BlizzCon 2015 The Future of StarCraft II Panel Transcript
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Co-op Missions
Matt: How are you guys doing? My name is Matt Morris and today I’m going to talk about co-op missions. If you are hearing the words co-op missions for the first time, that’s because we’ve changed the name from allied commanders to co-op missions. If you’re hearing allied commanders and co-op missions for the first time, I have a quick brief summary of this new exciting new co-operative mode that’s coming to StarCraft II for the very first time.
What is a co-op mission? This is where you are going to play cooperatively with a friend; you are both going to battle the computer on campaign style missions. This isn’t campaign, this is an entirely different mode, but what we’ve done is we’ve taken over some of the more memorable mechanics and objectives that you’ve seen in our campaigns and we brought them over to coop missions so that you could have that same experience with your friend; and you’ll both get a chance to choose a commander from one of our three campaigns.
Each commander plays a little bit differently, they have a unique set of units, abilities and upgrades. This is isn’t like heroes. This is still an RTS, you’re still building a base and troops; but each one of these guys is absolutely amazing.
If you guys haven’t seen it, the demo station over here has all the coop missions and the commanders. We have six commanders: we have Jim Raynor, Kerrigan and Artanis and we have Swan from Wings of Liberty, Zagara from Heart of the Swarm and we’ve got this new commander. You ae going to hear more about her in Legacy of the Void. Her name is Vorazun and she’s awesome, but the reason why I’m standing here today is to let everybody know that as this game goes live, we plan to continue the support co-op mission as we move forward.
One of the ways we want to do this is we want to continue to make more co-op missions. In fact, we already have a mission that’s almost ready to launch, once the game goes live it will be shortly there after. It’s a mission that you’ll see in the Legacy of the Void campaign.
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It’s a capture mission and we felt the mechanics of this mission fits perfect for our co-operative environment, because we are going to require both players working together to capture these points; but more importantly you are going to have to communicate with your ally as to how to prevent the AI from recapturing him. I have a little video to show you what this looks like in-game.
As we move forward one of the most important things that we want to do when we are building these missions is that we want to build missions that you guys want to play on. I highly encourage you guys to be active on the Battle.net forums, go to Reddit, go into one of those places that you like to read about StarCraft II, and let us know what you like and don’t like, because we really want to build missions for missions that you guys want to play on.
One of the other ways we are planning of supporting this mode is we want to add more co-op commanders. I’ve mentioned the six, but today at BlizzCon we are announcing our seventh commander. He is a protoss commander and his name is Phase-Smith Karax. He works in a room called the Solar Core, and what the solar core does is this is a room that powers the Spear of Adun: all the weapons systems and the defense systems.
That’s what is going to make him different than the other protoss commanders. He’s going to be above all these call downs from the Sphere of Adun. All the protoss commanders do have call downs, and they all have unique Spear of Adun powers, but what really makes Karax different is he’s going to be able use it more frequently, be more powerful.
In fact, in the mission itself you are going to be able to actually upgrade your Spear of Adun. You are going to make these powers stronger as you start playing the missions. I got a couple of videos to show you to illustrate some of these amazing powers that Karax has. The first one is called Solar Lance, and what is awesome about this is that the player is going to have to paint a line onto the mission and just do terrible amounts of damage to anything in there. Let’s take a look.
One of these next abilities I’m going to show you — it kind of shows he has more than just his offensive weapons. All the protoss you know have a Chrono boost that you can single target any structure and make that structure train units faster.
Karax has an ability called super chrono and when he activates this all your production facilities start going in overtime. It’s not just at chrono boost speeds, it’s actually much much faster.
This is Karax’s base right here and it shows you his gateways, cybernetics core and the forge; everything is working overtime to produce a lot of troops. It’s really powerful though, but most importantly this also impacts your allies so you can see how important it is to have Karax on your team.
I got one last video to show you, this is Karax’ ultimate ability. This thing is awesome.
It’s called Purifier Beam and what’s really cool about this is that it leaves a persistent beam on the mission for a pretty long time, but the real fun part is as you deploy it the player gets to control it and move it around so as the enemy is trying to escape you can just move it around and run them over with this thing. Take a look.
I don’t know if you see it, but I think I got 56 kills on that. So that’s it for co-op missions. You guys can start lining up. I don’t know where the person is going to have the microphone, but you guys can start answering questions; but before I sit down, I do want to remind everyone that if you’ve never picked up Wings of Liberty or Heart of the Swarm, or if you’re new to RTS there is no better time to get into StarCraft II than now; and with Legacy of the Void, it’s a stand-alone product.
We have an amazing new campaign, we’ve got amazing new multiplayer features, new units, we’ve got automated tournaments, we’ve got Archon Mode, and now we have a co-operative mode for you and your friends to play together, and have that campaign experience. Thank you.
Next: Q&A Session
Note: Work-in-Progress. Currently transcribing the panel. Please, support us on Patreon, and follow us in Twitter and Facebook for daily Blizzard games news updates.
| Browse these pages: | Panel Intro | Mission Packs | Multiplayer Features | Co-op Missions |
| Q&A Session | Q&A Session - part 2 | Q&A Session - part 3 | ||
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