StarCraftWire.net is celebrating its new, fancy design and domain switch (from old faithful StarCraft.IncGamers.com) with new interview material from Blizzard! This first Q & A session with Dustin Browder was made during the Zerg Reveal Press Event a number of weeks ago, and was an open discussion between Browder and the fansites (the only press to stay extra hours to play!) that had stayed the extra time on the last day.
As it was a more personal discussion than the official interviews, it was very warm and open, and you could tell Dustin preferred talking to the “fans” rather than the “press”. The discussion was quite long, and spans 5 pages. Here is a short snip:
Mutalisk Dancing
In the build we were shown, you could not use your Mutalisks to “dance” around, shooting and moving through micro. The pro player next to me asked Dustin about this, and he explained that they are really supposed to be able to do that in SC2, and the lack of “dancing” is a bug; “I am pretty sure this originally was a bug in the old StarCraft, but it has been used so much now that people expect to be able to ‘dance’ with the Mutalisks. So it’s planned for StarCraft 2, it is just amazing how much we got to break in our engine to get the same “bug”.
The bug appeared in StarCraft as the game only checked if it should react like every 0,5 second or so, like stopping when firing. So the unit fired, and half a second later, the game told it to slow down, but at that time it had already received a new command to move, which enabled ‘the dance’. With our new, more powerful engine, it checks that a lot often, and so they stop moving when they shoot. Our problem is that this version is so much better. It will be done though, it is just a lot of work, and we didn’t have time to add it to this build”.
