Gamasutra's interview with Dustin Browder on Starcraft 2 design

Updated on the 26th of October, 2009 by Buckwald

Gamasutra has an exclusive interview with Dustin Browser on the design of Starcraft 2. The interview covers some insight into the design philosophy behind Starcraft 2 and some questions to how Dustin's experience working on the Command and Conqure series translated to working on Starcraft 2 at Blizzard. The total interview is about 3 pages long but see a small excerpt below.

Gamasutra - Features- The Design of Starcraft II - Dustin Browder⁽¹⁾

Did you bring any of your experience at Westwood -- I guess it's EA LA -- to Blizzard?

DB: At the end of the day, no. Not a damn thing. [laughs]

At the end of the day, I learned nothing. I thought I was more prepared than I was when I came here, because I'd made RTS games at that point for five or six years. I thought, "Okay, I've got some chops here," but Blizzard is really its own beast.

Blizzard has its own style, and more importantly, Blizzard has a lot of institutional knowledge, which a lot of other studios don't have about making these games and making them great. At the end of the day, what I brought was a basic level of creativity, an understanding of how these games are built, and... Yeah, that's all I brought. [laughs] And hopefully, a positive team working attitude, right?

But I had to relearn kind of all the basics all over again, because the games that I'd made before were fundamentally not designed be an e-sport. They were not designed that way.

Command & Conquer, and so on?

DB: Yeah. It's not a focus of those games. Command & Conquer 3 tried to do that, and they're going in a different direction. While I was there, certainly we wanted to make good multiplayer games, but e-sports in Korea, to the level that it is at Blizzard, was not part of our focus. Certainly, the kind of context that we have in the Korean community at Blizzard goes way beyond anything we had at EA at that time.

There was just a lot of relearning to do, coming into Blizzard, to truly understand what StarCraft was all about.