Again, one of the very few complaints I’ve heard about StarCraft II, but one that I’ve heard repeated over and over, is that the multiplayer is too iterative, too similar to the original game. It seems to me that given the first game’s popularity as a competitive multiplayer title, you were kind of stuck needing to emulate that success rather than experiment with something new. Was there ever any frustration with designing the multiplayer? Did you ever discuss trying something wildly new or different, or did you know from the beginning that you had to stick to this formula that was so insanely successful?

There’s challenges, so there’s certainly frustrations in trying to create really great new content given how great the first game was. To make something worthy of that was really a challenge. I don’t know that we ever felt like we couldn’t do something new if we really wanted to. It was more a question of what did we want to do, and we felt like there was more we could do in this space, that there was more opportunity for us to improve on what had already been done.

Certainly, there was a lot of fear that we couldn’t. “You’re going to try to make the old one better? There’s no way!” That was a concern that we had internally. But we tried to get some courage and pull up our boots and push to see if we could actually improve on greatness and make it even better. I don’t know if we have or not. I don’t want to speak for it. It’s still out there. The meta-game is still settling down. We’re still seeing lots of players playing. We’re seeing lots of great tournaments right now. We’re seeing a reasonably diverse number of players across all levels of play, playing all three races. I’m certainly hopeful that we’ve been able to improve on greatness and make a game that’s even better.

I don’t want to seem nasty here, but the question is, how great have those successful “experiments” from other developers been? I haven’t really seen another gameplay experience that’s attracted millions of players with hundreds of thousands playing online. I haven’t seen that. So the idea that these other experiments have been successful, and therefore we must emulate them? I object, sir. I object strenuously. I have not seen someone else be successful by removing economy. I have not seen other RTSes be successful by removing micro.

What a lot of other games have done is they’ll pull the camera back and say, “Look, it’s all economy now.” Or they’ll push the camera in and say, “It’s all micro; economy’s dead.” And they’ll say, “See! We’ve made it better!” I have to strongly disagree. I definitely enjoy those games, but I don’t know that they’re ultimately a better competitive RTS experience. They’re different, and that difference has a value in the sense that for the three weeks that I’m playing it, it feels new and shiny. But then when I get down to it, I realize that there’s actually less to do. I don’t play it for weeks or months.

I don’t know if StarCraft II can survive that test of time. I don’t want to say that we can. We’re certainly going to try. That’s what we set out to do in the first place, to definitely improve on what had already been there and not just change for the sake of change. Like I said, I don’t want to be a jerk, but I feel like a lot of other studios have changed just for the sake of change. They haven’t made a better product, they’ve just made a product that is different.