타이커스 개발과 관련된 Lowko와 Kevin Dong의 인터뷰 상세내용

L: Let's first get started with Tychus. So Tychus is obviously the latest co-op commander. I've been playing him, probably like two dozen games at this point, I'm really enjoying him, but I think for those who don't know too much about him, if you could quickly introduce what he is all about...

K: Sure, in traditional Starcraft, you build these huge armies of one hundred or two hundred units, but for the first time ever with Tychus, it’s gonna be a lot different. Instead of being able to build these huge armies, you build these… or recruit these five very elite, very powerful outlaws that you micro-manage and upgrade as they are on the map. That doesn't mean you still can't play those big army engagements with Tychus because there are options like you can build turrets, you can deploy turrets on the map, or you can mind-control enemy units, so even though Tychus is a lot different, there’re still possibilities for him to play similarly to some other commanders.

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L: Anyways, so it (Tychus) is like the first commander that you worked on from start to finish, right?

K: Yup.

L: So how does that like design process work? So how do you like get started making a new commander? I'm really curious about the process, 'cause I have no idea.

K: Alright, so, first we have Tychus, and then we decide, "hey, what's this commander gonna be about? What is Tychus about in the lore?” So you can write down (what) he’s about Odin, he’s about being an angry guy, and then you also look at what his campaign experience is, because a lot of co-op is based around the campaign experiences of the characters. And that's easy for Raynor, easy for Kerrigan, easy for Altanis, because they have their own campaigns, but with Tychus, he doesn't have his own campaign, but what he does have is, I think there’s about three or four missions that include Tychus in it (sic.). A lot of them feature the Odin, but one of the most prominent ones is the Belly of the Beast mission, which I know you are a fan of.

L: I really like that one.

K: You control Jim Raynor, you control Stetmann, you control Swann, and of course you control Tychus, and you kinda fight through this dungeon.

L: It’s at the end of Wings of Liberty, for those who don’t remember. You invade Char. You are on the ground.

K: So Tychus, in a way, is like the Belly of the Beast, the commander. And we basically thought that experience was very fun, and we thought that it will translate well to co-op’s. That's how we came to the idea, but as far as the design process... how we eventually got there, we went through a lot of iterations with Tychus. We tried a lot of things. I can tell you about some of those things later, some of the things that may have failed, but eventually we got here.

L: Okay, so, so, like, how long is the process? How long are we talking from start to finish? It must have taken a while.

K: It takes... it, it heavily depends. So for Tychus, we took a, probably, little longer than normal, because, of course, it is my first commander, it's my first time taking over for David, and... I am an OK designer, but, you know, I'm no David Sum, you know, he’s been doing it for a while.

L: Fair enough, fair enough.

K: So, but, we have like a design process, and then after we lock our design, we go into a... we have to write all the tooltips. Writing toolips is actually... I think it’s one of the most underrated time-consuming things that people don’t really think about.

L: Like the things you hover over?

K: Yeah, the things you hover over, like, you have to get the wordings actually correct, then we have a lot of art, like, obviously the unit models, the building models, but I think one thing people don't think about is the icons. A fun fact is that Tychus has by far the most icons out of any commanders so far.

L: Right, because of all the upgrades, all of the gears...

K: All of the units, and there's voice-acting, then there's sound, and there's ... A lot of departments have to come together, work together to create this final product.

L: So you mentioned, not on this stream, you mentioned, there were several iterations of the co-op commander every single day. So like what do we have think about? So initially I imagine there are big changes, and I guess over time they, you know, become less influential, but what are some of the things you messed around with that didn't quite make into the final version of Tychus?

K: So the first iteration of Tychus we actually worked on was, um... He had this mechanic... it was kinda like Rage, and we called it “cold heart”, so if you are familiar with, like, World of Warcraft…

L: Rage from WoW?

K: Yeah, Rage from WoW, so basically, every time he did damage, every time he took damage, he would get stronger in some way... the belly’s get better in some way, and we tried to not only put that on Tychus but we tried to translate that to all of his units. So, the longer they were in battle, they would improve in some way, so like for example… like the marines would attack faster… the marines would attack faster the longer they are in battle or more damage they take... so like maybe the strategy would be like, stim them to 1 health and then they would attack super-fast. You can still see kinda the reminiscents of that in the Herc, “Cannonball”, ‘cause he has kind of like a Rage-type ability there. Every time he attacks, he gains attack speed. But the problem we found there was, it was cool, but it just didn’t feel like Tychus. You don’t think of Tychus as like the leader of a huge army, you think of them as leading a band of outlaws. That’s when… we… we’ve done research on like, who Tychus is as the character before, but that’s when like, it really came together... we decided, “hey, Tychus has to be like this outlaw that controls very few units.” And that was the kinda driving force behind the decisions for like the next few months. So after we came up with that we went through a lot of iterations of how like, a hero-based commander would go, we took a lot of inspiration from other games such as World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm, a lot of MOBA’s, um… Warcraft III was a big one, and heist films was another one, like Ocean’s Eleven where, you know, you have to pull a job and you need someone who can pick locks, you need someone who can pickpocket, you need someone who funds the operation, maybe someone who does the paperwork.

L: That's awesome, actually. So it's actually really cool to see all of the different, I guess, outlaws that he has. All of them have different jobs as well. I can notice that some of them are really specialized, some of them are pretty much good at every single mission. For example, what I first found was… I mean I've talked to you about this Blaze… Blaze is pretty good. He's pretty good on all missions, I guess. I think he comes together… and he works together really nicely together with Tychus himself right out of the very beginning of the game. They can work together quite nicely. Are there like, you know, some… some other heroes that are specifically added just because they have to fulfill a certain role or a certain job, or they are good on a certain map, or…?

