But Blizzard's StarCraft rep Bob Colayco told Edge on Monday that it's not like that all, saying that Blizzard's the one "calling the shots."
Some people say that the decision to release StarCraft II as a trilogy is a sign of Activision flexing its muscle over Blizzard—to “milk” the StarCraft franchise. Is the trilogy format related at all to the Activision merger?
No, absolutely not. [Activision] does not play a factor at all. One of the things that [StarCraft II lead producer] Chris Sigaty was saying in interviews this weekend is that we had always planned to do two expansion packs for StarCraft II. This structure just reshuffles how we were going to do things.
Just to give you some context, typically with Blizzard RTSes, we release a single-player campaign that gives players just a taste of each race. The original StarCraft had 10 missions each or so for Terrans and Protoss. When we released the Brood Wars expansion pack, there was another eight or so missions for each of the missions.
All we’re really doing is reshuffling how players are going to experience the single-player content. 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 Raynor. 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.
I think the readers aren’t understanding that there’s a full, gi-normous single-player campaign experience in each of these three products. Instead of getting all three race experiences at once, to make it a more epic experience, we’re focusing on one faction per entry for the single-player.
We’re just waiting to see if Blizzard kneels to its Activision overlord.
[Laughs] Activision doesn’t really factor in, because ultimately the people calling the shots on how this game is going to turn out is the StarCraft II dev team. This trilogy decision was really made by that team.
Effectively, what are we really talking about here? We’ve always done our RTS games with one expansion pack. So now we’re releasing two. Is it really that weird?
I think when people see reports of StarCraft II being a trilogy, with each entry focusing on one race, people assume it’s a piecemeal type thing where they’re paying for an incomplete game, then they can get the next piece for $50, then the next piece for $50, until they finally have one “full” game.
Well, if you want to say “one game” is 90 missions long, then yeah, I guess you’re only getting a third of a game each time. [Laughs] Show me a game where there are 90 missions. We’re giving players a full-fledged single-player campaign experience included in each of the games.
When we ship StarCraft II, the multiplayer will be included. You’re getting all three races there. It’s not like you’re only getting the Terran race, and you’re taking Terran vs. Terran until you put all three together like Voltron or something.
Effectively, the multiplayer will work just as it did before. You’ll get all three races, a bunch of maps, the full Battle.net experience. And when we tack on each of the expansion packs, as we did before, we’ll throw in a couple new units, abilities, maps, upgrades and things like that.
Maybe a lot of the confusion stems from the use of the word “trilogy,” but what we’re trying to get across with the word “trilogy” is that this is an epic story experience. It’s like Lord of the Rings, in terms of the storyline experience. You can play each of them individually, but when you put them together, they tell one epic storyline.
There are also a couple other things floating around from Blizzcon. Paying for extra services on Battle.net—what’s the story with that?
We haven’t talked about specifics with Battle.net’s business model. Nothing is finalized. All I can say is that once we figure out and develop what it is, we’re going to look at it and come up for something that makes sense from a business perspective. It could be anything, and it could also vary a lot from region to region. We’ll take into account what the game is delivering, what’s the right value proposition, what’s worth it to players. And what are players expectations in different regions, because they’re different things. We follow the same philosophy with World of Warcraft.
So as far as StarCraft II goes, bottom line, it was Blizzard that decided on the trilogy format, not Activision saying, “We want StarCraft annualized.”
Absolutely 100 percent. … Each of these games is going to be a full 26-30 game campaign experience. If you compare that to other RTS games, I think it stacks up very favorably from a value perspective.