Blizzard packaging three versions of SCII.
One pack will have the Terran Campaign. One will have the Zerg Campaign. And the other the Protoss Campaign.
I… don’t know about this. It seems they thought they could’ve charged us three times for the original game, and now are deciding to do it for real. They say each one would be a full-length game, so those campaigns better be DAMN LONG.
For those who only care about the multiplayer aspect, which set catches your fancy?
The boards have already been set aflame by this announcement. I think we need more specific details on length before calling Blizzard a sellout out. Having the story be spread out among several years will be annoying though.
They will have sold out Starcraft the moment they sell you the other two campaigns via DLC. >_<
Worked for Valve and Halflife 2.
Wait and see before taking out the pitchforks.
They’re asking you to pay 3 times for one game, AND charging for online?
Hey guys, so guess which game I’m not ever buying!
Extra suck points if they plan on releasing WoW-type expansions and patches. Fuck this. Fuck it so hard.
This is different, though. This is like releasing a Mortal Kombat game with only some of the roster, but then you release a Mortal Kombat game with the exact same engine, only different playable characters.
I agree to wait and see, but it’s inherently different when dealing with a game that’s multiplayer competition, where part of the fun is having those options to choose from.
Wait
B.net is not free?
I’m honestly confused about the whole thing and while it worked for Valve for HL2 , I don’t like that Valve did that.
Also, I don’t care so much that they’re sold separately as I care that I’ll get the final protoss chapter in like 4 years. Honestly, I don’t get why it would take so long to release all the damn single player campaigns since the vast majority of the polish to the game should be at the level of the multiplayer balancing.
I’m waiting to get more info to solidify an opinion on whether or not its a good idea.
I kinda wonder if this is Activision’s influence? Blizzard has never, ever been worried about games taking so long to make in the past. I’d really rather wait and buy a complete Starcraft II than get it in pieces with incomplete multiplayer each time.
Yes I know I’m a sucky SCer, but dammit, if I lose or win I don’t want it to be because things are broken or unbalanced.
qft but I don’t get it - are they all going to be released at once or is one going to be made, then another then the last?
Great way to make an announcement, Blizz. Now no one knows what the hell’s going on. When will they be released? So you get the Terran package and then can you play against the other races outside the campaign or not? If not are you getting a third of a game (and then the three parts merge to form Voltron)? If yes how long can one wait for the other two campaigns when people will be building stages like crazy? When will these all be released? I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard took another two years to release SCII, but if they got Blizzard release times for the other two, we’ll all probably have already retired.
Oh, and if they charge full game prices for each part, for all the love that I bear Blizzard, fuck them. Just because they got the hen with the golden eggs from the 10 mil. WoW subscribers, that doesn’t they get to export that model to their other games without any turbulence.
Also in the campaign, the game will debut units that are not playable in multiplayer.
Supposing that the balance between races is still the ultimate goal of SCII, these new units will probably be either inept or game breaking 
(But three long campaigns? Fuck yeah!) /fanboy
I cannn’t wait till it comes out and I can finally see the completion of the story. That’s the only reason I would be buying it, so I really hope they don’t stagger the release of the three campaigns.
As for releasing all three at the same time… that’s acceptable depending on the quality of the campaigns. If each campaign is truly long and detailed enough to qualify as a separate game, then I wouldn’t mind paying for all three as if they each were a separate game. But then, I only care about the single-player campaigns. If you were more into the multiplayer aspect, it would really suck to have pay high price to be able to play as all three species.
“They have a huge, solid Terran campaign that needs a bit of fleshing out at this point, and once you figure out the dev time needed for the other two campaigns it would have delayed the game for years.”
This implies Blizzard will be releasing content piece by piece like the HL2 episodes
“Blizzard added that the plans for the multiplayer component are unchanged by the splitting of the campaigns.”
“Each new single player campaign will come with upgrades and changes to the multiplayer.”
These quotations make it seems like the first game will come with a full-fledged multiplayer while the other 2 games act like expansion packs in that respect.
And what exactly do they mean when they say the story is “non-linear” 
Friday night, the company announced that they will be creating a single-player trilogy for StarCraft 2 where each race will have a stand-alone game. The first will be Terran: Wings of Liberty, where players take on the role of Jim Raynor in a non-linear game. The second is Zerg: Heart of the Swarm, and the last will be Protoss: Legacy of the Void.
It probably refers to the ability to pick and choose which missions to do that was shown at BlizzCon last year.
I tend to think that non-linear = bad, undeveloped story. I don’t want the campaign to be a series of side quests. But I have a feeling they’re somehow using the term in a loose sense.
Or it could be like Command and Conquer, where if you do stage 2 before stage 1, you get some sort of backup in stage 1, but if you did stage 1 first then you’d get some perk in stage 2, and then when you get scenarios where you pick three different stages…etc etc.
If non-linear means more scenarios like choosing to destroy the Battlecruisers or the nukes so that you don’t have to face them in the invasion of Korhal (as in Brood War), count me in. Actually, I’m not worried at all about the story.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. I am a little concerned about the story, actually, because I think they really bungled it with Warcraft III. The dialogue was awful and the plot was so ridiculously bombastic(that’s the best word I can think of to describe it). They threw too many new concepts at you, too many new types of characters, too many cool plot ideas that just fell over on each other. But after reading the descriptions at the SC II official site, it seems they’ve preserved the spirit of the first game. Plus, I think Metzen handled WWIII all by himself, and they have a lot of other people for SC II, so that may be a factor.
Picture from BlizzCon which is supposed to be an example of a non-linear campaign progression (mission names are filler so don’t stress your eyes out). Gametrailers has many videos of the SC2 keynotes and game presentation.