StarCraft's First-Person Shift Hinges on ‘Tension,’ Dan Hay Says
Dan Hay, StarCraft general manager and creative director, says the series' upcoming first-person shooter is built around a new kind of tension, with combat designed to feel dangerous and personal before its planned 2030 launch.
Hay discussed the project with TechRadar Gaming at BlizzCon, where he explained that moving from a top-down RTS view to first-person meant the team had to rethink combat, the world, and enemies while keeping the experience faithful and familiar to the original StarCraft. He said the combat “has to feel very, very clean and dangerous and mean and dark,” adding that StarCraft's mood is dark but also, in a strange way, hopeful.
The developer said the team must make the enemies players fight “feel real” while balancing the challenge of being inside 10-foot armor that weighs 1,000 pounds. “It's because the thing that's out there is going to try and shuck me like an oyster,” Hay said. “The thing that's out there is going to try and just flay me open, and eat my insides. And so we have to build it in such a way that it all makes sense, which means when you move, when you attack, when you shoot, it has to feel real, and then whatever it is that's attacking you — which we all know what's probably going to be attacking you — it has to feel like it's an onslaught where you have to stem the tide, you have to figure out a way to stop that biomass from attacking you, and it has to feel real.”
Hay said “tension” was the key to designing that experience. Players caught a glimpse of it in the CGI trailer, he added, and it is the same tension from the RTS games “but it's subtly different.” In the RTS games, he explained, players would face a wall of Zerg enemies, and that was the source of tension. In a first-person StarCraft game, the top-down perspective is gone.
“Now your boots on the ground,” Hay said. “We have to give you the tension of deployment, and you saw us actually do that in the teaser, and then we have to give you the tension of there not being a whole bunch of marines around that you can just go through. It's you. You have to protect yourself. You have to figure out how to fix your armor. You have to figure out how to push back against it.
“Every shot matters. Everything you do matters. So the tension feels even greater.”
StarCraft is currently in development and is set to arrive in 2030, according to TechRadar.