Originally posted by: Maximilian
Originally posted by: Dumac
All of you single player guys are giddy over the size of the campaign, but as they said, it's the same size of te original SC campaign. Except this time, you only get to hear the terran side.
Well thats not true, just to quote what binister quoted earlier:
"Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design, said that each game would be approximate in size to the original StarCraft. Each game will be a stand-alone installment ? not an expansion."
So the terran campaign will be the size of the original terran + zerg + protoss campaigns put together, making for a much larger and more in depth campaign with a deeper storyline. Same will hold true for the zerg and protoss elements, and blizz even said there will be differences between the campaigns, RPG elements etc.
What we're getting here is:
-Better story, more expansion, like what warcraft III did for the warcraft series.
-Overall much larger more involving campaigns
-No detraction from the multiplayer experience
Fooking awesome, blizzard never fails to amaze me. Its essentially Starcraft II X 3.
That is what I meant. I should have said that you shouldn't be giddy of the size of the
Terran campaign, as we really aren't getting more than the original Starcraft. In some ways, getting less.
What we are probably getting is:
-A story equal to SC1, but overly expanded across three games in a way that makes each race campaign shallow
-Larger race campaigns, but less involving an diversified gameplay
-Additions to multiplayer experience requiring people who play to buy additional upgrades for new maps, units, etc
Blizzard fails to amaze me. It's essential Starcraft 1 arbitrarily split into 3 seperate games.
What made the original Starcraft campaign great was that you switched sides often. The story could advance at an exciting pace because you switched to the proponents of action.
However, if the entire game focuses on one race, then the story can't advance too much. Otherwise players would feel as though they were left out of the other side of the story. Also it would be unrealistic for one race to suddenly have such great of an effect while the other races sat aside as merely objects to me affected.
Also, like I said before, the risk of playing an incomplete story is apparent. Can a one race campaign truly be it's own, satisfactory story in the Starcraft world? The original Terran, Protoss, or Zerg campaigns would be far from satisfactory alone, even if they uneededly bolstered each campaign size up to 30 or so missions. The overall story was satisfactory, even if it had an open ending, because you weaved your way through multiple viewpoints to accumulate in a satisfactory ending.
The original Starcraft could be taken and split into three games, each based on the campaign of one race. The campaigns could be made fatter in a shallow way, with more misisons, objectives, a irrelevant plot. However, the story pacing as a hole would diminish. This is what I fear will happen to Starcraft 2.
I fear that once one completes all three games, he may feel like a lot of fluff could be cut out to reduce the Story Arc to one game featuring three races, a la the original Starcraft. And from there a true sequel, a la BW, could be introduced.
I don't Story Arcs should be divided amongst games. Each game should have it's own distinct storyline, autonomous from any other sequels. If I play only the Terran campaign of Starcraft 2, would I feel like I have experienced a fulfilling story? Or will it feel like the end of Halo 2, PotC 2, or many other segments of a story arc where no satisfaction is to be found?
I guess no one will know until the game comes out.