Blizzcon 2008 Coverage >> BlizzCon StarCraft II Wrap-Up (Page 1) | (Page 2) | (Page 3)

With lots of stress and deprived sleep, we are glad that BlizzCon is over. Well, that’s not really true as a feeling of emptiness spreads inside when I am greeted by cloudy England. Here, I don’t have 14.999 Blizzard fans around me, of whom I can instantly strike a conversation with about a variety of gaming topics without making people think I’m an oddball when using terms like DPS, nerfing, RTS or APM. I miss BlizzCon. It could have been one day longer, or so I heard from the fans and journalists I asked about it. It’s so big, it really needs a third day so people are able to take in more of the event, such as doing re-runs of panels. Q&A Sessions will be new on each panel as well.

This wrap-up contains information about the Blizzard Fansite Summit, all Trilogy details, Story & Gameplay, Stats, Single Player Goodies, Release Date and Pricing. It’s all centred around StarCraft II, so if you want Diablo 3 or Wrath of the Lich King info, I recommend Diii.net or WorldofWar.net.

The Fun Begins With a Community Discussion

The IncGamers team met up on the day before BlizzCon for a Fansite summit with the Community Managers of StarCraft, Diablo and WarCraft, we discussed some ideas to improve relations between fansites, how we can be of help to Blizzard, and how Blizzard can help us. This was a continuation of the event that took place for RTS sites before last BlizzCon, when I was representing the old StarCraft.IncGamers.com, discussing fansite program possibilities. This time around, it was Maticus from WorldofWar.net & Elly from Diabloii.net / Diii.net that got to visit Blizzard HQ in Irvine, and having lunch with the developers.

While we can’t go into much detail on what was said specifically on the Summit in the afternoon (that I also joined in for), we got updated promises of more support from Blizzard. As Battle.net 2.0 now is closer to release, we’re more likely to get some actual changes made this year, and you might see some results of this in the next upcoming months on StarCraftWire.net, Diii.net and WorldofWar.net—we’ll see.

We continued to a dinner with the Blizzard representatives as well as other fansites, and with the conclusion of that, we picked up the rest of the team and headed off to our own little gathering at Rainforest Cafe in Downtown Disney. Meeting fans was very nice, as was the mood. A good start before two days of stressy fun.

The StarCraft Trilogy Explained (Part 1)

The StarCraft Trilogy was the big announcement at BlizzCon, which according to an interview with Chris Sigaty has been in the works since last year’s convention in August, and will potentially mean a lot for lore-fans of the franchise. In a brief explanation by Rob Pardo (StarCraft II Trilogy announcement), we’re told that StarCraft II was planned to have two expansions from the start but when they started working on the Single Player aspects of the game last summer, they realized that they would either have to seriously delay the production (speculation says: around 2 years), or seriously diminish their plans for flexibility in the single player story telling. Instead of doing either of these unattractive options, they choose to put the main campaign spread out over their two planned expansions, enabling them to release the game faster and putting more resources to the additional content. The design of these products is made so that they have enough content to stand on their own, with rendered cinematics, ingame cinematics and a flexible story line where the player will decide how he reaches the end.

On Page 2, you can read more about the Trilogy parts, layout, Story & Gameplay, and the hard numbers Blizzard revealed to us.

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Blizzcon 2008 Coverage >> BlizzCon StarCraft II Wrap-Up (Page 1) | (Page 2) | (Page 3)

The StarCraft Trilogy Explained (Part 2)

The three upcoming campaigns are:

• Heart of the Swarm (Zerg)
  

These ‘Trilogy Parts’, ‘Chapters’, ‘Episodes’, or whatever you want to call them, will be released more or less annually, according to Rob Pardo:

	Blizzard Quote:
	With any luck, it would be like a year for each successive one, but that’s going to be a target date, that’s not a promise

At the announcement, there was an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience, and the majority of fans I have asked about it have also been positive. There have been some negative (strongly negative in some cases) responses, who feel Blizzard is trying to “milk” as much cash as possible out of the game. Sigaty tried to calm these concerns by explaining that it was just too much content to fit in to one production. It was never a money issue, it is about time. He said that all the chapters will be very rich in content, and fans will likely not be disappointed. He didn’t exclude the possibility of additional expansions after the trilogy when asked, but he said that any such thoughts were far into the future.

The Story and the Gameplay

‘Wings of Liberty’ is the name of the Terran campaign, where the player will take the role of Jim Raynor rather than some anonymous officer like in the original StarCraft and he’s teaming up with a long-time friend named Tychus Findlay (whom we saw get welded into a Marine suit in the teaser trailer) and trying to fund his war effort against the oppressive Terran Dominion, lead by Arcturus Mengsk. They start on Mar Sara, completing missions for survival and and to gather credits from different employers in order to purchase new technology or new units for future missions. All with a goal to eventually overthrow Arcturus.

Thrown in to this melting pot comes the Zerg under the control of Kerrigan, after several years hidden in the shadows. Besides a few NPC names, we don’t know much more about the story line. We know that the first release of StarCraft also will contain a mini-campaign with Zeratul, so players will have the chance to play Protoss as a teaser for the future ‘Legacy of the Void’ expansion that will be released last.

