Hey folks, I'm back from vacation and back on the daily StarCraft 2 grind. I hope everyone had a very safe and enjoyable Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanza/Festivus or whatever it is you celebrate. I rang in the New Year in typical fashion, sloppily, hopefully you had a fun night as well.
2008 is behind us but not forgotten. It was a year of amazing and exciting developments: We saw countless screenshots and videos, read 47 Q&A's and tons of previews, interviews and stories; we experienced an unforgettable Blizzcon full of trilogy announcements and Diablo III gameplay; but outside of the gaming world we saw banks and lenders go bankrupt only to be bailed out by our government, we saw the stock market meltdown -- over, and over again -- and oh, yeah, we elected the first black president of the United States.
If last year was an indication of what is to come this year, and it is, our planet and all who reside on it are in for another wild ride. So, what better way to kick off 2009 than an exclusive interview with Browder about the first StarCraft 2 campaign, "Wings of Liberty?"
Check it out after the jump.
Thierry Nguyen of 1UP got to speak with lead designer Dustin Browder and talk about StarCraft II's first release, "Wings of Liberty." One of the most important things for me that Nguyen uncovered was that the subsequent titles will be expansions and not separate titles in and of themselves. It was never formally stated that that was the plan, but I always assumed it would be.
1UP: Do you anticipate the production cycle for the StarCraft 2 trilogy to feel like making three separate games, or more like World of WarCraft and its expansions, where the bulk of the work is on the first installment, and subsequent ones are more about iterating and refining rather than inventing?DB: Well that's the hope; that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we'll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.
That said, we're conscious of making sure we are providing new and compelling content for the expansions. The meta-aspects of the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, for example, will work a lot differently than how we're doing things with the core StarCraft 2 game. It doesn't make sense for Kerrigan to be flying around in a battlecruiser and picking out mercenary missions for cash, which is what you'll be doing with Raynor in the core game's campaign. So we'll be doing something different with Kerrigan to get her to evolve and grow her Zerg army. Meanwhile, Zeratul's Protoss campaign may require you to engage in diplomacy with the different Protoss tribes in order to gain access to different units and technologies.
-- 1UP
Read the interview in its entirety HERE @ 1UP.com
Coming soon: Maybe it's just my anxiety getting the best of me but I have a feeling that we will be hearing about the beta any day now and because of that anticipation I would ask that you check back regularly. At the very least I will be posting a video interview by G4 on that topic tomorrow. Much, much more to come in the days and weeks to follow!
Related Stories:
StarCraft II Becomes a Trilogy
GamePro's hands on preview of StarCraft 2 from Blizzcon '08
Single Player Preview: TONS OF VIDEOS
Gamepro's StarCraft 2 product page with screenshots, videos and more
