By: Eddie Makuch
Starcraft II lead designer says Wii U’s GamePad touch screen provides opportunity to bring RTS to consoles, but admits interface not there yet.
Real-time strategy games like Starcraft require players to manage multiple units simultaneously, and for this reason, among others, the genre has remained mostly tied to PCs, which offer keyboard and mouse controls. But could Blizzard’s RTS find a home on the Wii U? Starcraft II lead designer Dustin Browder explained to Kotaku that it “might” work, but ultimately, players would find the PC experience to be optimal.
“If I can control a cursor on the television with my hand on the touchscreen, that might be able to work,” he said. “[But] because of the hotkey scenario, it’s not like players actually play StarCraft with the mouse only–they play with the mouse and keyboard…We obviously allow new users to play mouse-only and that’s really fun, but when you get serious about the game you do move into the mouse and keyboard space.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Browder confirmed that Blizzard does not have a team dedicated to exploring the possibility of a console version of Starcraft, but said the company is always looking at new technology for its games. Browder went on to reveal that Sony presented Blizzard a demo of Starcraft II being controlled by the PlayStation Move, but this endeavor was dead on arrival.
“I wanted to kill myself,” Browder said of the demo. “I found it very difficult to make it work. I believe that if I had practiced as much as he had, I would’ve enjoyed it more…but for us it felt like it was gonna be a lot more effort to still make that work, to still make that really sing.”
In 2000, Blizzard shipped Starcraft 64 for the Nintendo 64. It was met by a warm critical reception, but all future series entries have landed only on the PC.
The next installment in the Starcraft II trilogy–Heart of the Swarm–is 99 percent complete, according to Browder. It will follow 2010’s Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and precede the final entry, Legacy of the Void.
Source: GameSpot