UP: Since these are "work in progress" HUDs/interfaces, can you talk about what elements of the interface feel like they "work", and also what parts of the interface are still being tuned and why?
DB: We're still putting in a lot of work on the star map, where you select which planets or systems you're traveling to next. The tech purchase screen that we showed at BlizzCon has also been overhauled, so what you saw there is probably not how it's going to look in the final product. Other aspects of the interface, such as the "sets" that you?ll explore in-between missions with Jim Raynor, are also being worked on constantly. These sets include places like the bridge of the Hyperion (Raynor's battlecruiser), and the bar on Mar Sara.
1UP: Do you anticipate the production cycle for the StarCraft 2 trilogy to feel like making three separate games, or more like World of WarCraft and its expansions, where the bulk of the work is on the first installment, and subsequent ones are more about iterating and refining rather than inventing?
DB: Well that's the hope; that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we'll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.
That said, we're conscious of making sure we are providing new and compelling content for the expansions. The meta-aspects of the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, for example, will work a lot differently than how we're doing things with the core StarCraft 2 game. It doesn't make sense for Kerrigan to be flying around in a battlecruiser and picking out mercenary missions for cash, which is what you'll be doing with Raynor in the core game's campaign. So we'll be doing something different with Kerrigan to get her to evolve and grow her Zerg army. Meanwhile, Zeratul's Protoss campaign may require you to engage in diplomacy with the different Protoss tribes in order to gain access to different units and technologies.
Source: 1up.com
Posted on Dec 25th 2008, 10:59am by Tom Phoenix :: 38 Comments
GameSpy recently released their holiday interview with Dustin Browder, lead designer for StarCraft II. While most of it does not reveal anything new for those who have been following the development of the game, GameSpy did touch upon the subject of variety of single-player missions. This was Browder`s reply:
"Tightly-scripted" may not be the right way to describe our philosophy as it relates to mission design in StarCraft II. Those of us who have played a lot of RTS campaigns have already played a bunch of the typical skirmish missions, or the commando-style missions where you navigate a hero character or two through a maze of enemies. We're not looking for StarCraft II to do 25 or 30 of those tried-and-true mission types.
We're doing our best to make sure our missions give players new and unique experiences, so we're viewing each mission as its own special mini-game. We don't want to give away too many surprises, but we can tell you that one of the missions will have you doing a series of train robberies. How that exactly plays out, you'll have to wait and see, but we're having a lot of fun putting these ideas into practice.
Source: GameSpy