If you’ve been patiently or restlessly waiting for Heart of the Swarm , the upcoming major expansion of Blizzard’s StarCraft II, good news: the multiplayer closed beta test is only a matter of weeks away. Heart of the Swarm will add an all-new, Zerg-focused single-player campaign, along with a number of changes to the multiplayer portion that will have a significant impact on the play styles of professional players and amateurs alike.

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As of right now, Blizzard doesn’t plan on cutting any units from the existing game. That means the Thor, as it functions now, is still in. So is the Protoss Carrier, though according to game director Dustin Browder, the team gets into nearly daily arguments about whether or not to keep it. Even if all the current units do remain in the game, Blizzard is adding in a bunch of new ones, as well as augmenting some of the abilities of the Wings of Liberty armies.In a game like StarCraft II where balance between the three armies is of such importance, Blizzard is being very careful about how to expand the online portion. David Kim, game designer at Blizzard, is constantly monitoring professional tournament results and matchmaking results to determine if imbalances exist.“For Terran, the number of options they have available to them are very diverse,” said Kim. “We’re trying to not include brand new tactics as much as other races. We’re trying to make mech-based play viable so you can go all factory units and still be able to compete, whereas right now you have to go a mix of bio and mech, or just bio. All the three new units we’re showing all contribute to either the Protoss late game or Terran being able to use a mech composition against all the races.”On the Terran side, you’ll be able to transform the fast-moving, flame spewing Hellions into bipedal mechs. In this transformed state, the Hellions will move more slowly, but gain boosted damage with short-range firebursts, as well as additional hit points. According to Kim, this is to ensure the Terran army has a way to stand up against something like groups of charging Protoss Zealots.A Warhound is also being introduced, another bipedal mech that will auto-target the nearest mechanical unit with a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. It can attack ground units with an arm cannon as well, but Blizzard wants its main power to be knocking out larger mechanical units, such as entrenched Siege Tanks in a Terran versus Terran match.Perhaps the most interesting new unit is the Widow Mine, which is produced at the Factory, can be moved around the battlefield and latched onto ground or air targets. When this happens, a timer, visible to all players, begins to count down on the affected unit, and when it expires the mine explodes, dealing high damage to enemy units in range. Blizzard is hoping this type of mechanic will in some ways help break up the “death ball” style of play, where large mixes of unit types are massed and moved around in a tightly bunched group.Skilled players will simply move the affected unit out of their armies so the detonation happens at a distance, but in the middle of a fight’s chaos, this may not be easy to do. Widow mines should also prove effective against clusters of raiding Mutalisks, or perhaps as a way to swiftly obliterate workers at an expansion while you attack elsewhere to divert your opponent’s attention. If a unit stuck with an active Widow Mine happens to die, though, the mine is no longer active, so there’s not as much reason to use them against anything at the front lines of a battle. Blizzard is still toying with the idea of having the Widow Mine blast inflict damage on friendly units as well, which could introduce significant risks while using Widow Mines in your own base.The Protoss will get a long-range siege option with the Tempest, an expensive late game air unit that can attack enemies in the sky and on the ground. Though the energy blasts shot by the Tempest don’t deal huge amounts of damage, they can be fired from incredible distances, well outside the range of most units and point defenses. This should help Protoss players soften up bases for assault, or wipe out entrenched units like Siege Tanks. The Oracle, another flying unit, is less about dealing damage and more about messing up your opponent’s economy. It can temporarily cloak nearby friendly units, wall off mineral fields to disrupt enemy resource collection, and set down detection fields on enemy buildings that also reveal what tech is being researched. This detection ability can also be granted to friendly structures, meaning you don’t necessarily need to build an Observer to deal with a Dark Templar invasion.The Mothership will receive a few changes, many of which have to do with how it’s constructed. In Heart of the Swarm, before you can bring a Mothership into battle, you first need to set up a Core. Only one Core can be active, and it sits on top of your Nexus. It can’t move around, but can teleport to the top of other Nexuses on the map. It can also deal damage for short periods of time, replenish