Blizzard says: You'll pay three times for StarCraft II, and you'll like it

Blizzard says: You’ll pay three times for StarCraft II, and you’ll like it

In StarCraft II, we’re going to have a campaign that focuses strictly on the Terran. It’ll be 26-30 missions long, and you’ll play as Jim Rainer. When we release first expansion set, that’s going to focus on Zerg. So that’s going to be another 26-30 missions strictly focusing on Zerg. When we go to the final expansion pack, it will be the Protoss experience, probably another 26-30 missions.

That’s nice, but the main point of single-player mode in a real-time strategy game is to learn how to play each race, offline, before you compete with other people. The story, although important, has to be secondary to that.

This is a company that has done literally everything right–not just right, but outstandingly above and beyond the competition–for as long as I can remember. Now, look how far they have fallen in their greed.

This is not a hard problem to solve: you put a short campaign for each race in the first box. Then you can expand upon them later in–wait for it–the expansions. That’s what ‘expansion’ means. It doesn’t mean ‘the rest of the game you should have got in the first place’.

I think the readers aren’t understanding that there’s a full, gi-normous single-player campaign experience in each of these three products.

Yes, that’s it. It couldn’t be that we hate what you’re doing, it must be that we don’t understand. Go ahead, insult the intelligence of your customers. Great strategy.