Blizzard Wants To Slow Down StarCraft 2

Ever feel like the combat in StarCraft 2 is simply too fast? If that's the case, then the team at Blizzard might agree, as the developer is currently toying around with the idea of slowing down the game's pace by a sound margin. It's already being put into practice in a testing phase, with a final decision to be made at a later date.

Team Blizzard member David Kim recently posted all about it on the StarCraft 2 blog, highlighting the handful of changes that are coming to the space strategy game, as well as those that are, for the time being, only being considered as possible alterations.

As for the game's pacing, Kim said that the team has tried reducing the attack speed of all units in the game by 40 percent. Yeah, that's a pretty significant number, and it's coupled with altering some of the damage stats to compensate for the slower pace.

“Even though a change like this would seemingly have a huge implication on balance, we realized the gain wasn't as big as we expected,” Kim says in the post. “Games feel different from before, but the main question has to be 'is this a positive change that makes games better?' We're just not sure yet.”

Kim goes on to say that the slower speed seems to make it easier for less skilled players to stand a chance in the game. Additionally, he said that the games feels more “dragged out” than before. Well, yeah, you nearly dropped the speed of characters by half. Of course it's going to feel more dragged out, even if you up their damage. I'd imagine that a game that actually takes the same amount of time as with previous speeds would still manage to feel like a longer slog if the units are simply chugging along.

Given the popularity of StarCraft 2 and its position as one of the few high profile eSports games, it's hard to imagine that the developer would go through with something like this, but it's too early to even guess which direction Blizzard will eventually go.

The rest of the Star Craft 2 update deals with less significant changes, like little tweaks to a unit or two for each of the game's races. Some changes are also being considered in resource yields and scan range, for those of you who like to get into the nitty-gritty of the game. Again, all of this content is currently in testing and potentially planned for an upcoming update.

At this point, 2015 is shaping up to be a huge year for Blizzard. StarCraft 2 is still going strong, as is the developer's flagship MMO, World of Warcraft. We can probably expect a couple new expansions for the hugely popular Hearthstone this year, too, and maybe even a playable version of the developer's class-based arena shooter, Overwatch. Oh, and then there's their entry in the MOBA scene, Heroes of the Storm. Yeah, it's shaping up to be a banner year.