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.

Comments

Re:Speaking of Multiplayer

[NuclearError]

Way to ruin a perfectly good thread.

Re:Shenanigans.

[kesuki]

"Ok, reasoning seems a little odd here. If a movie that just came out were to have cost Millions or even Billions more than a movie that came out yesterday, it would then be 'ok' to charge 3x the price to see it? If the development of a movie or game costs X amounts of dollars and it isn't scrapped then the volume of sales at current market price should damn well be worth the risk. There are a few exceptions that go above the current market price, and those in themselves are gambles, you had better be sure that it's a big hit.
As you said it's just a money grab, no excuses."

since you brought in movies we'll start there.

let's get things clear here, you saw the blair witch project movie, right? the one done for $2000 with only one paid actress that got $500? right? that is an example of how cheaply a movie can be made, the same director he got what millions to produce blair witch 2? and nobody saw that one right, it sucked, it bombed, the guy couldn't handle the money and make a decent movie. right, the point being, making something worth watching isn't just throwing money at it. somethings should only be done once.

and how much money does hollywood spend on a big movie? millions, tons of money, and yet at one point in time it cost little more than actor salaries, and options on the screenplay. the cost of producing movies has gone up as long as you rely on technology instead of storyline, and the same thing is happening with games. I have a wonderful laptop that i bought happily in 1997, I paid $1,199 for it, you know what? that system can run a few basic games, like civilization 1, wolfenstein 3-d etc, i mean come on it's a pentium 120 mhz with the F00F bug, and 48 megabytes of ram, and a small hard drive, and a floppy, no cd-rom. the types of games that were huge in 1995 cost almost nothing to code and develop and yet some of them had wonderful game play, all while fitting on a few 1.44 mb floppy diskettes. but i tell you what, nobody buys simple games. if i coded a game that could run on a pentium 120 nobody would buy it. they might go to a website with ads to play it, but they wouldn't buy it.

and now blockbuster video games are running into a major problem, they're running into the hollywood effect. it takes a game with the latest sound and graphic capabilities, to woo customers into initial purchase, and yet most games are going to be below the satisfaction level for them to tell all their friends "you gotta get this game and play me online dude!" this is really really driving up the cost of developing game engines, and game content. at some point someone has to wake up and realize, if games get any more expensive to make, nobody is going to make enough money, and the market will collapse. it already has, to a certain point. coding game engines that require 1600 pixel processing units, just doesn't offer the ROI especially in a down economy.

and yet, if someone makes a game like crysis that requires 1600 pixel processing units to run 'at max' settings, there are people, comparing screen shots of crysis running on a 1600 pixel processing unit setup, vs 'our game engine' that maybe runs fine on a card with 32 pixel processing units, and instantly saying 'that our game engine game sucks, look at how pretty crysis is with a $4,000 alienware* dude'. it's a tough job trying to make a game engine and market it, and still make money, especially in an economy where people are going to rent or warez, instead of buying.

to tie this all together, to a certain point, it's easier to 'make a prettier' game than anyone else, or a better special effects blockbuster on hollywood, than it is to really come across a storyline and tell it just right, and release it at the right time, to get everyone telling their friend to go see this movie. it doesn't cost a lot of money to make a really good movie, and i know a lot of people who play sudoku, which is the simplest popular game i can think of... it doesn't take $$$ to make a winning game concept or a winning movie concept, but