The Protoss Soul Hunter, initially revealed in the leaked PC Gamer video, did not make the cut and will not make an appearance in the game, according to Dustin Browder, lead designer.

Dustin has posted on the Battle.net StarCraft forum, describing the “training camp” process which the developers put units through. This process helps them decide which of the units need adjusting, refining, or a coup de grace.

We have a lot of units going into StarCraft 2 right now. Many of these units you have already seen, others you havent had a chance to hear about yet. We have a few rules for our units:

1) A unit should have a cool personality. A unit must be something that is fun to play with.

2) A unit should have their own very unique role on the battlefield.

3) A unit should be fun for the enemy to try to deal with. Generally this means good strengths and interesting weaknesses.

Theres a lot more to it of course (how intuitive it is, will it balance well, etc) but thats the basics. Right now we have a lot of units on the Protoss. Not every Protoss unit you have heard about is going to make the cut. They are in training camp. We put them in the game and we see how they do. We compare them to some other units and see how much overlap there is between various units in the game. We compare units that are similar and then we make the call. Which unit is cooler? Which unit has a more unique role? Which unit is more fun to fight against?

Sometimes units will get cut. For example, the Soul Hunter is not going to show at Blizzcon. He appears to have failed his training period. He was kind of cool, but not cool enough. Some other units that you have seen are going through some significant changes. They have adapted and may yet survive. Thats how we do it. Being able to try units out before we decide if they are going to be in the game or not is a huge advantage for our development process and its an opportunity that not every developer gets. Well give you more specific information on the Protoss as we figure it out. Even what you see at Blizzcon will be work-in-progress. After Blizzcon things will most definitely continue to evolve.

The Soul Hunter had received a lot of critical attention right from the start. We wrote about our reservations regarding its design in our “PC Gamer Leak: Analysis” post as well. Blizzard has taken this into account, or perhaps realized the same thing for themselves, and have decided to remove the unit from the game.

Goodbye, Soul Hunter. We hardly knew you.


From the Starcraft 2 Blog.