Last month, Destructoid's Jonathan Ross got to pay Blizzard a visit, and there he got to talk with the lead producer of StarCraft II, Chris Sigaty. Of course, hot on everyone's mind is their decision to remove LAN support from the game. "There's a lot of reasons," Sigaty said. The biggest reason? You'll have to get it after the jump.

If you've got qualms about the StarCraft II delay, blame it on WoW. Speaking to Eurogamer, the guys at Blizzard reveal that the reason we've been waiting so long for StarCraft II is because World of Warcraft held it up. Details after the jump.

As the development on StarCraft 2 continues, so do the Blizzard Q & A sessions. This time around, Blizzard blue poster Karune tackles Spider Mines for Nomads, Ghost sniping, Reaper Mine mechanics and what not. Absorb the information in the full article after the jump.

When the lead producer of a game like StarCraft 2 talks, you just know it's about something important. In a recent video interview, Chris Sigaty discussed literal and figurative AI intelligence and how Blizzard has been experimenting with the game. Check it out in the full article after the jump.

If something's been going strong for the past ten years, you can bet its worth celebrating once it hits its anniversary date. That's true of Blizzard's StarCraft 2 as well.

In a recent interview, several members of the Blizzard opted to take a stroll down memory lane. Reminisce with them in the full article after the jump.

Making a good sequel is challenging business. One must be able to breathe something fresh into the franchise while keeping the fun core elements of the original game intact.

Fortunately, Blizzard is working on doing exactly that with StarCraft 2. Lead Producer Chris Sigaty tells us a little bit about what Blizzard has in store for the sequel in three separate videos. Watch them after the jump.

 

StarCraft II's Chris Sigaty was able to tour Korea back in May for the World Wide Invitational and saw a glimpse of the gaming populace's fixation on Blizzard's recent sci-fi real-time strategy game, StarCraft. In an interview with Gamasutra, the game's producer relayed his amazement at the StarCraft scene in the country.

Aside from electronic sports leagues revolving around the video game, there are huge, sponsored tournaments covered 24/7 throughout every event, and in the most unexpected of times, too. There are local TV channels, and Sigaty relayed a memorable account of one experience while there with his wife:

Twice in Korea now I've been in the malls, and the last time we were there just for the announcement, on a Wednesday, wandering through the mall, I happened upon this store that looks kind of like maybe a show or something is going on. We went in and we're standing in the back looking around in the back of the store and wondering ‘what's going on?’, and we look up on the screen, and it's a Starcraft match, and it's a pro match in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. And there’s all these girls there for the fan club of the guys that are playing, and we're just kind of like: ‘This is surreal, this is crazy awesome.’

Game athletes are idolized by numerous female fans - often organized into fan clubs - and surprisingly, it's the professional gamers that get the most attention from the media. And it's probably this fandom for StarCraft that propels Blizzard to not alienate the StarCraft players when StarCraft II comes out.

As a side note, however, Blizzard mentioned a development team within the company at work on a mystery title. Dubbed Team 3, this 50-member team was hinted to be working on "something really awesome." That awesome thing, however, was not conveyed (or even hinted on) by Frank Pearce, Blizzard's senior VP.

But Pearce did add, "I will totally tell you, it's really awesome," which was followed by Sigaty, who chimed, "Really, really awesome," and they left it at that. And because StarCraft: Ghost is on indefinite hold, officially, we're left to ponder what this new title is.

Given that Blizzard Entertainment has a definite gold mine in their hands with World of Warcraft, it would be a common thought that the developer would ride its own wave of success and release a sequel to its MMORPG titan. However, according to StarCraft II producer Chris Sigaty and senior VP Frank Pearce, the idea of World of Warcraft II hasn't even entered their thoughts.

"We haven’t even thought about the idea of a World of Warcraft II," said Pearce. "The game's only been out for about 2 1/2 years. So I think for the foreseeable future it’s going to be expansions as it relates to World of Warcraft." Developers, community managers, and other employees involved in the game actually do play WoW with their customers, and they know that the video game has to be granted a long lifespan.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, another of Blizzard's most anticipated projects, is still under development, and yet some third-parties anticipate that Blizzard would have a successor ready in its sleeves. Fortunately for some, they don't, although Pearce did identify a factor that would spur them to create an actual sequel:

What would necessitate a sequel? For us as gamers, we are making the games we want to play. So it would really be about the dev team, and if they said ‘OK, we just can't do what we want to do in regards to the Warcraft intellectual property with the current structure’. It would have to be a situation where we said: 'This is what we want applied to what we want to do, and we can't do it on the current framework’.