Dustin Browder, game director for the upcoming StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm , knows that if the game isn’t great, it’s the studio's fault. “All the mistakes are ours,” said Browder in a recent interview. “If it’s bad it’s us -- it’s the dev team.” To make sure this doesn’t happen Browder says the team relies on the advice and feedback of other talented developers at Blizzard, as well as the responses from their most valuable resource: the community.

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The Heart of the Swarm beta has been going for some time now, and, more importantly, the team at Blizzard has had two years since Wings of Liberty to learn about the wants of their players. This has resulted in a number of adjustments for Heart of the Swarm, including new units like the Protoss Tempest, which Browder says the team put in as a counter to the Zerg Brood Lord that currently dominates in competitive play.“In Wings of Liberty we don’t really have a unit in play that’s a legitimate weapon against the Brood Lord if you’re Protoss. We just don’t have a Brood Lord counter. Kind of Void Ray, but not really cause its range is not enough to make it practical. And Tempest gives us that weapon that the Protoss can use to keep off the Brood Lord, which should change up that endgame composition fundamentally from Brood Lord / Infestor.”Another thing that’s influenced Heart of the Swarm’s multiplayer design is the trend towards larger multiplayer maps. Browder said he likes this because it ended a lot of the worker rush that plagued the early days of Wings’ multiplayer, but also says it’s allowed Zerg players to get, “too greedy.”“A lot of the units we’re putting back in, things like Mothership core, things like earlier Reapers, allow us to get a lot of the aggression back in the game for races that previously couldn’t pressure in that respect. I think you’ll see a much more balanced experience in the long run. Whether we hit it out the gate or not? I have no idea, we’re still in the throes of beta... Now we’re actually making the game for these maps.”Not all community feedback comes in the form of vocal forum posts or emails to the company, either. Some features the team has worked to put into Heart of the Swarm are a direct result of the explosion of eSports. “When Wings first launched we thought, ‘Maybe it’ll be an eSport one day like StarCraft was an eSport one day,” said Browder. Instead of “one day,” though, Wings of Liberty blew up, becoming an eSports sensation that draws millions of players from around the world.With Heart of the Swarm Blizzard aims to accommodate the competitive scene, putting in group and clan features, as well as providing the tools so that anyone can customize their interface for watching replays. Browder wholly expects that MLG, IPL and various other casters will have their own look to their videos after Heart of the Swarm launches.Even cooler still is the ability for you and your friends to take direct control when watching a replay. Imagine you’re watching the replay for a big online showdown with someone else. Instead of just watching how it plays out, you and your buddy can jump to any point in the game and then assume direct control over the armies. This probably won’t make you play as good as your favorite pro player, but it could serve as a great learning tool.Getting into the multiplayer component of StarCraft II has also been problematic for many people. So Browder and the rest of the team are attempting to make it easier to get into it with a series of battles against AI where it slowly ramps up the difficulty. These stages will introduce you to concepts that the campaign doesn’t, such as the reason behind building, say, four Barracks. The hope isn’t to make you a pro player, but to make players get past their initial apprehension."Browder loves to talk about StarCraft II, but he didn’t have much to say when it came time to discuss the internally developed StarCraft II mod Blizzard All-Stars. “We’ve got a small group of guys who are doing some awesome prototyping work,” said Browder. “I think they’re making a lot of progress, but we’re not there yet... We still have a ton of work to do in the online and UI space.” When pressed about whether he thinks it’ll come out this year Browder simply said, “I have no idea. I really don’t know, I’m not f**king with you.” He said they’ve done some internal testing off-team, but they need to do more of that to see the response before they can move forward with the project’s timing.For more on StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, why not check out our exhaustive coverage to date. If you want to hear about what it was like to play Blizzard All-Stars in 2011, you can check it out right here.