The announcement StarCraft II will be released as a trilogy generated significant discussion among the gaming community. One of the main theories put forward was that Blizzard was bending to pressure from Activision to release the game as a trilogy in order to increase revenue over time. In an exclusive interview with game news site Edge Online, Blizzard representative Bob Colayco denied this claim.
Colayco stated, “No, absolutely not. [Activision] does not play a factor at all,” when asked if Activision had pressured Blizzard to release the game as a trilogy. He also stated, “I think the readers aren’t understanding that there’s a full, gi-normous single-player campaign experience in each of these three products.”
According to Colayco the decision to split the game was made by the Starcraft II development team. He stated, “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.”
The original Starcraft had roughly 10 missions for each of the races and another 8 were added with the Brood Wars expansion. According to Colayco, the large number of single player missions is the justification for splitting the game. He stated,” 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.”
Colayco also confirmed the all important multiplayer component will work the same as it did for the original Starcraft stating, “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.”
When asked about Blizzard implementing a paid Battle.Net service Colayco failed to confirm or deny anything concrete. Colayco vaguely added, “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.”