One of the first things we discuss is the balance between hardcore and casual players - especially relevant to StarCraft, I propose, given the obvious difference between the average gamer mucking about with friends and the Korean pro-gamer scene.
"It's not really any different for StarCraft than it is for World of Warcraft, Warcraft III or Diablo, to be honest," Pardo says. "We really try to serve both audiences.
"One of the ways we do that is that we build for the depth first - for the hardcore first. When we're first prototyping and working on the game, we're very meticulous. The game speed has to be fast, the units have to be perfect, we have to be thinking about balance. We don't balance it early on, but we have to be thinking about whether each unit is balanceable, whether we have all the right hooks in the game to be able to do it.
"Then, what we do gradually once we have that basic game ... then we really start trying to make the game more and more accessible....
"The reason we build the game in that order is because you can easily come up with game design concepts or ideas or mechanics that are shallow and designed for a more casual, broad-market gamer - they're not going to put fifty-five hundred hours into a game, right? But we really want to make sure that we build in those features that have a lot of depth and a lot of replayability first, because we can always make that stuff much more accessible for someone that's not going to put in the same amount of hours."
