On July 2nd 2009 Blizzard had a press conference for Starcraft 2 single player to give press a hands on experience at what it will be like. Prior to playing the game, but after a brief explanation of what single player was like, there was time to drill Dustin with some questions. Here are the results of that time.

We've had some feedback that we might need to do that. What a lot of players are doing to tell how difficult the mission is, is looking at the cash reward for it. That has been an indicator to players as to which missions will be more challenging. It's something we've been talking about, but it's a little difficult as well because depending on the technology and upgrades you've earned, which missions are going to be hard and easy for you is kind of hard to say. It also depends on your style as a player - if you're particularly good at Turtling up then hold out missions you'll find a bit easier, whereas if you're a more aggressive player then strike missions or missions where you have to make aggresive moves will be easier. But it's definitely something we've been talking about.

We have thought about using it, but not everyone knows about that intuitively. It's something we could definitely do if we wanted to.

If they live, they live; and if they die, they die. In many cases you'd feel obligated to make sure they survive, and it would be a more positive feeling than losing a mission because a hero died. But at the same time, you'd feel like, "Ah, my Firebat mercenaries died, I guess that's a load." We kind of don't want you to do that. It is Starcraft - it is a blood and guts kind of game. Units live and die all the time, and as a commander of the Starcraft universe, we want you to be comfortable with that - that those men sacrificed themselves so that the rest of us could survive - and we want that feeling and vibe.

It is pretty much the same mission. They may say, "We're under attack - come help us," but it's just like a quest in WoW. A quest in WoW will say, "Oh my god - we're being attacked," anytime you want to show up though, it's cool. It's still a strategy game in that sense; we wanted to preserve that choice. We definitely could, as time goes on, start chopping out missions, but that's actually less choice for the player. That means if he wants that mission, he has to take it now, and there is no option for him to avoid it, right? And we don't have 50 or 60 missions; each one of these missions is about a 3 or 4 month endeavor for us to build. Each one of these is much more complicated than a single quest for WoW, so we don't have an endless amount of content to throw at the player which means we really want to give the player a choice - if he misses something, to get a chance to go back and play it again and not feel like, "Well, you missed it." And at the same time, we do like the story elements that feel like we're under a Zerg invasion, so we do kind of wink at you a little bit and say, "Hey, it is a video game." These characters will hang out and wait for you to get to them whenever you manage to do it.

Well, it does in some ways. We do have these achievements that you can show off to your friends which is one measure of success. The second is whether you completed all the secondary objectives as they relate to research. If you complete those objectives, that will add additional firepower to your forces. Again, we're still working on what those bonuses are going to be, but it will give you additional access. Usually the research objectives are a little more difficult than doing the main stuff. Most players can probably, if they've got the right technology and are playing at a serious level, be able to hold out and complete the main objectives as they play through the game. But to reach for and complete the bonus objectives is a lot more challenging so we want to make sure those rewards are significant when you pick them up. Whether or not we offer additional cash or not, we're still talking about. Again, if we offer additional cash, that makes the player think, "Well, I'm sure the game designer balanced the game for this additional cash which means I will load and save until I beat this thing," and it's really just a pain. So we want to sort of walk the line between giving the player a real benefit for being better - at the same time, demanding he be better in order to play the game, which is not that much fun.

Nope, there is no co-op campaign.

You need to connect once to install the game; after that, you don't need to be connected. If you want access to your achievements, your friends list, and all the good stuff that comes with it, you have to be connected.

Yeah, it's definitely a fun way to play. There are 5 different difficulty settings now in the AI - there's beginner, easy, medium, hard, and insane. Insane is the only one that cheats. The other ones are all playing legitimately, so it gives players a wide range of difficulties to challenge yourself with. And if you find an equal number of insane opponents is too easy for you - which I doubt very seriously - but if it happens, you can always add more AI players.

At certain points it does. There are times where you have to choose left or right, black or white, and you have to choose which one you want to do. But for the most part, the plot begins in the same place and ends in the same place; and kind of what you do in the middle is, more or less, up to you. Actually, there are a few critical points where significant events occur, but I don't oversell it and tell you it happens every time. In many cases, you are just choosing quests to do here. Once you choose a quest, that quest is done, and you can choose another quest. The quests don't change each other, but at a few critical points, it does fundamentally change the plot. Characters may live or die based on your choices.

There's one ending. We really wanted to have a game that still had a continuity to it, and this is the important thing, too - that this is not Fallout, you're not choosing whether Raynor is good or evil. Raynor is who he is, a conflicted man, a troubled man who's seen too much war; and it will have a very specific ending, and the next game will have a very specific beginning. We don't want to have to worry about, "Well, the player made Raynor into a bad guy," so what happens when we get into the next game? With a lot of games, that is what they do, and they make their game all about those kinds of choices. Our game is still about Real Time Strategy (RTS), and that's where we've been pouring into making these missions really, really great. So our story is a continuous experience; it is a continuum that will go into the next game and will make sense with the books and will make sense with whatever future games we decide to make.

