Starcraft II: Still no release date, but get ready to open your wallet

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:40:45 -0700

While long-suffering Starcraft fans are still waiting for a release date for Starcraft II, they at least got a teaser from Blizzard today. Shack News reports that Blizzard has announced that the game will actually be a "trilogy" with the game broken into three sections, or campaigns. The first to be released will be Terrans: Wings of Liberty, and the following two (Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and Protoss: Legacy of the Void") released as expansion packs. Blizzard maintains that the game has to be split:

"... to maintain the quality of the product, the alternatives either being a long delay of the game, or a scaling back of the campaigns."

While Blizzard claims that the multi-player functionality promised won't be compromised by the split, the company did acknowledge that some game units won't be available as multi-player units.

While Blizzard is undoubtedly hoping for The Sims and World of Warcraft piles of money by moving to an expansion pack model for the game, it may be a misstep for the release. It will undoubtedly be a big seller for Blizzard, but expecting fans to pay three times for a game that's partially hobbled for multi-player gaming may be asking too much.