StarCraft 2 to be released as a trilogy!

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http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/10/starcraft-2-to-be-released-as-a-trilogy/1#comments

This totally stinks.

I'll be waiting a few more years to buy the complete SC 2 game in one box I guess.

 

I've had this unexplained suspicion of episodic content, but now I can point out to a specific reason and say "this is why I don't like it".

This, indeed, totally stinks

 

[censored] you, Blizzard.

 

My level of irritation with this decision will have a great deal to do with the length of the campaigns.

 

To me it doesn't matter. As long as the first one is, it won't be as long as all 3 campaigns of the original. Therefore there is no reason to split them into 3 games, other than Blizzard making 3x the money.

 

I wonder if this means that you'll only get one playable race per game. I suppose not, because, if these games are really separate and released in a staggered fashion (i.e. not all at the same time), this would severly limit possibilities for online gaming.

But then, the only reason to actually purchase all games would be to get the background story for the single player campaign. Which is generally not much of a reason at all, and will just lead to more piracy, as people will buy one copy for online play, and then just download the others to see for themselves what the story was for the other factions.

And even if the campaign length of one faction is as long as all of the campaigns in the original, would it remain interesting for that long? I seriously doubt it. After all, building up you're base and beating down a fairly retarded computer AI does not remain interesting for very long if the units and gameplay don't change from level to level.

Not that I really care, I wasn't going to buy SC2 anyway, but it does set an alarming precedent, which I hope won't be followed by other developers / publishers. But then again, I hope the same of EA's crazy copy protection scheme, as I refuse to buy games which require online verification during installation or severly limit the number of times I can install a game on my PC. Oh well, I can always just replay old games - get myself lost in the world of Morrowind for a couple of hunderd hours again, for instance.

 

A shame.

I'm not touching it until I see it in a box.

Episodic content is watered down fun. No punch to it.

 

*cough*Half-life*cough*

Seriously though this proves how much pressure they are under to release this thing ASAP.

 

I get that they're under a LOT of pressure to release it quickly, but I'm guessing the REASON for that is because of all the announcements they've been making about it... Not to mention all the publicity, MAJOR forum discussions asking the public what kind of things they want and also unit information and things like that on the SC2 site.

Because of this, they're just rushing things. Sorry to state the obvious, but that's BAD. It was nice to hear that they were making a sequel, but perhaps that should have kept it a secret for at least a year while they developed it. We all know what's going to happen if they rush this game and release it too early...

I don't understand how this is going to work though. OK, I'll admit 25 missions per race would be great! Despite what Henkie says, they did a great job with the storylines for each race in the original, and personally, I always thought there should have been around double the missions for each race, just to make it seem more believable (There were a lot of things that remained a mystery throughout the campaign that could have been explored with a mission to itself). BUT separating the game into three different parts (for each race) is just stupid!

If they DO release the game this way, I honestly doubt the multiplayer thing is going to be much of a success, although after hearing that Blizzard plans to charge people to use battle.net, I didn't think it would make much difference.

Honestly, I wish they would just TAKE THEIR TIME, and make the game the best it can be. I wouldn't care if this thing's released in 2012, as long as it would be the proper sequel that we've all been waiting for.

 

Still, even then Half Life 2 was released as a full game, all the episodes really are is a change of name from expansion pack.
It really does depend on the length of the campaign in the first part, but as someone who only ever plays rts's for the singleplayer, this news has meant that I care about the game even less...

 

I'm outta game!

There no way in hell I buy this chopped off game.

I get the Episode form when it comes to half-life. After all, there is a conclusion to each part!

But having only one campaign per race in an RTS game like SC is daft!

 

It's nobody's fault but their own. No one forced them to announce the game if they weren't anywhere near on schedule. No one forced them to hype the hell out of it. Does Blizzard, of all companies, no longer believe in taking the time to get it right?

Also I'm not sure the comparison to episodic content applies. In general each episode is much cheaper than a full game. From what I understand each campaign of SC2 is going to be sold for the full price of a game.

 

Wow. Alot of anger. Well, although I think it would flesh out the story alot more, but I'm pretty annoyed at paying 3x for what is one game.

 

it seems like their plan is to make 3 less than full price games. I dont know if the first part (Terran) will be sold at full price and the others as expansions, but as far as I know they arent 3 full priced games.

Part of me likes it, because it seems they might have so much story to tell that we would have to wait for Starcraft 4 in 2020 to finish the plot, so in a way this lets them wrap up the plot in SC2. however, I do wonder what kind of plot requires 90 missions to tell - it will either be unbelievably brilliant or unbelievably bad. Each campaign seems like it will be more detailed as a result, but to be honest I like games where I can play campaigns will all of the factions, and not just one (although the Terran version includes a Protoss mini campaign).

So.... I dont know, but I'm going to wait and see. It will either be brilliant or terrible.

 

At the moment, I'm pretty sure most people are putting their money on terrible.

 

Some more reading to do on the subject:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/starcraft-2/918896p1.html
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/starcraft-2/918963p1.html
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55267

Apparently, each campaign will feature around 26-30 missions and will have units that won't be in multi player because they'd unbalance a multi player game. Possibly the different campaigns could have different accents, such as more RPG elements in the Zerg campaign and more of a focus on diplomacy for the Protoss, though this is speculation at this point (see the second article).

 

I wouldn't care if they released the game in 2015, so long as it was made to be the best it could be.

 

The group who made Blizzard up to Diablo 2 are different than those who mande warcraft 3 and WoW +++. Of course they are adhering to the old standards, but they have different programmers and leads.

That said, I don't have a ton of faith in Blizzard, after the expansion to warcraft 3. They proved they have a huge capacity to ruin a game that was fun as hell. Starcraft 2 has a lot of potential and what they're doing with it's release is not new, Dawn of War is being released the same way. From the comments made it seems only the single player is being released without the other races, you should be able to play all 3 in multi.