Well, you're kind of controlling Raynor. At no point do they look at you and go, "Commander". You're kind of controlling Raynor in the sense that you control a unit in the RTS battlefield; you tell him which room to go to and make decisions for him.

Well, I don't want to say. But yes, it's still in. There is still the opportunity to play as the Protoss. There is a point where it does unlock in the game.

We'll see, I don't know for sure. It really depends as we go. The bulk of the missions are done to a pretty good level. There are a few missions that are sort of on our watch list, we don't know if the mechanics are fundamentally fun, or if we need to redo them over from scratch or not. As we go forward, we're very flexible with that if we feel like there's a plot hole; or if there's a great mission idea that comes to us that we still have time to get done, we'll put it in.

We're always under pressure to finish - haha. I mean, that's been non-stop for quite a while now, to finish the game.

Not for this game because Raynor shows up on maps so rarely. If you remember the heroes from original Starcraft, they spent a lot of time in the back of bases, hanging out and hoping not to get killed because if they did get killed it was sort of a mission failure-state. If you look at what we did with Warcraft 3, it sort of solves that problem by designing the entire game around that one problem. The whole game is focused on the fact that you've got heroes on the battlefield. The reason that the armies are so small in Warcraft is so the hero will be relevant throughout the gameplay experience. The UI is designed to support equipment and hero-based gameplay. Starcraft is still very much a big army game so we're not focusing the battle so much on heroes. There are heroes, but it's not about them leveling up or upgrading. Raynor has his moments on missions where he goes in and does stuff, or he steals dominion technology. But it's not just about him; it's about upgrading the army. At the end of the day, you are sort of role playing Raynor's raiders. That's who you're upgrading, controlling, and improving - not so much Raynor himself, specifically.

Starcraft 2, being the kind of high firepower game that it is - and also a numerous game in that you'll build 50 or 60 Marines, backed up by Medics and Siege Tanks and send them into battle - well, we can make Raynor a little bit bigger than a regular marine, but he can't be 15 feet tall before it starts to break the bounds of what's believable. In many cases, in order for the hero to be usable - and so you can spot them on the battlefield, and so they don't get killed by some random thing that you didn't even notice - they really need to be on a map that's designed for them, where there's only a handful of guys where they've got their buddies and they're going to go kill the bad guys. So we sort of design the maps around the heroes. Throwing a hero, however tough, into a Starcraft battlefield is a recipe for disaster. They just get overrun by the sheer amounts of firepower. It's a very different game from Warcraft 3, and that's done on purpose. We really are not looking to make Starcraft 2 into Warcraft 4. We want it to be Starcraft 2, a sequel to the original and speak to that big army fantasy - really give you a chance to command fleets of battlecruisers and battalions of men. So yes, we have missions that are designed for them, but we keep them off the maps where there's missions with big battles.

We have the ability to put in items for mod makers, but it's not something we typically use in the Starcraft environment. They're not around often enough for you to collect a lot of items; it just didn't make sense to include that in the gameplay. But we are working on the interface and having the UI available for people who want to make mods because we know that there's a huge tradition of mods from Warcraft 3 that are dependent on that interface. We've got that interface in and we'll be polishing it up as we get closer to ship so that we have that available for the mod makers.

I don't know about it being based off of Pitch Black - maybe a little I am Legend in there - but the Zerg definitely come out at night and hide during the day. With a lot of stuff, that for some games would be a mechanic for an entire game, is one scenario for us. Then the next scenario is a set of mechanics that could almost be it's own game, but it's just one scenario. That's why these missions take so long to build.

Sure. One of the missions takes place on Red Stone, which is a lava planet. Your goal is to collect as many minerals as you can. I think you need 8,000, which varies depending on difficulty. Now you've got kind of a problem there because there's Zerg on the environment, so you kind of don't want to spend because you need to spend because you have to fight the Zerg. So you've got a choice. How much do I spent? How much do I not spend? Now, all the minerals you're gonna get are all high yield minerals and collect much quicker than anywhere else in the game. But they're all on low ground. And about every 3 or 4 minutes, depending on difficulty, the low ground floods with lava and kills everything on the low ground. So you need to run down to the low ground; bring your guards - but not too many, because you don't want to spend too much money; grab as many minerals as you can. Fly in a command center, grab as many minerals as you can. Oh, here come the Zerg - fight them off. Then the lava starts to rise; bring everybody back to the high ground. It's not multi-player Starcraft at all; it brings a whole new set of challenges. Every one of our missions should feel like that, where it's a whole new experience that's not like any of the other missions.

The actual units are the same. A marine is a marine; a medic is a medic. We do, however, have units in the single player that are not in the multi-player, such as medics, cobras, wraiths, and cannons on top of your bunkers. If you see the same piece of art in multi-player that you do in single player, it does the same thing.