Nobody is perfect. When it comes to creating an epic story arc, awesome pre-rendered movies and a fully fleshed campaign Blizzard has done well. Now, Blizzard speaks of Starcraft 2 and the world shuts their mouth and listens to each and every word. What’s the word?
A Trilogy.
We’re not talking about the Lord of The Rings style trilogy, but three games with full stories which all end with the gamer being satisfied at the closure, not cliffhangers.
The three standalone games will be (says GameStooge):
- Terrans – Wings of Liberty
- Zerg – Heart of the Swarm
- Protoss – Legacy of the Void
Gamers are probably thinking, “so, I can play multiplayer with only one race?” No! The campaign is split into three separete games, not the races and multiplayer features. Although, each title is sure to introduce something new to the game engine, Blizzard has said:
“Nothing changes for multiplayer or skirmish mode. All three races are fully implemented from the get go. Each campaign will feel like an epic story – not a cliffhanger into the next one. They will each have separate arcs that have a clear start, middle, end – and you will feel like you’ve really finished *something* at the end of each game. More content than we’d previously planned – many more Movies, Missions, etc.” (games.on.net)
From our perspective, it seems Blizzard is itching to release the multiplayer system to the world sooner than later, considering some countries use Starcraft as a professional league, but they don’t want to rush out fast to market campaigns just to satisfy this multiplayer desire.
Instead, they’re going to take their time, in usual Blizzard style, by releasing the game as they finish it… per races story. This should give us a less watered down storyline or having one or two races with a piss poor storyline while another has a kick ass storyline because it was done first.
End result? Multiplayer gamers will be happy in the end while those that play Starcraft for the story will need to wait for each game to be completed. We know Blizzards release schedule is “when it’s ready” so we can only imagine how long it will take to reach that third game in the trilogy.
One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or
Nice to have a three man podcast again 🙂
@Occulous Rift: This is the first I’m hearing it called an absolute joke after seeing constant praise for this device.
I agree with the bring on the Holodeck sentiment, I’m sure society will fall apart when everyone decides to live in one.
@Simcity offline: This feels a bit like too little too late for me.
@QOTW: I once bought a Neo-geo and ten games for 20 dollars from a pawn shop. The games were a soccor side scrolling platformer, a space game that didn’t look better than Star Fox, a mystery game with very cheap animation, a doom clone and DragonSlayer. Aside from Dragonslayer most of these games looked like they could have been done on the other consoles at the time. We eneded up using it as a media player, funny how a out of date console can play CD’s while the Ps4 and Xbone can’t.