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Prophecy · 10-11-2008, 08:35 AM

StarCraft II Lead Producer On The Split Single Player Campaign via Kotaku

StarCraft 2 Now A Trilogy, Three Campaigns to Be Split Into Separate Games via Shack News

Blizzcon 08: StarCraft II Split Into Three Games via IGN PC

Quote:

Blizzard today announced that StarCraft II will be released as a trilogy of separate games, each concentrating on one of the universe's three factions.

The first game in the trilogy will consist of the Terran campaign, and is set to be titled "Terrans: Wings of Liberty."

The second Zerg-focused title will be "Zerg: Heart of the Swarm," with the third game being "Protoss: Legacy of the Void."

"Effectively each game in the will be an expansion," lead producer Chris Sigaty explained when I told him of our reader's initial concerns about buying the same game three times with a different single player component. Think Warcraft III's The Frozen Throne, or the original StarCraft's Brood War.

Blizzard's Rob Pardo echoed his comments, "[The second and third games] will be like expansion packs, but we really want them to feel like standalone products." "We really wanted to emphasize player choice a lot more," he said. "We really wanted to tackle more of a branching storyline, [a] branching campaign; allow players to choose things like their own technology. And as we kind of developed [the game], we had to figure out how all there? How many missions do we actually need to tell an interesting story and what's the player's critical path to it? We have to make all of these tough design decisions about how this was going to work for us?"

"What we realized that whenever we put in the similar amount of content that we put in our previous games--as far as missions, characters, cinematics, things like that--it never really felt like the player had enough choice; it wasn't really living up to what our hopes and dreams were at first. That's when we realized we're kind of at this fork in the road. We really have to make a choice. Do we want to back away from those philosophies? Or do we maybe just delay the game a lot and kind of do a little bit more? Or do we go for it?"

The original StarCraft, according to Pardo, had 32 missions; 12 for the Terrans, and 10 each for the Zerg and the Protoss. According to Blizzard, each of these StarCraft II games will consist of more than 30 missions.

Each campaign will be very different, with Pardo announcing the Zerg campaign will contain RPG elements. The Protoss campaigin will likewise be differentiated by elements of diplomacy. In addition, the Terran campaign will feature a Protoss mini-campaign.

The campaigns are planned as concentrated, epic storylines, with enough content to justify a full release. As a result, the games will now feature more in-game cinematics and story content.

Pardo explained that the multiplayer remains relatively unchanged; each StarCraft II game will have a fully functioning multiplayer suite with all three races playable. However, some units will now be unique to the campaigns and will not be playable in multiplayer. "[In] the shipping product, all three races will be fully featured and balanced in gameplay and also in content," he said. We asked whether that meant the multiplayer suite in each game would be exactly the same, and he said, "More than likely, the successive products will add multiplayer content; we haven't decided right now what that is." That brought up the question as to how multiplayer would work if some players only buy the first game while others only buy the second or third games. He said that they haven't made any determinations yet as to how that would work.

Pardo noted that the decision was necessary to maintain the quality of the product, the alternatives either being a long delay of the game, or a scaling back of the campaigns.

More details may become available during BlizzCon, which continues through this weekend.

I'm not really sure what to make of this. The first game had all three races campaigns in one game, I'm sure that's what most people expected to happen this time around. I'm hoping the second and third games sell at expansion prices, $150 for the full story sounds extremely iffy. Heck, I'm already tempted to wait till the Battle Chest and no official prices have been listed. Let's hope each game's single player is really as robust as they're promising.

However, since all three races are supposedly in the multi-player and custom maps of all three games, I'll likely bite the bullet and buy the first title if not the last two. Thoughts?