That’s actually the first time I’ve heard that criticism, but I’m conscious that each of Blizzard’s games had a certain following who strongly preferred one art style over the others.  We’re setting out to draw inspiration from all three of the most recent Blizzard RTS games, while at the same time aspiring to create something distinct and new.  We’re still in the process of talking through art style, but appealing to a broad audience is important to us and this is feedback that we will consider.

What causes a game to resonate culturally in a specific region is so intangible.  To the best of my knowledge, there was no intentionality behind Warcraft III’s tremendous popularity in China or Broodwar’s tremendous popularity in Korea - there was just something about those games that struck a chord with the players in those countries.  We’re making an effort to  look at the genres and visual styles that resonate with particular regions, but to a great extent we have to hope that our own sensibilities will naturally align with those of our audience.  Even games which are developed endemically within a region don’t always strike the right chord, so I suspect it isn’t possible to reduce cultural resonance to a simple formula.

I worked hard to increase community engagement around StarCraft: getting the dev team to prioritize community feedback, providing transparency on balance thinking through updates, and implementing annual summits in Irvine for key community members.  The Frost Giant team is even more community-driven.  We decided to engage with players from the outset, to make sure we’re considering what’s most important to them.  It helps that a number of our team members come directly from the community: Austin Hudelson, who started in game development making mods; Ryan Schutter, who created the Gameheart UI for esports; Kevin Dong, who previously worked for Team Liquid; and Cara LaForge, who worked at Day[9]TV.

Player expectations evolve over time.  The venerable audience of Brood War prefers static balance (though there’s a growing community within Brood War advocating for balance patches).  The majority of the StarCraft II community advocates for frequent balance patches.  At Frost Giant, we’ll do whatever is necessary to make sure the game is fair and fun, while remaining open to community feedback.

We’re discussing a variety of ways to differentiate player expectations when playing against AI as opposed to playing against each other.  In StarCraft II, it can be confusing to players that the balance is substantially different between campaign, co-op, and competitive.  A separate faction for campaign is one approach (eg - the Xel’naga), and there are other possibilities under discussion that could provide elegant solutions.  As with all aspects of the design, we’re interested to hear from players.

At our current early stage of development, we have to focus on the core modes, but BGH in particular is something that comes up frequently as a topic.

The Frost Giant team is tremendously grateful for the support of its community.  We have a long development process ahead of us, so please be patient!  As we start to make design decisions, each decision will unavoidably polarize some portion of the community.  We’re going to make an effort to be transparent throughout our thought process so that hopefully everyone can at least understand how we arrived at the decisions we made.  Ultimately, we want to make as many players happy as we possibly can.