The Hard Stats and Progress

Each part will contain 30 missions. It’s unknown if the ‘Wings of Liberty’ Zeratul missions will be in addition to that number. The following two parts after release will have Kerrigan and Zeratul as the playable characters, each following a sequential story line from start to finish. The beginning and the ending cinematics of each part will be the same every time (so no alternate endings), but all choices between these two points is up to the player to explore. Calculated gametime is 26-30 hours if a player chooses to take all the missions.

The story of ‘Wings of Liberty’ is nearing completion, the ‘Heart of the Swarm’ has been written out into maps, and the story for ‘Legacy of the Void’ has also been created. It seems there will be at least 6 rendered cinematic movies in the trilogy (not counting the teaser trailer), two for each race. One of these is 4 minutes long, so potentially 20-30 minutes worth of high resolution beauty.

The split also means more tilesets, story mode high-rez sets, ingame cinematics and more NPC characters.

Continue to Page 3 for information about Single Player Goodies, Release Date, StarCraft 2 Pricing and Final Words.

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Blizzcon 2008 Coverage >> BlizzCon StarCraft II Wrap-Up (Page 1) | (Page 2) | (Page 3)

Single Player Goodies

The campaign maps will have a different layout than multiplayer maps. Players will find things like deep canyons, weather particle systems, day cycles with proper sun placement and a host of extra units such as Firebats, civilians or mining vehicles.

There will also be new tilesets like New Folsom, the prison planet with seas of lava making sure no prisoners ever escape the compounds, and Haven, a forest planet hold mostly by Terrans. These campaign maps also contain much more ingame cinematic components, map Easter eggs and advanced use of the map editor, which currently is so complex Dustin Browder said in an interview with Wired that he was afraid it might be too advanced for the intermediate mapmaker. The current map editor to be shipped with the game is the same tool Blizzard are using for lighting, cameras, effects and model movements. Seeing lip sync in the gameplay video just shows what a good cinematographer will be able create with this editor after release. You can read more about this in the StarCraft 2 Gameplay Panel Summary.

Wings of Liberty - The Release Date

No press got a release date out of any Blizzard rep, but the old StarCraft 2 release date confirmation from Activision-Blizzard was most likely made knowing that Blizzard would split the game into a trilogy, which would mean that we are still looking at a 2009 release, probably even in Q1-Q2 (January-June).

Pricing of the Three

Neither price or business model has been decided yet, but it seems likely to be similar to Brood War and The Frozen Throne as these two expansions have been mentioned several times for comparison by different representatives. We are probably looking at a full priced ‘Wings of Liberty’, and lesser priced expansion ‘chapters’. While some rumours have been circulating about Blizzard wanting to “monetize” Battle.net, it’s still unlikely to have any sort of monthly fees in the US/EU market.

The fact that Blizzard will be receiving a trickle of money from StarCraft 2’s trilogy, and that Diablo 3 probably also will be released with more than one expansion is reassuring, but there are more reasons to believe that Battle.net will remain free to use: The main thing Blizzard feel they are missing out on today is the huge amount of advertising money that goes into eSports and their goal seems to be that they want a small piece of that action. They are making advanced tools on Battle.net 2.0 to make sure that players and companies will prefer to run their custom tournaments and leagues of any size on Battle.net (whether it will be against the EULA to host any such events outside of Battle.net is yet to be seen). Bobby Kotick of Activision-Blizzard mentioned that StarCraft II would get ‘ingame advertisement’, and that was later explained by Chris Sigaty on the Zerg Reveal to be a comment about the little banner you see when you log on to play, and most players think that’s fair enough tradeoff to be able to play for free.

In Korea, there has also been actual ingame advertising, such as changing the client graphics through a mod, to display logo or messages for spectators, without bothering the players. Since people generally want to own their games in Europe, any fees would probably only relate to Korea specifically or Asia in general.

In Other News

You can find more news over at the Blizzcon 2008 Coverage article, as well as the equivalent version on Diablo III and Wrath of the Lich King on their respective pages.

The event might be over, but you should expect one or two nuggets of information pop up if someone finds some important detail in an interview or gameplay footage that was overlooked. Some sites also wait several months to report their material, so more cool stuff will probably appear.

Final Words

While there is no question on the fact that Blizzard made some good money out of the event, it doesn’t diminish the value of these grand gestures to the fans, and they probably lose a lot of time in development that potentially would be an even better income, so the issue that some fans has over “Blizz greed” seem null and void. A third day of BlizzCon is hereby requested by the fans for next year, and a more stable sales system with better information to the fans trying to buy tickets. If 15.000 tickets sell in 15 minutes, they can probably increase the number of tickets as well, and move into even larger halls.

This has been two very stressful, and very giving days with many great memories. I only wish my camera’s memory stick had not died, taking a bunch of pictures with it to the grave… We’re looking forward to more SC2, D3 and WoW info from Blizzard and we’ll see you all next year!

If you have any follow-up questions, please ask them here!

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