Talking Legacy of the Void with Tim Morton!

by djtyrant - 9 years ago     show comments

Blizzard gave us the opportunity at the Legacy of the Void / WCS BarCraft event to sit down and talk with Tim Morton, Lead Producer of StarCraft 2.

Tim Morton, Lead Producer StarCraft 2

Some key points we can glean from our interview:

• Legacy isn’t the end of the development of StarCraft, there are post expansion plans for LotV they’re not ready to discuss yet.
• Map makers are really important to them and there is going to be a continuing and on-going dialog with them to improve the system.
• Archon mode has been a big hit and they’re excited to see where the professional scene may take it.

BlizzPro: With the StarCraft 2 storyline  wrapping up what can those interested in primarily the single player expect from the StarCraft team after the campaign?

Tim Morton: First and foremost the co-op missions, allied commanders, that we’ve shown most recently at gamescom but not talked a lot about. I think this mode is really campaign style game play but in a cooperative setting. So it provides a little bit more of an open ended experience and we’re certainly going to continue extending that mode. So hopefully for players that enjoy campaign will find that, that’s also an experience that is not quite as intimidating as multi-player, since it is just against AI, but has a lot of that same objective based gameplay that really makes the campaign so great.

BP: With the multiple changes to macro mechanics when can players expect that to be ‘finalized’ for the release?: Because it’s changed multiple times over the beta and the release is two months away. Is there a lockdown date for that?

TM: We don’t really feel like the launch date is the end for changing the game. So we do plan to make a decision on macro prior to launch but we’re just going to keep on changing the game even past launch to make sure that we get it to a point that everybody is happy with. I think the macro changes specifically right now, it could go either way. I’ve heard a lot of feedback from Pros, not necessarily on one implementation or another, because we have obviously gone through a series of pretty big shifts on how we feel about it. I think in general people like the idea of shifting some of that attention away from the more mundane macro management, to using some of the new units and abilities that we’ve introduced with Void and shifting it more towards active game play there.

BP: With the Map Community, What is the StarCraft team doing to support them? I know you guys have done the arcade website but is there more coming to help the support those content creators?

TM: Yeah, very much so. I think the first step will be some user interface improvements. Chris Sigaty just now talked a little bit about the user interface revamp they are working on (Editors Note: This is referring to the discussion on stream about new UI/UX coming in LotV).

BP: Is that just coming in the retail version? We’re not going to see that in the beta?

TM: You’ve seen some tastes of it in the beta, so for example, the chat system that we rolled out and reiterated on in the beta. So there are some pieces appearing there, but ultimately it is going to wind up in the live environment. I think it will be the first kind of wholesale revamp user interface. So I think for arcade step one is just a little bit of user interface improvement there. But even post launch for Void we’re intending to put a lot more attention to the user experience. How we highlight what games players should check out, how we highlight open games. Then on the back end side there are a number of things for arcade that we’re talking about for 2016 that we really want to add to the tool kit that map creators have and these are things like trigger next map, server site banks. We see a lot of requests from that community and in 2016 once we’ve got Void out there we want to shift some more attention to making sure that we continue to extend arcade.

BP: There was discussion early on, pre Wings of Liberty, to help support map makers to be rewarded for their efforts by being able to purchase maps and some of that going towards map makers. We’ve seen a couple of map makers go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Are there any plans at all to bring that into that economy system of StarCraft itself?

TM: When we originally talked about it and it has been a bunch of years, since we did. It was a very grand vision and I think what we’ve seen is that over the years that there is a lot involved in putting together a map marketplace and so we’ve chosen to really focus the vision around creating a more curated marketplace but that is something that at the last Blizzcon we’ve had some meetings with content creators for arcade and we let them know that the idea of market place hasn’t died but that we are taking a more curated approach. So in 2016 you’ll see us have some conversations with individual content creators around our first steps in that direction. It’s not going to have the broad visions to begin with, that we originally had talked about, but we absolutely are continuing to move in a direction that will enable some limited monetization for arcade.

BP: Going back to multiplayer you guys announced Archon mode last year at Blizzcon. Do you see this becoming its own E-Sport, separate from the 1v1. I know Red Bull has been supporting that pretty intensely. What are your guys thoughts? You guys obviously have to be excited about it.

TM: Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed the Red Bull Archon competitions. It is such a different dynamic watching Archon and just the interpersonal dynamic between the Archon players. We’ve seen a lot of streamers go out and stream some Archon, it’s just a lot of fun to watch. What happens in 2016 in the professional scene with Archon, depends a lot on Pros and tournament organizers and what they feel like they want to do with it. I am very excited to see how it evolves, for sure.

BP: The automated tournaments have been put into beta. What kind of numbers are you guys seeing or a lot of use of that? Then further on into the future could we see this almost as the defacto system for seeding WCS players into that?

TM: We’ve started to talk about ways that automated tournaments might have more of a meta and might even perhaps tie into WCS. We’ve haven’t really settled on what’s the right way to approach that. I think right now we are much more focused on just making the tournaments themselves be a satisfying experience. I think from the beta we have seen really good engagement with them but there are a number of things, like having better notifications, having a better sense of rewards as people win tournaments, that we want to make sure we get right before launch and after launch. We will get into some of those questions like: ‘What kind of meta would be satisfying for automated tournaments?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have automated tournaments for Archon or for 2v2s?.’ So these are all things that again we’re not going to stop working on StarCraft when Legacy of the Void comes out we’ve got just some much more that we want to do with it.

BP: I know this has been something talked and asked about by the community forever, especially with the automated tournaments now. Are we going to see potentially an observer mode? From what I’ve seen from on the beta, people come out of the tournament and they are like, ‘I want to see if that person who beat me and goes and wins the entire thing.’ Are you guys discussing this at all?

TM: I’ll say that there are certain sensitivities right off the bat, having some kind of delay so that there isn’t an exploit opportunity. I think there are players who are sensitive about protecting their builds, so there’s that whole angle to think about. Personally as a player, I think it would be really cool, we just have a lot more thinking before we can really settle on the right direction for that, but it’s definitely something that we are considering.

BP: Legacy will be one of the most significant changes to the game ever with the macro mechanic changes, new units, bringing back the Lurker. Is there any talk of potentially adding new units? We are talking years down the line, to keep the multiplayer fresh, because balance changes can only do so much, along with map changes. What are you thinking about the long term future of SC2?

TM: We’ve been so focused on Void we haven’t set a defined strategy yet around what’s going to happen post Void. What I can say is that all options are on the table. So we are not ruling out the possibility that we’ll make more big changes after Void is out. I think it’s important to us that we continue to make StarCraft the best game that it can be and we don’t want anybody to feel like that Legacy of the Void is the end of our efforts towards that. It’s the resolution of this story, but StarCraft 2 is very much going to continue to be actively developed.

BP: How tough has balance has been for the team with all these changes that are going into the game?

TM: It’s always an iterative process. I think we did get the feedback from the community, that they wanted to see us try some bigger changes. We got the feedback, I think from particularly from Korea that with the new units the difficulty had gone up, so we’ve kind of taken a leap to try this experiment with macro which is definitely opened up a lot of questions around race balance. Because right out of the gate, the very first change we made it did have an impact on race balance. So I think this is one of the more challenging betas to balance, but I think that the team has so much experience now and has such a great mechanism to talk to the community and get feedback back from the community now that it feels like it’s going to trend towards something really good. I don’t even know what it’s going to be but it feels like it’s on a really good trajectory.

Thanks to Tim Morton for his time on this interview and for the wonderful answers!