the energy of a nearby unit, and use a Mass Recall ability to quickly bring units back to it, giving Protoss players a way to yank back an early assault force without suffering too many casualties. If you decide to proceed to a Mothership, it can still Recall and use Vortex, though Vortex will only affect land units, and can use a Stasis ability, which freezes it an all air units around it for 20 seconds.Like the Protoss, the Zerg will also get a long-range siege weapon, called the Swarm Host. “We didn’t want to just put in another Siege Tank,” said Kim. “We didn’t want to put in another Colossus. After it’s planted in the ground, the Swarm Host will release small creatures called Locusts onto the field. Locusts are slow, but they can attack land and air, and the Host will keep continuously releasing them until it’s killed. While the Host’s modest army doesn’t do high burst damage, moving a few Hosts into position could very well wind up overpowering an enemy’s defenses through persistence. “If you can take care of the Locusts with high damage, you’re not actually causing damage to the other guy. The constant streams of slow attacks that slowly wear the other guy down is a brand new siege mechanic in the game.”The Viper is a flashier unit, with the ability to grab and pull enemy units across the battlefield. If a Siege Tank is positioned somewhere that makes attack impossible, you can just use the Viper to pull it away and into your army, making for an easy kill. The Viper can also lay down blinding clouds to dramatically reduce the attack range of biological units, as well as replenish its energy by eating the hit points of friendly structures.In terms of upgrades to existing units, the Zerg Ultralisk will get a Burrow Charge, that lets it zip underground quickly and deal damage when it surfaces. This makes it easier to get the normally slow-moving Ultralisk to the front lines of battle so it can slice apart armies. The Hydralisk will also get an option to upgrade its movement speed so it can run just as fast on exposed ground as it can on creep, which should certainly make Hydralisk armies more of a threat.“We tried to solve Zerg late game,” said Kim. “If you don’t bring out big units like Ultralisks or Brood Lords, that late game composition is not that strong. The Viper combos really well with Hydras or with Zerglings because before the battle, you can actually pull Siege Tanks or Colossus or Immortals out of his army, kill them first, and then engage. We think it will be viable for Zerg to have swarms of little stuff comboed with the Viper in the late game instead of having to have either of those two big units out.”Not only will there be new units and abilities, but added environmental features as well. “We added collapsible rock towers,” said Kim. “It’s a fairly low health tower usually placed at choke points. If you destroy that tower it creates a rock to block off that ramp. It’s a one-time thing. That rock is the same as the rocks that are in the game right now. We’re using it to help the defending player defend his base better, or placing them in strategic locations.”Blizzard tested out other options for additional map features, but some just didn’t work as intended. “We’ve tried some other things too, like areas where units moved slower, but the gameplay became kind of complex because units like Siege Tanks that really don’t need to move became crazy powerful and the units that really depend on mobility, like Zerglings, they’re useless in that location. We felt like it limits the strategy rather than opens up more options, so we took that out.”Many unit ideas, too, were tossed aside after trying them out in-game. “We thought it’d be kind of cool if you could harass the enemy’s army instead of the base,” said Kim. “So we had this fast-moving hover unit that shoots a [damage over time] missile. If you were to use that unit in combat, it kind of sucks because the [damage per second] isn’t very high. But if you’re to harass his army with it, you can actually tag like ten different guys, have them die over the course of one minute, and then you can engage the army. The problem with that unit was, if I tag too many of your guys, then you just push and attack me before you lose your units. So that didn’t work out.”Clearly there are a lot of ideas bouncing around, so how does Blizzard know when to cut it off? At what point are there too many units? “That’s what we talk about constantly,” said Kim. “One of the rules we tried to follow in Wings was every race has no more than thirteen or fourteen units. We obviously kind of broke that rule. We will need to test heavily in the beta to see if the fifteen, sixteen, seventeen units that we have per race is too much.”As testing continues, Kim pointed out anything could change. Existing units could be cut, in-development units listed in this article could be completely altered or scrapped altogether, and all-new units could be introduced. Expect a more solidified list of multiplayer features once beta testing is underway. According to Kim, “If someone has an amazing idea, we’re always open.”