Posted 07/15/09 at 04:37:16 AM by Nathan Grayson

Wow. Nothing gets past StarCraft fans. Case in point: Blizzard quietly announced that LAN play would be absent from StarCraft 2, and fans immediately zerg rushed an Internet petition all the way up 57,000 signatures.
 
As of now, Blizzard has yet to respond, though with 57,000 semi-militant people joining in a spectacular chorus of anger, sorrow, and rage, we imagine the developer won’t be able to ignore the whole fiasco for too much longer.

So, what’s your stance on LAN in StarCraft 2? Could you care less, or are you so determined to cram a bunch of guys in a room to play StarCraft that you’d even go so far as to write your name on a piece of paper?

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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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