After a lengthy hands-on session with the StarCraft II campaign, I got a chance to sit down with lead producer Chris Sigaty and rifle a couple dozen questions at him.

We touched on a few obvious subjects, such as beta time frames and release goals, not knowing that the game would be officially delayed two weeks later. We also delved into some finer points, like the new challenge mode, the editor, the upcoming expansions, and why StarCraft II has taken so long to hit shelves.

Shack: So, to get the obvious stuff out of the way, something you probably can't talk about: will the game ship this year?

Chris Sigaty: What I can say is we will ship it when it's ready, and I don't know when that's going to be. We were working as hard as we can to get it this year, and we're trying to get the beta out as fast as we can. Honestly, it'll be done when it's done, and I don't know when that is at this point.

Shack: You've gotta get it right..

Chris Sigaty: That's how we feel about it for sure.

Shack: ..even right down to the wire.

Chris Sigaty: Well, we're committed to quality. And we've been through several things recently internally. We let the company play singleplayer. You've seen some of the reaction to that--there's still a lot more. This build that you're playing has some reaction to company feedback. The same thing with the early preliminary multiplayer online stuff, that we wanted the company to look at first. And we see that, we hear the feedback, and until we hear what we want to hear, we keep working on it, you know.

Shack: There was a pretty strong reaction to the news that there will be no LAN support in StarCraft II. Were you expecting that?

Chris Sigaty: Yeah, I think any time that people hear news like that, they're going to be upset, or some people will be certainly. The really hard thing about is the primary reason we made it--and it's a tough decision--are some of the things we intend to do with Battle.net. And really a sense of being connected all the time, and whether you are a competitive player or a casual player--we're adding things in there that try and enhance that experience by being connected. So that's really the primary driver behind it, but we can't show that driver, so I think people are reacting to that in the way they will, and they don't have any information.

Shack: Like, perhaps, seeing a rainbow in a screenshot, and then..

Chris Sigaty: Precisely. So I think ultimately, it's going to be a great experience. We're really concerned--of course, it's our bread and butter, is a good, connected, fun multiplayer game. Playing with low latency, and having an experience where you're not complaining about the connection. I know people are saying, "But I do it this way now." There's things that we're going to try to do that if you are close to one another, you get the best connection possible. So we're going to try to alleviate all of people's concerns, but until people play it and see it, I think they'll just react to what they see on paper.

I mean, we've gone through a lot of this so far on the project. Even things as much as us saying we're going to add unlimited selection to the game was met with all sorts of various crazy reactions, even on our own team. It's funny, thinking about the unlimited selection argument--that's still ongoing, although I think it's going to turn out to be just fine. But unlimited selection, originally that was a huge deal, and on our team as well. And one of the guys on our team recently went back and was playing original StarCraft some more, and he said, "Wow, I don't know why I ever pitched a fit, because I can barely go back and think of the older interface in that way." [laughs]

Shack: EA just announced Command and Conquer 4, which will require all players to be constantly connected online, even in singleplayer. Have you considered something similar for StarCraft II?

Chris Sigaty: Well, there's a couple things. You will need to connect once for sure, to basically authenticate the game. And then you can choose to play "offline," we're calling it. But playing offline is more limited. There's a bunch of achievements and that sort of stuff, and that stuff does not happen when you're offline. So it's really to your advantage to be connected.

Shack: But you're not requiring it.

Chris Sigaty: Not for singleplayer. And I think that's also true--singleplayer and challenges. Which you probably saw the button for it, but didn't know anything about it--challenges is another area you can go to. Challenges are something we're trying. We always hear people say, "You look at singleplayer as the training ground for multiplayer, right?" And we don't really.

And in fact here we're kind of training you all wrong, because you can have any unit depending on what missions you went through, and there are units that aren't in multiplayer at all, like Firebats, Medics, all sorts of stuff. We kind of created challenges out of this, and our concept behind challenges is to train you at some of the things that are important to a good competitive player, to be at least aware of. They're little minigames that teach you about things like economy, how to maximize getting resources, unit countering, control grouping, micro, spell usage, all sorts of things like that. Those two things are available when you're offline.

Shack: It almost sounds like a tutorial-plus.

Chris Sigaty: Yeah, it's like a master version of a tutorial. And you can best yourself too. There's a minimum bar we want you to hit, and you can try to best yourself by playing them again and again. It's pretty cool stuff--I'm really excited about it, because I think that's one of the things we haven't done as well in the past, is really helped out people who aren't really experience in multiplayer. And when they jump on there for the first time, nobody's telling them these things, they jump into a game and get their assed handed out, and they just walk out of the experience. We want people to have a place they can go to learn, and eventually get to the point--some of the better players do research, they get replays, they see what the best players do.

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