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Hands up if the first thing you considered when seeing the Wii U tablet was whether it could run Blizzard’s StarCraft II? Oh, nobody? Well, Blizzard has said it “might” work on Wii U. Hurrah!
But wait a second! Blizzard also said to Kotaku, via the mouth of StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder, that it’s probably not going to happen. Boo!
“If I can control a cursor on the television with my hand on the touchscreen, that might be able to work,” said Browder. “[But] because of the hotkey scenario, it’s not like players actually play StarCraft with the mouse only-they play with the mouse and keyboard… We obviously allow new users to play mouse-only and that’s really fun, but when you get serious about the game you do move into the mouse and keyboard space.”
“It needs to match a very high quality level for control for us to consider a StarCraft move in that direction,” affirmed Browder. “Again, if there is enough there, totally we could make a port.”
Browder also suggested the developer might look into making games that fit with touch-based input methods. “If there’s not enough there, it still might be exciting to do a whole new title,” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Browder also spoke about how Sony once tried to show the studio a version of StarCraft II with Move controls. “The demo that I saw was really fun because the guy who came in and showed it to us was a big StarCraft fan, and he put a significant amount of effort into trying to make it work,” Browder said. This story might even have a happy ending!
“And when I tried it, I wanted to kill myself.” Oh dear. “I found it very difficult to make it work. I believe that if I had practiced as much as he had, I would’ve enjoyed it more… but for us it felt like it was gonna be a lot more effort to still make that work, to still make that really sing. And for us, control is king, and it’s so critical. Everything’s gotta move when you tell it to move. It’s gotta be really tight. You can’t feel like you’re battling the interface.”
This is stupid. How would that even work? It would be like playing StarCraft II on an iPad except with an even smaller screen. I can’t exactly imagine it at the MLG finals. If something like this was ever to happen it would be like the horror of StarCraft 64 all over again. Yuck.
