BlizzCon 2015 The Future of StarCraft II Panel Transcript

Multiplayer Features

David: Before we talk about the specifics of what we are trying to do next year in terms of multiplayer features, I want to talk a little bit about how we’ve been collaborating with you guys all throughout the development of Legacy of the Void; and we believe that has been so successful in making Legacy of the Void as best as it could be before the release of the game.

I’d like to point out that none of these features we are talking about today, implementation hasn’t started yet. We are still in the design phase only so if you had thoughts and feedback it would be great to work with you guys on all these features as well.

The first thing we’ll start working on is ladder revamp. This will be right after the release of Legacy of the Void. This will be our main focus, and we’ll be going into the exact specifics and details of our planning so far in the multiplayer panel today at 4:30pm. So if you’re interested in that please check out that panel, but for now I just want to point out that our main goal is to keep the good parts of the current system and address these 3 elements which are: having more meaningful ranks, more accuracy with the system, as well as more transparency.

The reason for this is because we want to fulfill on the ranked play experience specifically in StarCraft II, and what I mean by that is we want to have the most competitive and the most accurate type of system to go with the game.

On the tournament side it’s all weird but we are planning on Archon mode tournaments and 2v2 tournaments. Right now we have the one view-on experience represented in the automated tournament system for the release of Legacy of the Void. The competitive side is very well represented, but we wanted to take a step further into automated tournaments system as a whole, and we wanted to make it a little bit more of a teamwork-oriented and a bit more of a social experience, and that’s why we are trying to add these two formats into the system as well.

The next thing is to separate MMR per race in unranked play. We know that many of you have asked for this feature and we do also agree that the player experience will be a lot better if you have the ability to check out (say I’m a Protoss player — that’s my main race, but I’m kind of curious what my rank is as Zerg or Terran) giving the players opportunity to do that I think is a good thing; but the only thing that we are working on here is, are we going to have separate MMR per race in ranked alone, or also in unranked? The answer to that question is a little bit difficult because the more MMRs we have per player the less good the matchmaking can potentially become; so depending on how our bootstrapping process goes and things like that, we’ll make the right call; but please let us know your thoughts.

Finally for the multiplayer side, we are going to have updates as needed like we had in Wings of Liberty, and Heart of the Swarm; and what I mean by that is map updates every season, balance test maps and balance patches every season as needed as well; but the more important thing I want to talk about is exploring big changes.

So unlike Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, we want to explore things like major redesigns to existing units when needed or even systems, and potentially adding more units to the game to make the game feeling a bit fresher. As you guys know from Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, we had a few design issues with a couple of units like the swarm host or the broodlord with infester combination in Wings of Liberty.

We want to be a lot quicker to react to those situations. It is why we have these goals, and on top of that say one or two years have passed after the release of Legacy of the Void, the game might be a little stale because the strategies have been kinda figured out, everyone is doing the same sort of things on the ladder and in tournaments and so on.

We want to keep the options open in terms of adding more units so that we can keep the game feeling fresher. Like I talked about before, we did this whole process of community collaboration all throughout the course of the beta, and even after the release of Legacy of the Void we would like to continue working together with you so that we can make these new designs or potentially new units coming into the game at a later stage as best as we can. Now Matt Morris (our lead campaign designer) will talk to us about the updates coming next year for our co-op missions. Thank you.

Next: Co-op Missions

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