Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm Will Be an Epic Game

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is now out and we've got both a One Hour With and a game diary showing off what the new real time strategy title has to offer. But the developers at Blizzard, fresh from launching their first non World of Warcraft related video game in years, are thinking about the future, which includes the creation of two new games in the Starcraft saga, one of them focused on the Zerg and another featuring the Protoss as the main playable race.

Talking to CVG Carl Chimes, who is the lead software engineer working on Starcraft II, said, “We're still in the development process on that and we haven't even come close to announcing anything yet. Tonight we're just focusing on Wings of Liberty”, before adding, “The next one will be Zerg focused and it will be just as epic as Wings of Liberty.”

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm will be clearly focused on Sarah Kerrigan, the former Terran Ghost operative who is the now the Queen of Blades, the most powerful of the creatures that make up the Zerg. We have seen glimpses of her in the campaign in Wings of Liberty but the character has the depth and complexity to power and entire single player campaign of more than 20 missions.

It's not clear what Blizzard wants to say by talking about the “epic” qualities of both the current release and Heart of the Swarm. The company is probably trying to prepare fans of the Starcraft universe for the fact that the game will deliver the roughly same amount of missions and significant changes with multiplayer but will retail for the same price as Wings of Liberty and not for the reduced price that is usually a characteristic of an expansion. Blizzard has not talked about a possible launch date but it would make sense to deliver Heart of the Swarm in about a year so that interest in the series is still high.