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BlizzCon: StarCraft 2 Campaign Now A Trilogy
Posted 10/10/08 at 08:13:05 PM | by Nathan Grayson
StarCraft 2 will likely be so great, many players will want to buy it twice. Unfortunately, however, after today's BlizzCon announcement, they'll be doing Blizzard (and themselves) a huge disservice by only making two StarCraft treks. Simply put, they'll be missing 1/3 of the spacefaring RTS' universe-spanning plot, because Blizzard has announced that StarCraft 2's campaign will clear the launch pad on three separate occasions.
Predictably, each release will focus on one of StarCraft's trifecta of races. Terrans: Wings of Liberty will be first out the gate, presumably with the national sport that is the game's multiplayer mode. Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and Protoss: Legacy of the Void, then, will be pseudo-expansion packs.
Don't get the wrong idea, though. Blizzard executive VP of game design Rob Pardo explained that the Zerg and Protoss titles will "be like expansion packs," but that they'll bombard players with content. "We want them to feel like standalone products," he said.
In order to accomplish this, each campaign will break off from the rest of the pack with its own feature set. The Zerg's flesh-crawling installment will include RPG elements, while the Protoss are going the diplomatic route. Terrans, on the other hand, seem to be getting the short end of the stick with only a Protoss mini-campaign to their name, but we'll see.
Pardo also noted that Blizzard sliced and diced StarCraft 2's campaign not for fat stacks of cash (WoW would get jealous, after all), but in order to avoid delaying the game or cutting corners on quality.
As for how long in between installments we'll be hanging from cliffs, Blizzard wouldn't say. However, knowing Blizzard, we're guessing the games will be less of a Zerg-rush and more of a Zerg-Half-Life 2 Episode Three.
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Nothing new in Blizzards court....
Submitted by ghot on Thu, 2008-10-16 10:55
I still play Diablo II and have since D1 beta....in other words
I've gotten to know Blizzard...and YES their now pulling a "Stephen
King" aka snippets of game/story for the price of a full copy.
They even did it back before the Lord of Destruction Expansion, and
didnt EVEN have the smarts to hide it....See for yourself....Install JUST D2 w/o the LoD expansion....enter a
game and look in the quest log....even before LoD was even speculated
about.....Blizzard had "left space" in the quest log for a "fifth" act,
that being LoD. All they are doing now is being even LESS smart about
it. The kid gloves are off.....they are BLANTANTLY grabbing for your
wallet, and doing it with no apparent shame. I'm just glad they don't
write books, or at least any books that I would buy. What would they
do sell a chapter at a time for the cost of an entire book?I've met hookers with more morals.
Oh Blizzard
Submitted by ericmckenna on Tue, 2008-10-14 15:47
Heh, Three separate releases. Could be cool. Maybe make the long wait for Diablo that much shorter.
Could this mean that Diablo could end up with 4-5 releases, adding new content and races?
At least battle.net will be free. Or will it??
I Agree
Submitted by Velcrow on Mon, 2008-10-13 10:53
I have to agree with the previous poster. We automatically assume that when they say they're breaking up the game into 3 parts that the game will be short and lacking. We could very well say the same about Half-life 2 at this point. Do you feel ripped off that they released a single full length game, then continued the story through expansions? I don't. I've played them all and enjoyed every minute of it. As long as the first release FEELS like a full release, we'll be happy.
Submitted by dracoress on Mon, 2008-10-13 04:34
I for one don't care how much I pay, as long as it is a great game. Which I know it will be coming from Blizzard. If we have a trilogy and each is as long as Starcraft 1, that is great!
And I don't know what your crying about WoW for, every MMO has expansion packs, if you every played a Sony MMO you would see how much worse they are at content and expantion packs and how low quality they are. Blizzard has huge new content patches (like this Tuesday with the "Echoes of Doom" patch) and their new expantions are over half the size of the original game. Honestly what more could you ask for.
Now I am not sure about the monetization of battle.net, I'll have to hear the details of that when they realease that.
This is another reason
Submitted by b_boy_69_00 on Sat, 2008-10-11 15:40
This is another reason people pirate games. Give us a complete game, don't try to sell us what should already be in the game. I was afraid that this kind of thing might start. They see how much money they can make with the expansions for WoW, so now every game they release will have at least 2 expansions. So not only will you have to pay $60 for the original game, but then to actually play the game like its should be played you will have to buy 2 $40 expansions.
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