Are you a long-time StarCraft fan who hungers for more than your usual RTS fix? Have you spent the last eight years gazing longingly towards Blizzard’s Warcraftian pastures? Luckily, the team at Upheaval Arts, an assembly of fans with a broad and impressive set of skills, are doing what many have asked of Blizzard since the release of 2004′s World of Warcraft: turning StarCraft into an MMO… sort of.
Upheaval’s StarCraft Universe is a fan-made mod that will be officially published through Blizzard’s Battle.net service, providing SC players with a raiding experience similar to that of WoW, pitting groups of players against powerful enemies for a shot at loot and glory.
The mod features unique NPCs, loot, missions, achievements, and RPG-esque systems for character advancement, including crafting and item enhancement. The talent behind the project provides some brand-new models, story, professional voice-acting (Deckard Cain, anyone?), and even original music from Castle Crashers composer, David Orr.
For the lore nerds among us, Upheaval’s synopsis tells us that, “StarCraft Universe takes place in an alternate timeline, 11 years after the events which transpire in the ‘In Utter Darkness scenario of the StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty campaign. It’s our vision of how the universe may have been for any survivors of the hybrid onslaught which ensued, had Kerrigan died.”
To find out more about the project, we talked to the main man behind the curtain, Ryan “Kreation” Winzen.
What roles do you play in StarCraft Universe’s development?
Might be quicker if I tell you what I don’t do for SCU, haha. I don’t program core systems, I don’t do web design, I don’t compose the music, and I don’t voice act. I do everything else.
StarCraft Universe appears to be a very ambitious undertaking. What has it been like to take a massive project that some fans have dreamed of for years from an idea to a reality?
It has been aweeeeesome! It’s probably been the most challenging and fulfilling thing I’ve done with my life so far, next to the Marine corps.
There’s a lot more to it that just being technically proficient. I’ve spent countless hours studying StarCraft to ensure I wouldn’t offend even the most die-hard lore-lovers of SC. StarCraft isn’t my IP, so it takes a lot of work to be creative within the surrealistic laws of its universe.
It has been such a blessing to my life to work on this and have so much fan support behind us. Naturally when you’re working on something as bold as this, people are going to compare you to Blizzard itself, which has pushed me to my limits to educate myself, and produce what I hope people view as quality work.
On top of that, this project is backed by some amazing and talented industry-experienced contributors, adding to the professionalism of our display.
I thank God, Blizzard, my team, and all the fans for this opportunity!
What are some of the ways that SCU differs from traditional MMOs and what are some challenges you face in developing an MMO-styled mod for a Real-Time Strategy game?
Let’s call SCU a MORPG (Multi-player online role playing game) for the sake of argument.
SCU is a lot what like Diablo might be if given a third-person interface. Groups will be organized in battle.net menus, and the game will be played in closed instances.
That said, we’ve worked hard to emulate many of the features you see in big MMO titles! (Equipment, consumables, crafting, vehicles, skill trainers, etc!)
The biggest challenge we face is with the control input delay. The StarCraft II engine uses something called a non-asynchronous system which requires all input commands to communicate with battle.net, all players in-game, then be re-routed back to the client before the action is seen on your screen. For example: anyone with high latency who presses ‘W’ to move forward, might experience a 0.5 second delay between the time they press the ‘W’ key and the they see their character move. Fortunately, only about 20% of people experience this problem, but it still sucks, and we get blamed for it! We hope one day Blizzard can implement an asynchronous system like WoW uses. That would open up the possibility for SO many more game types on the arcade!
Second biggest challenge is that StarCraft II has no LOD (level of detail) system. A LOD system is a system that renders models and textures in game at specific levels depending on how far away your camera is away from them. It’s how most MMOs allow you to see what appears to be miles in front of you without experiencing graphical lag. We made our own low budget work-around, but it heavily limits the camera distance visibility (You can only see about 50 meters in front of you). If we extended it any further than it is, players would start to experience FPS issues.
What sort of gameplay structure does SCU implement? The primary gameplay element seems to be the 10-player raids, but do the class trainers, vendors, and other NPCs exist in an overworld shared with other players? How do players transition between different areas?
OK so right now, we’ve only released our single-player prologue to ensure all core systems are working properly. Our next step is to release a combat-heavy multiplayer instance which will open up challenges and boss fights to both give players a taste of grouping for encounters, and allow us to work out any bugs, game-play issues, and the general feel of core progression. We’re not a big group, so we’re taking baby steps.
Right now there is no big overworld to explore, but we do hope to release that eventually. Blizzard has hinted that they might allow people to transition between published maps in the future which would allow us to really consider opening up a large world if we can get the funding to do so.

MMOs commonly group players into the roles of tank, healer, or damage dealer, but SCU uses what you have referred to as the ‘Unholy Trinity’ of damage dealer, damage mitigator, and crowd control. Could you elaborate on what each of these roles entails?
Right. So that description is very old and needs to be rewritten. I’ll give you the general overview of how class-building works.
Classes don’t really have specific roles in SCU. In SCU, you build your desired role in combat based around what abilities you choose to set to your skill bar, and what stats you focus on building.
Each class has about 30 different abilities of varying types they can learn between ranks(levels) 1-50. Each ability is measured with a point system called combat weight. Depending on how high your rank is, you increase your combat weight capacity, thus increasing the amount of abilities which can be allocated to your skill bar.
Players can mix, match, and develop countless builds to fit their own play-style.
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Check out Upheaval Arts’ Starcraft Universe site for more info and hit up the donation page if you want to help make this project happen. Any StarCraft II users can test out SCU’s single-player prologue through Battle.net. En taro Adun!

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