Slashdot Mirror
Starcraft 2 To Be a Trilogy
The Starcraft 2 gameplay panel was an eventful one at Blizzcon today. The developers faced an obstacle when designing the game; the plans they had were just too massive to implement in a single game on anything approaching a reasonable timeline. Their solution was to divide the game up into three separate, stand-alone titles: Terran: Wings of Libery, Zerg: Heart of the Swarm, and Protoss: Legacy of the Void. Read on for further details.
Each campaign will have on the order of 26-30 missions. The path players take through the missions can vary — the storyline branches frequently — but they will end in the same place. The games will run alongside each other; there will not be cliffhanger endings leading from one to another, and each game will focus on a different part of the story. The Terran campaign will focus on Jim Raynor, and the Zerg campaign will be all about Kerrigan. Multiplayer functionality will be in place for all three races from the start.
This is just lame. Game companies seem to be coming up with more and more ways to gouge consumers. Now releasing THREE Starcraft titles... Sorry Blizz, you just lost a sale. What? Making an expansion pack doesn't make you enough money any more? Making 75 million plus a month off WOW isn't good enough? Activision must owe some loansharks.
"How can we make more money?"
"Well screw it. We pay the writers very little. Just have them write longer stories and VOILA! One game, but three sales for the whole thing!"
"Jenkins, you're a genius! You'll find a whore and some gin waiting on your car when you leave."
Ah well, one less game to buy. Or three actually.
Where did it say that they were charging full price for each one?
It didn't, the summary was thankfully terse on what would have been interesting details.
I think I'm going to buy all of their new titles, just on general principles whether I play them or not. Blizzard is #1 in the industry at the moment. Blizzard supports Mac OS X out of the box and their developers worked with the Linux wine guys so the Warden didn't kick out people who want to play on Linux.
I'm sick and tired of people who claim Linux and Mac OS X are worthless because no one does games for them, but someone does. I, for one, am going to welcome Gaming Overlord Blizzard right where it counts - in giving them new sales.
No, you're paying $50 for an engine and a campaign. Then you're paying $100 for 2 more campaigns.
Right... except normally you'd pay $50-60 for 2 more campaigns, in boxes called 'expansions' normally for between 19 and 29 bucks, instead of the price of a full game.
Remind me why I need 3 copies of the game engine? They only developed it once, why do I need to pay for it 3 times?
That's largely my thought, if they have enough material to justify several games, I'd rather have several games rather than one mega sized mega priced game.
Historically additional content that uses the same engine is called an expansion. All they're doing is bundling the engine with the expansions and charging full price for them.
They develop the engine once, you pay for it 3 times. Sucker.
Me, I'll just wait until they release a 'box set' with all 3 for what a regular game costs; it probably won't take more than 6-12 months after release.