If you walked away from the StarCraft reveal excited for the franchise to return, but unsure what this new game even is, you’re not alone. Aside from being described during the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony as an open-world shooter, Blizzard didn’t share much else. In an interview with GameSpot, Blizzard GM Dan Hay provided a few more details, including the fact that it’s a third-person game.
The StarCraft franchise, having taken the form of real-time strategy games previously, has typically used an isometric perspective. When it came to choosing what perspective to offer in the new shooter, it sounds like it wasn’t a difficult decision.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Hay said when GameSpot asked him about whether StarCraft will be a first- or third-person game. “I want to be able to see my armor. First thing we did is we built it, put it on a turntable, and spun it around like, ‘Ah, awesome, cool!’ I want to be able to see it, so third-person, right?
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the license to, in a couple of spaces, do a little bit different and whatnot, but third-person: You get to see your armor, you get to see the full weight of everything you have, and then you get to see stuff that’s in my head that I can’t tell you.”
Hay spoke to us a great deal about the fantasy of having this armor to protect you. Asked about character progression or customization, he said, “If I was to get—in theory, hypothetically, purely hypothetically—this is what I would want: I would want to be able to make sure that my armor can be made better, stronger, and different. I would also want to be able to make sure that I could make it feel like mine. I would want it to be a visitation of the legacy of the things that I had done. I would want to show that it looked different from the first moment that I got it to the last moment I got it. So, read into that how much you will hypothetically, but that’s what I would want as a player.”
“We have to make sure that we’re thinking about—and I have to be careful not to talk about this too much—combat has to feel powerful,” he added. “You’re in this armor; you’re a living tank. You have to feel powerful. When you hold that Gauss rifle, and the thing weighs something ridiculous, you have to feel like you’re just pushing through the Zerg. The Zerg have to feel like those raptorial claws are going to shuck you like an oyster in that thing. So you have to feel the weight of all that.
“We take that very seriously. We know that people who are out there are going to be going, ‘The teaser was amazing, super cool, the story sounds great, but we want to see that combat. We want to feel those moments. We want to feel the exploration, the sense of discovery, and we also want to feel this notion of disruption—that when I go out into the world, it pushes back in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and then I have to figure out a new way to play.’ It’s how our world works.”
Hay also revealed to us that StarCraft is a single-player game (or single-player is at least the focus) and shared why Blizzard decided to reveal it so soon, given it won’t be out until 2030.