Gamasutra talks with Starcraft II 's design director, Dustin Browder on the single player, multiplayer and other various topics. Here's an exerpt of the interview

As design director, are you equally responsible for single-player and multiplayer design? They seem like very different games, more so than in the original StarCraft.

Dustin Browder: I am both single and multi. I have a lot of folks who help me out with that, though. I have a staff of very skilled designers in both areas. They do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Having been in the beta test for a couple months, I would imagine the amount of balance and design data you have to work with has skyrocketed.

DB: It's pretty high. We can learn a lot. The danger with a lot of this data is that you have to be very careful how you use it. With unit stats, I can tell you that, for example, in a Protoss versus Terran game, 12 percent of the time the Protoss build carriers. And when they build carriers, they win 70 percent of the time. You could say, "That must mean carriers are overpowered!"

That's not really true, though. It could just be that as you get towards the end of the game, if the Protoss have the extra resources to waste on a bunch of carriers, they're probably going to win anyway.

In other words, if your opponent hasn't managed to stop you being able to build 24 carriers...

DB: Right. Of course, it doesn't mean the carriers aren't overpowered either. That stat alone actually tells you nothing. It's a very dangerous stat. If you listen to that stat, you can make all kinds of mistakes. The real challenge for us is to continue to sort the wheat from the chaff, to determine which stats are real, which stats are meaningful, and which ones we should be looking at to make a meaningful change.

Read the rest here at Gamasutra