It was supposed to be just a standard convention panel in which Lead Designer Dustin Browder, along with Chris Metzen and Rob Pardo, would take to the stage to discuss the single-player campaign. It ended in cheers, shouts and scrambling reporters each rushing to report the big news: StarCraft II would no longer be a single game.
Instead the single-player campaign was being broken up into three distinct chunks (one for each race) that would be sold as three separate products. The first game, focusing on the Terrans, would now be referred to as "Wings of Liberty." The second, focusing on the Zerg, would be "Heart of the Swarm." This would then be followed by the final, Protoss campaign, called "Legacy of the Void."
The panel started in standard enough fashion as the three Blizzard employees took to the stage after being announced by a disembodied voice from DirecTV (the convention is being broadcast on Pay-per-view). Pardo took the stage and began speaking about Blizzard's new approach to RTS storytelling. He pointed out that most RTS games follow a predictable pattern of mission followed by cut-scene followed by mission followed by cut-scene.
The StarCraft II team didn't want to do that. Instead they're trying to allow players to have more choice when it comes to missions, the technology they utilize, interaction with the world, and dealing with characters.
StarCraft II takes place four years after the original game. In the next section of the presentation, the crowd was treated to a cut-scene in which Tychus Finley, the new character best known as the convict being welded into a Marine battle suit in the introductory movie, walks into a Mar Sara bar and meets Jim Raynor. Raynor hasn't had it easy these last four years, and has become a ragged but tenacious freedom fighter battling against the Dominion, the tyrannical political hegemony ruled over by his one-time "ally" Arcturus Mengsk. Finley has a proposal for Raynor. Apparently Mengsk has made it illegal for anyone to dig up or trade in alien artifacts, so the Moebius Group is offering a lot of money for some under-the-table work.
The Mara Sara bar is the first example of what Pardo calls a "between-mission space." While not an original concept (the Wing Commander games pioneered this idea years ago), the beauty of the game's artwork shows both how far the technology of computer graphics has come since those days and the oft-lauded talent of Blizzard's art department. Each of these spaces is loaded with stuff to click on and interact with. Results range from full-blown cut-scenes that detail elements of characters to small things like a jukebox in the bar playing music, a television showing news reports about what's going on in the galaxy, and even a window on the bridge of Raynor's flagship giving a nice view of whatever planet his ship is currently orbiting.
