Starcraft II Single-Player Will Be Three Games
By Danny Willis
Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 4:49 pm in News, PC.
Remember Starcraft? How you bought one game and got to play as all three races in the single player campaign? Wasn’t that nice, paying once to get the complete game?
Ah, the good old days.
Well the good old days are over. According to Joystiq Blizzard has announced that the Starcraft II single-player campaign will be treated as three separate games: Wings of Liberty for the Terrans, Heart of the Swarm for the Zerg and Legacy of the Void for the Protoss.
According to Rob Pardo we should “…look at the next two as expansion packs, but [they] will have the feel of stand alone products.”
I look at expansion packs as costing more money. They haven’t announced whether all three will be released at once and how much the other two thirds of the game will cost, but based on other expansion packs expect to pay $100-$180 for the full campaign.
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October 10th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Is Blizzard really that stupid? Could this be some kind of decision forced onto them by Activision higher ups?
I just don’t see the logic behind this at all besides get as much money as possible from the customer.
This will probably cause a Spore level of uprising against them.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
That’s exactly the point, milk the gamer for everything they’ve got.
Putting my reporter hat aside for a moment, as a consumer, there’s no way I’m approving of this by buying it. As much as I love Starcraft it’s not worth supporting this precedent.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
… why is everyone so up in arms about this? This seems brilliant. They are putting a TON of effort into the single player missions, making each of them as fleshed out and immersive as the ENTIRETY OF ORIGINAL STARCRAFT so… duh? Of course they will charge more for 3x the work.
Multiplayer? its functional from just one box. If you don’t care about the single player… don’t buy it? You’re buying just one game, exactly like you were expecting.
I don’t see what the big deal is. What would you prefer? A $150 release that multiplayer junkies HAD to eat, rather than breaking it into manageable bites so that only those who would benefit from the more immersive single player experience had to foot the bill?
Perhaps you would prefer if they just settled for a (expletive) singleplayer… not me though. If I wanted uninspired and unimaginitive gameplay, there are TONS of companies out there.
Don’t drag Blizzard into the quagmire.
October 11th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Other than different units and different maps can the single player campaigns be that much harder to make? What about maps for multiplayer? If you don’t buy the zerg single player game will you not get certain maps?
Activision/Blizzard has turned into EA. First they say they want to pump out as many Guitar Hero games as possible and now this.