- StarCraft‘s first-person perspective will offer a new sort of “tension”
- General manager and creative director Dan Hay says the tension is “subtly different” from the original RTS game
- Since the game is in first-person, “You have to protect yourself”
StarCraft general manager and creative director Dan Hay has explained the process of designing a new game in first-person, revealing that “tension” was crucial.
Blizzard’s next StarCraft game won’t be a real-time strategy (RTS) title, but a story-driven, open-world first-person shooter, which will be a fresh direction for the beloved series.
Hay, who discussed the game’s inspirations with TechRadar Gaming at BlizzCon, explained that because of the new perspective, this meant the team had to think carefully about how to manage a combat system, the world, and enemies of StarCraft in a new way, while still being faithful and familiar to the original RTS game.
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“The combat has to feel very, very clean and dangerous and mean and dark,” Hay said. “I think StarCraft does that well. The mood is dark, but also, in a strange way, hopeful.”
Without giving away too many details, the developer said that the team has to make the enemies the player is fighting “feel real” while also balancing the challenge of what it’s like being inside 10-foot armour that weighs 1000 pounds.
“It’s because the thing that’s out there is going to try and shuck me like an oyster,” he continued. “The thing that’s out there is going to try and just flay me open, and eat my insides. And so we have to build it in such a way that it all makes sense, which means when you move, when you attack, when you shoot, it has to feel real, and then whatever it is that’s attacking you — which we all know what’s probably going to be attacking you — it has to feel like it’s an onslaught where you have to stem the tide, you have to figure out a way to stop that biomass from attacking you, and it has to feel real.”
Hay said the “key” to designing this experience was “tension,” which players got a glimpse of in the CGI trailer, adding that it’s the same tension from the RTS “but it’s subtly different.”
In the RTS game, players would be confronted with a wall of Zerg enemies, and that would be the tension, but in StarCraft, a first-person experience, the top-down perspective is gone.
“Now your boots on the ground,” Hay said. “We have to give you the tension of deployment, and you saw us actually do that in the teaser, and then we have to give you the tension of there not being a whole bunch of marines around that you can just go through. It’s you. You have to protect yourself. You have to figure out how to fix your armor. You have to figure out how to push back against it.
“Every shot matters. Everything you do matters. So the tension feels even greater.”
StarCraft is currently in development and is set to arrive in 2030.
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