I had the opportunity to meet Karune at the World Wide Invitational in Paris, France. To tell you the truth, he is one of the coolest guys I have ever met. He was really kind and we had a little chat. It is sad that I have such a bad english, so I wasn’t so communicative.

With shaking limbs I asked him for a short interview, and he said „of course”. This happened on the first day of the event, and I was looking for him for about 1 day, and finally I saw him on the Tournament Stage before the start of the Starcraft II matches. I asked him again, and after the event we had the interview.

We are after the Starcraft II match, that Karune lost in, in the afternoon on the second day of WWI.

Here is the short version in english:

Aston: Hello, this is Karune, Starcraft 2 Community Manager, I will have an interview with him. Hello Karune, how are you doing? You have played Starcraft 2, how do you feel about it?

Karune: It was a pretty crazy game. My opponent was very fast, very good, so…J I think you could see that lot of the original strategies still work in Starcraft 2.

Aston: What was your weak point in the match?

Karune: He expanded very good, and all the time we had the same amount of armies, but he also had the expansions.

Aston: How is the development of Starcraft 2 going?

Karune: Well, to be honest it’s hard to say what part of the process we are on, because we often build in new ideas, that need balancing, but we also want to make sure that the new game plays as smooth as the original, and it will take a lot of time. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done, we are working on the singleplayer now, – the multiplayer is a lot more polished, as you can see – and we are playing around with the new mechanisms, making sure that all the units fit in well, but some units fit in better than the others, so we will se how it goes.

Aston: Can you tell us more about the singleplayer part of the game and how it evolved?

Karune: The player has more choices, more control over the singleplayer campaign, and it’s going to be the same epic storyline that we saw in Starcraft 1, so it’s going to be really exciting. In the singleplayer we have a lot of things planned, it’s going to take most of the animation that’s put into the game. It’s going to take RTS-gaming to a new level, especially with the immersion, its depth, and you can make choices now, so it’s going to be really awesome. It’s all we really have now, and it is now our top priority.

Aston: What plans do you have – as the Starcraft Community Manager – for managing the community in the future?

Karune: Starcraft 1 was very succesful, we didn’t know it would be that succesful – especially in eSports. For Starcraft 2… we planned eSport from day one, we planned community from day one, we knew that this will have a following so we really wanted to build upon that.

Aston: Yes, you have a lot of unique community ideas…

Karune: Yes, we have BlizzCast, Q&A-s to really involve the community in the making of Starcraft 2. We really want to make the communication two-ways beetween the developers and the fans. This way the community will understand the challenges that we face in the making of this game – because there are plenty of challenges. We are going to inform the community of what is going on, and how the game is shaping.

Aston: Thank you for your time, and thank you for your hard work in the making of Q&A batches, BlizzCast and everything…

Karune: No problem, my pleasure.