The Future of Starcraft II – Mods
Players from all over the world are eagerly awaiting any news on Heart of the Swarm, which is the second single player installment for the strategy game Starcraft II. Recently the development team behind the game decided to take a break from the campaign to push out four new custom game types. Blizzard’s Alan Dabiri elaborates more on the subject.
At Blizzcon this past weekend, Blizzard’s CEO Mike Morhaime announced four new official game mods that are to be released for Starcraft II in the coming months. These new game modes are Ajur Chef, Star Jeweled, Left 2 Die, and Blizzard DOTA.
The first question to Dibiri was a deliberate one: Why were we left hanging at the end of Wings of Liberty? With players already making their own amazing mods, why is Blizzard deciding to get involved?
“You’re right. The end-users have already been making these mods on Battle.net,” Dabiri explained. “We wanted to highlight some of these ourselves; do a take on these ourselves to show the different kinds of games you can make in the StarCraft II engine. That it doesn’t have to just be an RTS game.”
Of course, the modding community knows all about this. There are several mods out there that transform the strategy game into a turn-based fighter, or even a kart racer.
Blizzard has decided to set a goal with the release of these official mods, and that is to let the less experienced Starcraft II players know that these types of creations exist. They hope to show the players that more is out there, and they hope to get players even more involved with the game.
“We really wanted to highlight the flexibility of the engine and the things you can do, and this is such a huge part of what you can do. Some of these games are nothing at all like StarCraft II,” said Dabiri.
It is true that the mods have taken away a bit from the development of the second and third installments of the Starcraft II campaign, but they also offer open doors for players to see what else exists out there, giving them much to do while waiting for the release of the other installments.
“This is to let everyone else know that there’s a whole ‘nother part of StarCraft II they may not have played,” Dibiri closes.
