Starcraft 2 Single Player Details

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From ShackNews:

-We've got a mission right now where every five minutes, lava rises and kills everything on the ground. Everything dies. You've got to get to the high ground or die. We've got a mission right now where infested Terrans are attacking at night, but they're hiding in the ground by day, so you need to just hold out all night long like you're in I Am Legend. Like, "I've got to live!" and then day, "Get 'em! Kill 'em while they sleep!" And you run out and you burn everything as fast as you can, and then when darkness starts coming you have to get back and hide out.

-We've got missions where you're trying to defend a Terran colony that's getting infested one piece at a time, and you've got to try to put out all these fires while fighting off these infested units. We've got this mission where you are a lone ghost trying to influence the course of an entire battle. So each of these missions is like a little minigame.

-It's like a 15-45 minute minigame. Depending on how fun the mission is it'll be longer or shorter. But each one is its own little game for you to play.

- We've got missions where you're racing against the Zerg, both fighting your way to the same Protoss base trying to reach a goal. We've got battles on ancient forbidden space platforms where the very space itself damages your units. We've got all kinds of crazy stuff. So this is what we're working on the solo campaign that takes so much time. Each mission is a little game.

- They can choose the order of the missions, they can choose which units they want to upgrade. So if you love yourself some medics, hey I got a couple upgrades for you they would make them so powerful we'd never put them in multiplayer. We've got a couple upgrades in there--oh, did you want an eight-man bunker with three armor? Go you. Did you want a Hercules dropship that can carry three Thors into battle, and looks like it can? There's all kinds of crazy stuff that you only get through the solo campaign. I think it'll really rock 'em, but we'll see.

Sounds awesome.
 
Zaptruder said:
30 missions of a huge amount of variety? Sounds good to me.


variety? everything they're describing is "you can't go to place X because of Y" or "you can't do X because of Y". Sounds like I'd rather avoid this.
 
I thought this was a pretty interesting insight into the their development process. Certainly different then what we normally see, where you see games take massive leaps in polish during the last few months of development.

Hard. [laughs] Yeah, it's easily the most challenging development environment I've ever worked in. It's really exacting. We're really focused on quality, and that doesn't mean--when I first thought about, I want to work at Blizzard, it's going to be so cool--I thought we would make the game and then polish it. But no: we polish it. That's what we do.

We make and polish at the same time, as we go. So you don't get to jam in a bunch of stuff, and then just redo it. I mean, you do that, but you fix it as you go, so it's always currently the highest quality experience we can figure out. So you're always a minute away from being done--not really, but you know what I mean? You're always trying to make it as strong as you possibly can. You're always arguing about the smallest detail. You're always working on the littlest, tiniest thing you can think of to improve the game.

I can't say it's the most efficient way to make a game, but you can't argue with the end result.
 
esbern said:
variety? everything they're describing is "you can't go to place X because of Y" or "you can't do X because of Y". Sounds like I'd rather avoid this.
It's like we didn't even read the same interview. Could you elaborate?
 
Seems like a lot of people are forgetting this (and Blizzard keeping a slight veil over it) but StarCraft 2 is a proper point & click adventure in between the RTS missions.
You walk around the mothership doing all kind of things.

bridge.jpg
 
Wollan said:
Seems like a lot of people are forgetting this (and Blizzard keeping a slight veil over it) but StarCraft 2 is a proper point & click adventure in between the RTS missions.
You walk around the mothership doing all kinds of things.

bridge.jpg

Yeah I dug that hardcore when they first revealed that.
 
Most RTS SP campaigns are sort of dreadful, but it sounds like they're really trying to escape from the paradigm of dropping you into a fully developed enemy territory and having you inch your way forward clearing it. This is especially important for Starcraft 2, since the multiplayer experience seems tailored towards moving the ultra-competitive starcraft 1 scene forward, rather than the non-APM focus of most modern RTS.
 
Wollan said:
Seems like a lot of people are forgetting this (and Blizzard keeping a slight veil over it) but StarCraft 2 is a proper point & click adventure in between the RTS missions.
You walk around the mothership doing all kind of things.

bridge.jpg
I'm sure I'm not the only one who got Wing Commander vibes when that was unveiled.
 
Zaptruder said:
30 missions of a huge amount of variety? Sounds good to me.

Yeah, I prefer missions like these.

If you only want to build a base from scratch and go attack an enemy base, you can just go play skirmish or multiplayer.

Warcraft 3 was mostly like that as well, almost all the levels had some sort of twist to them.

Wollan said:
Seems like a lot of people are forgetting this (and Blizzard keeping a slight veil over it) but StarCraft 2 is a proper point & click adventure in between the RTS missions.
You walk around the mothership doing all kind of things.


Hmm, probably more like Wing Commander than a full blown point & click adventure.
I'm guessing it mostly a way to convey story and sort of a menu-in-disguise.
 
Wollan said:
Seems like a lot of people are forgetting this (and Blizzard keeping a slight veil over it) but StarCraft 2 is a proper point & click adventure in between the RTS missions.
You walk around the mothership doing all kind of things.

bridge.jpg

Why does the guy on the left look like he just came off the Too Human set? :lol


Bring on the Beta!

Ohh, have they talked about any collectors editions for SC2 yet?
 
esbern said:
variety? everything they're describing is "you can't go to place X because of Y" or "you can't do X because of Y". Sounds like I'd rather avoid this.

I'm with you. Running and hiding isn't a fun gameplay mechanic and neither is environmental damage. Building entire levels around these annoyances sounds like a nightmare.
 
ArjanN said:
Hmm, probably more like Wing Commander than a full blown point & click adventure.
I'm guessing it mostly a way to convey story and sort of a menu-in-disguise.
It was great in WC and now this setup is returning with SC2 and with a proper Blizzard budget, can't wait.
 
esbern said:
variety? everything they're describing is "you can't go to place X because of Y" or "you can't do X because of Y". Sounds like I'd rather avoid this.

As far as RTS games go, the variety here is a welcome change. The only variety in the first Starcraft was either the number of units and whether it was limited or not by having a base to build more. Check Halo Wars for yet another example of this. These changes are very welcome imo.
 
Can't friggin wait.

I've never been excited for an RTS single player campaign before...but holy shit am I excited for this one!
 
i bet the guy on the left betrays raynor somehow in the game, he just LOOKS like hes gonna!!! been having that gut feeling ever since they revealed him :P
 
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