Beyond WarCraft in Space by Bert Shen Science, Technology, and Society 145 March 15, 2003The Firebat prodded the bones with his flamethrower. “It ain’t one of us. Don’t look like no Zerg scum either. Protoss don’t have giant nostrils like this thing. What the heck is it, Jim?” Raynor took a closer look. “I’ve read about this ancient species. It’s an Orc.” “Don’t look like no pork to me, Lieutenant.” Raynor continued, “They’re extinct now, but they were eerily similar to us, almost like our forefathers. Long time ago, this place was called Azeroth and it was filled with elves, dwarves, trolls, and ogres. The Orcs tried to exterminate the humans, just like the Zerg are trying to do to us now.” “So they’re just like the Zerg? Just as ugly I bet.” “Their melees were similar,” continued Raynor, “but on a much smaller scale compared to ours. I’ve studied some of their battles, and the victor was always the one who could amass the most units and storm the other side’s base. Time after time, the side with the strongest ground forces won. It was formulaic, no strategy.” “Not like our battles,” interrupted a Marine. “We’ve got to balance our attacks and send in the right types of units. They didn’t have to deal with cloaking, burrowing, or the air combat we’ve got to deal with either.” “That’s right,” said the Lieutenant, “We’ve got to deal with a greater number of units at a time and we’re faster, smoother, and more coordinated than they once were.” “Still sounds all the same to me,” said the Firebat. “We’re fighting the same type of wars, and it’s the same story all over again. You put them Orcs in space and you’ve got us.” “No,” replied Raynor, “we’ve evolved.” WarCraft and StarCraft will forever be linked together as innovators in the real-time strategy game genre. Superficially, StarCraft uses many of the successful formulas that WarCraft 2 helped develop. The basic game play, the layout, and the rich narrative are characteristics of both games; however, a deeper inspection shows that the games are indeed quite different and that StarCraft is far advanced in many aspects to WarCraft 2 and to many other real-time strategy games as well. StarCraft may have begun as a carbon copy of WarCraft 2, but the final product was vastly different and much improved from the first prototypes. This evolution of StarCraft away from the WarCraft series would not have been possible without the commitment of Blizzard to scrap and re-scrap the game. Even after all of the development hardships, StarCraft was still remarkably successful due largely to its outstanding game play and still has thousands of gamers addicted today. StarCraft has made an astounding impact on the PC video gaming industry and set the benchmark for all real-time strategy games for the future.To understand the evolution and success of StarCraft, an overview of Blizzard Entertainment’s real-time strategy games is necessary. The WarCraft and StarCraft series include WarCraft, WarCraft 2: The Tides of Darkness, the expansion WarCraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal, StarCraft, the expansion StarCraft: Brood War, and the newly released WarCraft 3. Combined, they have sold millions of copies and won numerous awards (Blizzard). They are all real-time strategy games, and while advanced game play becomes extremely complex, they all follow the same general idea. The goal is to defeat an opponent by constructing a base using mined or gathered resources. In addition, the resources allow the player to buy various units with special attack or defense abilities. After enough units are gathered, the player instructs them to kill the enemy’s units and ultimately destroy the enemy base. The winner is the player who successfully destroys every building owned by his opponent. Since WarCraft and StarCraft both fall into the real-time strategy genre and conveniently have similar titles, they would inevitably be compared to one another. In fact, there was a time when many critics and gamers considered StarCraft as simply WarCraft in space. Though StarCraft obviously draws heavily on WarCraft 2 and its success, StarCraft’s history shows that despite the initial similarities, it has evolved into a much different and more advanced game. StarCraft’s development began in 1996 when one of Blizzard’s leading programmers, Bob Fitch, was assigned the daunting task of continuing the real-time strategy success of WarCraft 2. He did not see any point in deviating from the winning formula of WarCraft 2, so he set out to “take WarCraft 2 and turn it into a space game” (“Bob”). Within two months, Fitch had taken the WarCraft 2 code and thrown together a demo for the E3 conference in Los Angeles. The game looked remarkably similar to Warcraft 2, from the terrain, to the characters, to even the layout of the screen. StarCraft did not make much of an impact, however, and one gamer summarized the collective feelings of those that witnessed the demo, “Oh, Orcs in space.” (“Bob”)Fig. 1 Final release of WarCraft 2 (Blizzard) Fig. 2 Alpha version of SC built on the WC2 engine (Blizzard) Fitch reworked the design and programming of the game, but it became evident that the technological limitations of the engine were holding back the design team. “The WarCraft II engine just was not capable of producing the effects that we were looking for. All of the spell abilities, such as the burrowing, the cloaking, and having interceptors on carriers, couldn’t be done. We just kept hitting all these walls because the engine wouldn’t support these new ideas” (“Bob”). The graphics had been touched up, but still maintained a strong similarity to the cartoon-like shading of Warcraft 2. Fig. 3 The reworked StarCraft still using WarCraft 2’s engine (Blizzard) At this point, Fitch completely discarded the WarCraft engine and took two months to create a more powerful engine that would give the designers the ability to do everything they wanted, plus much more (“Bob”). This was the defining point in the development of StarCraft.The new graphics were remarkably improved, and the new engine could produce smaller, yet more detailed units, while increasing the number of total units on the screen at any one time. The game play was significantly improved to take advantage of the smaller units, so that they
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