View Single Post
Old 10-11-2008, 08:35 AM   #1 (permalink)
Prophecy
Oracle & Apollyon
 
Prophecy's Avatar
 
Location: Limbus Patrum
BlizzCon 2008: Starcraft II is a Trilogy

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?
__________________
La Disciplina È La Mia Spada,
La Fede È Il Mio Schermo,
Non salti Ciecamente In Incertezza,
E Potete Raccogliere Le Ricompense.

Last edited by Prophecy; 10-11-2008 at 12:22 PM..
Prophecy is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360