14 DAY TRIAL // The strategy game genre is one filled with various titles that struggle to offer players a complete experience while bringing innovative things to the table and stirring up their interest. But sadly few of them have success, as some franchises established a benchmark on how RTS (Real Time Strategy) games should feel and play.
One of those series is StarCraft, the brainchild of Blizzard, which has been giving players some truly great experiences ever since the first one was launched in 1998. After that, the expansions that appeared, culminating with Starcraft: Brood War, refined the whole experience and made the series an iconic one for fans. Now, as StarCraft II is taking shape, it seems that things will go a bit different. Because of the monumental task of completing a full game with campaigns for all of the three races, the Terrans, Zerg and Protoss, the team decided to split them into separate titles that would follow each of the three factions.
Such a decision got fans worried about the fact that Blizzard would price this trilogy very high in an effort to make a bigger profit. But things aren't like that, as Dustin Browder, the lead designer of the games, has talked with 1up and revealed that the design philosophy of this trilogy would be akin to the one used in Blizzard’s extremely popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, which has been introduced as a core game, and, up until now, two expansions brought new content for players to experience.
“Well [the team hopes] that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we'll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.”
It seems that the first title in the trilogy, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which will follow the human-like Terran faction, will act as a backbone for the other two, which will follow the Zerg and the Protoss, which might be released at a lower price. Let's hope that things will go as smoothly as possible and that we will get the chance to play StarCraft this year, as Blizzard's philosophy of releasing games “when they're done” isn't very conclusive.