
They had a meeting about the item shop, and things began to get interesting. "What are we offering fans that is really unique?"
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"And suddenly, with that mod value off, suddenly the standards for the game go through the roof so what are we doing with this game?" Browder asked. It also became clear that they're working on an already crowded genre, and both League of Legends and Dota 2 have grown into massive, worldwide successes since the early experiments with Blizzard DOTA. "It starts growing hand over fist, and now we're adding people like crazy, and now the pressure is really on, right?" Browder said. Once Heart of the Swarm shipped in 2013, the team working on the game began to swell considerably. "And as soon as we said this is our own game, we basically tore out every single piece of Starcraft art that we could." "We had the comment when the strike team was playing, it was fun but it felt like a mod game for Starcraft," Sam Didier, a senior art director at Blizzard, told Polygon. "Like a dumbass, I was just like, 'Yeah, cool.'"Įvery aspect of the game had to be improved to meet the quality standard of a standalone product. Suddenly it looked like Blizzard All-Stars would become its own free-to-play, standalone game. And it's not gonna be as cool as it could be if you split it out.'" It's just that there's all this extra stuff that they're gonna want, Starcraft's not gonna be easily able to support. It's too cool to be hidden inside Starcraft, and it's not that players won't find it there, they will. Its gotta have its own ladders, it's gotta have its own profiles, all that stuff. "I remember very distinctly, I went to this design council meeting, with all the game directors in the studio and they said, 'You can't make this part of Starcraft, its gotta have its own UI. They'll just look at you point blank and say, 'Well, you're not gonna release this cause it sucks, right?' I mean they'll just tell you whatever." "And it's the most brutally honest experience you could possibly have in your life. Different people come into projects they're not a direct part of, play through the content that has been created, and give their feedback. "We have a process here at Blizzard called a strike team where we get a bunch of people who are not on the game teams, well they're not on the game team making the game," Browder explained. In fact, the Blizzard All-Stars project was about to get evaluated.

There was no BlizzCon in 2012, as Blizzard was head-down on too many projects to give time to the show.
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They began to look at the StarCraft 2 engine to figure out how to turn Blizzard All-Stars into a game with monetization options.
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The team had swelled to four or five designers, and between 10 to 20 artists who were working on it in their free time.

That's what they wanted to show at BlizzCon, they decided after looking at the arcade machine with fresh eyes: A game where all these great characters and worlds came together, a way to have their favorite characters from each major property duke it out. There is an arcade machine inside Blizzard's offices that plays a wide variety of emulated games in what has to be a quasi-legal way, and the sides of the cabinet feature art from all of Blizzard's key properties.

"This allowed us to test a bunch of our systems that we had put in the game but we never actually tested, because we actually had done a bunch of work to make this type of game because we knew our fans would want to," Browder explained. They also put together a zombie game and a puzzle game called Star Jewel, just to show fans the flexibility of the toolset. DoTA itself began as a Warcraft map, so in some ways this was bringing the genre back to its roots. They would use the mod tools included in StarCraft 2 to create a little game called Blizzard DOTA, a way to show that you could even make a MOBA-type using the built-in tools. They had a few months to work, so they decided what the hell.
