We had a chance to meet Tim Morton and David Kim and talk about how StarCraft 2 will maintain its eSports scene and position as a competitive RTS. Here’s a look at how Blizzard is trying to popularize the game while still maintaining its uncompromising identity.

There is a lot going on in StarCraft 2. How did your team come up with all of this?

We spent some time making adjustments to the game after we launched Legacy of the Void came to a conclusion that simply adjusting the balance through patches is not enough to push the game closer to perfection. This led to our decision that, because we are not planning on any additional expansion sets, we should deal with the issue by dropping huge patches.

As we were monitoring public opinion all around the Internet we realized that, while people in Korea were saying that SC2 is too difficult to step into, people from other countries said that it is not SC2 if it is made easy. It was hard for us to maintain the balance between the two standpoints, but we did not want to make things too simple. SC2 is a game that players should gradually learn to play better as their experience builds up, and we did not want to sacrifice that. We decided to keep our own complexity of the game and PvP system but instead try to lure in new players and light users with co-op missions.

Among competitive Blizzard games, SC2 is earning the least amount of profit. It seems like your team is trying to increase profit through things like the War Chest and then investing that money in eSports. Can we hear more about your plans?

We haven't made any decisions on the details yet, but I can say for sure that profits made through the War Chest will be used to support eSports management in general, including prize money for SC2 tournaments. We have yet to decide on how we should allocate our earnings.

General opinion indicates that the game's overall pace should be slowed down. Do you have any plans to make adjustments accordingly?

I think that's the difficult part. We have been maintaining this culture in which we make the game together with our community members, but it is hard to meet all the demands. In Korea, people prefer the game to be slower, but other countries push for the opposite. We are having a hard time satisfying both sides.

Some people suggest that the game is too fast-paced due to the fact that there are so many units countering each other, which makes us wonder if we pushed the matchup too far. We've decided to reduce these elements and give players more ways to defend their base. Hopefully we can better adjust the game's pace through such changes.

The competitive SC2 scene has died out in Korea. Is there any solution for that?

Korea has some of the world's strongest players, so we are trying to make it easier for Korean players to participate in tournaments by giving more support in events like WCS. We also allowed pros to keep up with their livestream, so we are expecting things to get better.

RTS is not as popular as it used to be. How do you view the future of this genre?

I personally think RTS was never really popular except for Blizzard games. With that being said, our strategy is to give SC2 its own unique standing among other games and guarantee that the game is fun to watch.

There are a lot of differences in playstyle when it comes to Korean Zerg players and those from other countries. How are you going to handle the issue?

I think Zerg is the race that is going to face the most changes. Currently there are many strategies that revolve around Ravagers, and we think we can make some changes to diversify Zerg strategies. I believe that once the Hydralisk becomes an important unit, strategy will also become more diversified. We are hoping to diversify Zerg's strategy pool and make it easier for players to establish their unique playstyle.

What are your plans for DLC?

The last Nova Mission Pack will be released soon. We are planning to add more multiplayer content like co-op in the long run.

Looking at this year's competitive scene, who is the most creative player in your opinion?

Among Terran players, Hyunwoo "ByuN" really made a good use of his own playstyle to produce good results. Ryungwoo "Dark" Park brought his own strategy and proved that Zerg is still strong. For Protoss, Alex "Neeblet" Sunderhaft really stood out in KeSPA Cup.

Did you have plans to add a new unit this year?

We did, but we are not planning to make it actually happen. We always try to avoid making units that have overlapping functions. Our goal is to give a wide spectrum of roles to each unit so that they can all be used for different purposes.

Most of the new units we tried to add saw their role already taken by preexisting units, so we decided to make adjustments to those units instead of adding a new one. Our attempts were not without failures. There was a time when we tried a unit that, after a Lair upgrade, would hatch from an egg in groups of three, but it was too similar to the Zergling. Then we gave it ranged attack which turned it into the Hydralisk, then we made more adjustments which turned it into the Roach... We learned that simply making new units does not really help with diversification of strategy.

We also had a Tier 1 airborne Zerg unit which doesn’t really do anything by itself but hatches a Roach upon death. We thought this create a fun choice for people, but we threw that away after a single test.

Dark Templar now armed with Blink. What was your intention when you added that?

Whenever I saw a cloaked unit, I thought it would be fun to add another feature to them. Players tend to use them early game and abandon them right away once their enemy brings Detectors, so we decided to make some changes to Dark Templar so that players can still find them useful even after Detectors come out.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Any last words to StarCraft 2 fans?

Morton: Much still remains as we move towards 2017—DeepMind's SC2 challenge, War Chest... We still have a lot to show. We hope we can bring more gems to our fans before this year comes to an end.

Kim: SC2 is a game that is very hard to master, and we are aware that many people are saying that the game should be easier. SC2 has already established its position as a difficult game, and I do not think changing the game's difficulty would change the standing. It will still remain a hard game even if we make the game simpler in multiple aspects. Therefore, instead of making a compromise and putting the game in an ambiguous position, we decided to maintain SC2's complexity and keep its identity as a challenging game. We are trying to make the game more popular in other ways, and we hope you stay with us.