Nearly two decades after Blizzard released its sci-fi real-time strategy game StarCraft, the game is still being played at a professional level.
Why? What is it about this game that gives it such enduring appeal?
That's basically what Blizzard senior producer Pete Stilwell has spent countless hours trying to understand as part of his work leading development of StarCraft Remastered, the revamped 4K version of StarCraft that's coming out this summer.
As part of a larger conversation about the state of RTS game design and where the industry is headed, Stilwell recently sat down with Gamasutra to chat about what he's learned while rooting around in the guts of one of the most popular RTS games ever made.
We got into a lot of nuts-and-bolts talk about what makes a competitive game timeless, where the RTS market is at these days, and how developers can walk the tricky path of trying to make a strategy game that's both accessible and deeply complex.
Hey Pete! Tell me a bit about your time with the company and your work on StarCraft Remastered.
Stilwell: Sure! I guess I'll start with my time at the company. I've been with Blizzard about five years now. Most of that time was spent with internal tools working to help game teams streamline their process and get games out faster.
I think that's a lot of where that experience came in dredging up and resurrecting our classics. Dusting them off and getting new tool chains built up, things of that nature. That's kind of been my time at Blizzard until about 18 months ago when I got tapped to help with this classic game.
I'd love to know what you've learned about the design of StarCraft as you've been revivifying it for modern machines. What is it, you think, that makes it so enduring that it should be remastered and revitalized?
It's the balance. That's the key note that you take away from any conversation you have, whether it be a pro, a passionate fan, even the initial developers.
"It's important to have that, 'I give a piece in order to take another piece away.' That, to me, is the fundamentals of an RTS."
That was what we spent our pre-production doing. We didn't have to find the fun or anything like that -- we had to go find what made the game fun and successful. So we talked with the initial devs, we spent months and months in Korea talking with folks there that have really been the community around this game for the past ten years, especially since most of the community moved on to StarCraft 2 when it was released.
So it's the fact that -- And [Blizzard cofounder Mike] Morhaime touched on this recently, they kind of came up with a foil for every unit, right? If this enemy is strong this way, it needs something that can counteract it so that a smart player will see it emerge on the battlefield and realize they have a counter to it.
That's like learning chess or similar games, where there are set moves and set strategies and it's interesting when you can counter plays really well, because that's the high-level gameplay.
But also, even as you're seeing with Brood War right now, guys like Flash are emerging onto the scene and saying, "You know what? We haven't explored everything yet. There are some other ways to play this game and play it more aggressively than Terrans typically have, but rely on strong macro to deal with some losses in a way that didn't used to be the case."
I think that speaks really well to that balance and to what makes it interesting, and why the remaster makes so much sense. That there's a generation that grew up playing. I'm one of the guys who played this game and was like, "Someday, I want to grow up and work at a Blizzard and work on games like this."
So to come here and actually unlock that reality is amazing. But to me that's what we're doing for another generation of players. You've already got this game that was so lovingly crafted and turned out to be so well balanced. Why not unlock it for a new generation by making it more approachable and giving it all the features that our modern games get? Like matchmaking and being inside of the Blizzard launcher so you can have your friend network and things like that.
To me, the community is as big of a part of these games as anything, because you need someone to tell you about strategy. You need to realize why you just got your ass handed to you by this guy that you got matched against.
That's what makes this interesting, I think, is that you can speak to it. It's not just that you missed the headshot in a first-person shooter or something like that where you need to work on your mechanics, your muscle memory. That's understandable. RTSes have a depth, I think, outside of the game that can be really engaging. That's another one of those things that, in our pre-pro[duction] period, that came up routinely.
We used to talk about it. We would talk to people in Korea who still go to the IGR [Internet Game Room] for an hour after work to just chat with their buddies that they've had for 20 years now. Like how insane is that? They'll just go and pay a dollar to get into that chat channel that their clan has and just BS about life and the game and it's like a World of Warcraft guild or something like that. The thing that really binds it is that sense of community, and that you have now a game that's lasted 20 years that has a shared experience and dialogue.
Like we grew up playing baseball, hockey, whatever, and you can usually find another kid who played that sport and have a shared dialogue about that common experience. And we're seeing that with StarCraft now. Where we remember aspects of the game, the exploits, the things that we can talk about and have a little laugh and it doesn't matter that you and I are only just meeting now, there's a bond there. We really hope, with the remaster, to unlock that for another generation. Keep it vital.
It's been strong for 20 years, there's no reason it shouldn't be strong for another 20.
As you were going back talking to folks who worked on the original and getting ready to put this together, what stories of the original development of StarCraft stood out to you?
I think it was the "oh, shit" moment when they went to E3 and realized that they had a top-down game -- and perspective was a thing now. And their game was not going to be able to compete with Age of Empires.
So it was like a paradigm shift, and they had to adapt in short order. They did it in like less than six months or something like that to get the game ready and make the release date.
Because you have to understand how much aesthetics are part of the appeal of games, especially back then. I used to do that thing of turning the box over and really looking at the game to see if I wanted to buy it. Because we all knew the game art on the front was lying to us, making false promises.
Original StarCraft
So I think seeing [the StarCaft dev team] being reactive like that was a great lesson for us to apply even now as we are making some fundamental changes to the graphics engine and the input system. That we have to be equally reactive. And that's been the great thing about the PTR [Public Test Realm] with the community, is getting the game out there...and taking a few licks, admittedly.
StarCraft Remastered
But the community is so engaged, they know this game so well. Even if my APM is never going to be over 300 like a lot of these pro players, they're there and engaged and can articulate what we need to do to tweak it to remaster exactly what matters.
Thinking back to the original StarCraft, it feels like RTS games were legion in the '90s, then kind of faded away as everyone congregated around a few genre leaders. Does it seem like RTS is having a bit of a resurgence, here in 2017?
RTS is like my main genre, and I agree with you. And maybe to build on the dialogue of this, I think there's two things: I think like everything else, there's a fashionability of games. We go through cycles, just like music and fashion. And I think FPS had such a dominant run for a while.
But now, I think people are revisiting and reaffirming a lot of classic gameplay elements; like look at the Telltale games that are popular right now. Those types of point-and-click adventures and decision trees that were the foundation of games 30 years ago, are now coming back in a cool way, and getting kind of re-imagined.
In a lot of ways MOBAs are a reimagining of an RTS, I think, but obviously building out of an actual RTS engine owes to that.
"We grew up playing baseball, hockey, whatever, and you can usually find another kid who played that sport and have a shared dialogue about that common experience. And we're seeing that with StarCraft now."
But the biggest lesson I've taken out of this is that there are -- like you were just touching on, kind of like enduring communities around certain games and genres where, they never left it. And to your point, if we were players that enjoyed the campaign and story moreso and got engaged there, we wanted the next story -- like you wanted Warcraft 4, you wanted StarCraft 2 to be out really quickly and then 3, 4, 5, 6.
And just to consume the game that way and kind of watch it evolve, whereas, with the level of play and time you've got to put into be really great at multiplayer StarCraft, you don't necessarily need a new one. Because then you've got to start over, there's going to be differences.
It's one of the things we see with SC and SC2, that they are different games. I don't like when people make the comparison that
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