“It was really that we no longer wanted to do something that was just going to be an expansion,” says Patrick when asked of the sorts of changes they wanted to bring to StarCraft after their E3 showing, “it was to do something that was going to be epic in every sense in the same way that Warcraft was endeavouring to push on every single bound. Development was reset, and the team had to work hard to make this a title that would stand out in the way that they presumed Dominion Storm would. Patrick explains that the team went back to the drawing board after that. “It was just down the hall from us and it had a full isometric perspective, it had a creature that looked like a Star Wars AT-AT walking around, and it just looked impressive in terms of the technology and the artwork, and made us feel embarrassed that we were even on the floor.” One game in particular, Patrick recalls, was enough to earn the developer some humility: Dominion Storm. But the real issue was not the negativity that it was met with but, instead, the competition that Blizzard found itself facing. It was a defining moment for StarCraft, one that-for as disheartening as it was-bolstered the team. So it wouldn't reinvent everything, and it would be done in 12 months.” This was 1995, with a planned release of 1996 a date the game would not hit. StarCraft was envisioned as a sort of an expansion set, and this is how we described it internally… except it was going to be a standalone expansion set. “And so the idea was that some people were going to go off and start another project and then some of the people who were not the leads on Warcraft II were gonna become leads on StarCraft. “So there was a desire to get back to the next project,” he adds. And immediately afterwards there was a desire to continue the franchise and to find ways to pay for all of the salaries of the people who were still working.” Patrick alludes to the vast difference between the industry then and the industry now, suggesting that the numbers of sales was often so much smaller than they are today, and it was tougher to get by. ![]() “Well, we had just finished work on Warcraft II,” remembers Patrick Wyatt, one of the key programmers on StarCraft, “it was a product that ran late.
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