K: How the outlaws were all added is actually very interesting, because they were all added for very different reasons. Um, for example, one aspect of Tychus that we found weak in our initial designs was Tychus was not very good at killing high-target objectives, oh, high-health enemy objectives, because it's hard to scale his army going into the late game, like we do give him a lot of attack, and uh, weapon, armor, life upgrades, and there's a lot of gear that upgrades his damage, but we eventually found out that, uh, most of his damage actually comes from his abilities, so we needed some way to deal damage to structures, so that's when we came up with the idea of Crooked Sam, who's the Reaper, he throws this Demolition Grenades on, um, a lot of structures, and as you can see um, I think we tried it on the trains mission, Oblivion Express... you did very well there…. so that was an example of an outlaw where we had a clear idea of what we wanted the outlaw to do and designed around that, but most of the other outlaws were designed for other very specific reasons. A fun fact about Tychus is, originally when we... um… came to the… the… the next step after we figured out “Okay, we want to do heroic units” is, how do we design… what's a starting point for designing his...

L: So for, who’s like the first one?

K: So what we actually did was we looked at World of Warcarft, we looked at the classes, and originally the outlaws were all designed, all based off of one of the World of Warcraft classes.

L: You have a Shaman class in, in, ... like a Shaman outlaw?

K: The funny thing is, you would expect the Marauder… um... “Rattleshake”... he'd be a Shaman class because he throws out a wand, so the funny thing is like, originally that was the Paladin class that we were aiming towards.

L: How so?

K: He had a whole different set of abilities, so it was completely different, and his abilities changed over time, and he no longer resembles Paladin at all, but can you see like some examples of outlaws that directly relate to WoW classes, for example, off your top of your head?

L: I'm like trying to remember all of the names. Well I guess... ugh, that's a good one actually. I mean I played pretty much all classes in WoW (이상 쓸데없는 소리 주저리 주저리)

K: So, like what I said before, the Herc is based around Rage and like around combat, so he’s kind of a mixture of... he can take damage and he can deal it back... sort of like a Warrior, and then another one is Nux the Spectre, he casts AoE abilities, and he kinda has Brilliance Auras, so a lot like a Mage. That's where we all started off, but not all the outlaws were designed around that, but ...

L: That's like a basis.

K: Yeah, basis. Actually, one outlaw that I tell you was scrapped was, we originally, instead of Blaze, we had a Hellion/Hellbat, and it was based off of a Druid.

L: Wait, oh, obviously, he can shift...

K: Yeah, he shifts, right. We thought that was cool, and so what it basically did was in Hellion form it healed your guys. Its flame attack healed, and then in Hellbat form, it dealt damage. There were a lot of reasons we scrapped that though.

L: I mean that’s pretty difficult to manage as well, difficult to balance...

K: It was weird. It was like, ‘cause you’re seeing these blue flames like healing your guys and you’re kinda confused about what's happening, and the other thing is... we can talk about like the primary abilities as well. Originally our outlaws had like, some of them had three abilities, active abilities, some of them had zero. The thought process behind that was that, we wanted like more skilled players or people who thought they can handle a lot of micro-management to be able to use that very well, and people who didn't maybe just use like a character with a lot of passives. But we found that that was very difficult to manage for anyone, especially because you have to tab through all the abilities, so which is why we came up with the fact that you can select all their abilities and use all their abilities from a single command card. And because of that actually, the Hellbat/Hellion outlaw, he had too many active abilities, so had to kinda scrap that idea. We couldn’t let him transform.

L: So right now all have only one active ability. I can imagine maybe some of them shifted around then as well (문장 마지막 잘 안들림). One of the things I didn't realize initially was, there was actually… I guess he’s technically not a healer but the Marauder has this ability to throw a totem, I guess, on the ground, like a healing ward on the ground to heal everyone, but I didn't realize how much damage he dealt. He still deals a lot of damage. And he still definitely is a Marauder, but he has this healing thing too, so it's a little bit, a little bit confusing, but I can see the shift of the abilities in this case.

K: You definitely need some form of healing for this kind of commander, but we wanted multiple avenues that you go toward, because a lot of Tychus is about decision-making behind... like there's a lot of decision-making with Tychus, so you can either get a Medic, you can either go for a full healing route, um, she has a lot of healing abilities, or you can go for the Marauder, which, uh, his healing is probably a little weaker, but he also can deal a lot of damage as well, or you can...

L: Or Medivacs.

K: Yes, Medivacs. You can just use mass Medivacs. That's a viable strategy as well.

L: I didn’t realize... uh, a couple days ago but uh, you mentioned it.. that those Medivacs are basically transport units… kinda similar to how Nova functions. You can just pick up the units and then drop them off elsewhere. One of things I didn’t realize was apparently they also heal up, they put you up in cloak for a couple seconds as well, so I haven’t really tried this out too much yet, but I think it might be possible to just go for five damage dealers, Three Medivacs real quick, and if you have the Mastery points set up to them to reduce the cooldown, you can probably.... I think you can use them every fifty seconds or so… I don’t know, is that like a percentage-based heal, or is a flat heal?

K: Uh, it’s a percentage-based heal, I believe.

L: Okay, so it’s actually pretty significant. You can probably pick them up every once in a while and they’re cloaked initially too.

K: Yeah, let’s try that strategy. I’m curious to see what happens.

L: I think there’s pretty much everything there is regarding Tychus, I’m not sure any funny stories, or any other heroes who got scrapped, or any other bits and pieces that didn’t make to the final product? There’s probably a lot, but...

K: Ahh… there’s a lot of things that didn’t make it. (생각해내려 노력하는 표정이 역력하나 즉시 말할 거리가 생각이 안남.) We tried a lot of different outlaws ideas. I’m sure chat will have questions about Tychus later on, so…

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