Dustin Browder, Lead Designer: The Zerg are exciting because there's a lot that they can do. The Terrans are sort of limited conceptually more than the other two races. The Protoss are all psychic and magic, who knows what they can do. And the Zerg are equally strange and alien, there's no preconceived notions as to what a Zerg creature can do, up to a point. As opposed to a guy with a machine gun, you know what they're about and have to work within those restrictions.



So it's been cool with the Zerg, since we've been able to run amok in terms of the kinds of abilities we've been able to put on these units, and the kinds of wacky things that they can do. And I guess also, the original game had a lot of delicious source material that we didn't really get to see a lot of. We knew that the Zerg had the concept of infestation in the original game, but we didn't have a lot of units that could infest. We had the Spawn Broodling, and the rare circumstance that a command center could be infested, but that almost never happened.



Since we had this source material that didn't get a lot of use, it was nice to explore it and put in some core units to make the Zerg feel like they were very swarmy and infesty, and spawning little horrible creatures every chance they got.

Dustin Browder: No, not yet. The counters are pretty easy in a lot of ways. For the most part, with the controls over cost and health and a lot of factors, the units are the most challenging portion in that respect. The units like a Mothership or a Thor, a unit whose art speaks to a specific set of numbers. If you start to break those numbers you get confused. You can't have a weak Thor. You can't have a Mothership that has very few hit points. It just doesn't work. That's when it starts to get challenging, when you get into art that you all kind of like, and you all can see it work, it constrains the direction you can go.

Dustin Browder: No, single-player is pretty flexible. We can always add units and structures to single-player if we want to. They (multiplayer and single-player) don't have to be exactly the same. You're limited to the number of units you can have for a race in multiplayer before things get out of control.



But you can do things differently for single-player. This is a game where you have to buy your own technology, which is different from any single-player game we've made before. If we want to have an extra five or six units, like Goliaths, Wraiths, and Vultures, and make these available in solo play, and give players more choice as to the kinds of purchases they'll want to make, then that's a choice that makes a lot of sense to us.



We're allowed to break any rules we want, so solo play is more free in the sense that there are fewer balance requirements. The challenge of remembering all the controls is not as frightening. The game generally plays at a slower speed, we default you to a medium speed setting, which you can turn up but most players don't. Most multiplayer games are played much faster. I think solo is the easier space in that respect.

We've seen the Terrans and their take on the mighty Thor. We've seen the monolithic Protoss Mothership. Today Blizzard unveiled the final slice of thetrifecta with a hands-on demonstration of the Zerg. The Queen of Blades' army is back, and they're poised to infest a Terran base camp near you. We sat down withLead Designer Dustin Browder to discuss the reimagining of this uniquely alien race.At BlizzCon we went over the general design philosophy of, so let's stick with the theme of the day, which is the Zerg. Last we spoke, you discussed upgrading the Terran and Protoss. Was there anything different about updating the Zerg?Did you find that since the Terrans are conceptually limited, you had to limit yourself with the Zerg, since you couldn't come up with a rational counter for the Terrans?Did you find that's success as a multiplayer game restricted your single-player design in any way?