Rush, Boom, Turtle: The Game So Nice They Made It Thrice

The story of StarCraft IIa, StarCraft IIb and StarCraft IIc
10/24/2008 5:10 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Of course, the big news this week in real-time strategy games is the Multiwinia patch that nerfed ant hives. But since everyone's already talked that issue out, I thought I'd focus on something you might not have heard about. Did you know that StarCraft II is being split into three games? Blizzard quietly announced this during the hullabaloo about some World of Warcraft expansion.

Now your first reaction might be to get worked up into a snit because you're going to have to buy three games instead of one. Perhaps your concern might be financial, you parsimonious bastard. You doubt Blizzard can deliver $150 worth of entertainment over the three-plus years it will take to get all three games out the door? Just consider that over the course of those three years, you'll be paying less than the cost of a single year of World of Warcraft. How's that for value?

Or maybe your concern is one of a lack of content. Instead of three full games, will Blizzard instead make three one-third games? Moot point, you greedy bastard, since one-third of a Blizzard game is usually three times the game of a non-Blizzard game, right? In fact, consider yourself lucky that by that metric, Blizzard's games don't cost $450. (Can someone check my math on that?)

Then there's the issue of splitting up the multiplayer community among haves and have-nots. Maybe you've tried finding an online game of Age of Empires III that'll let you use your city from the WarChiefs expansion. I feel your pain. But if this is your concern, I have to question your commitment to StarCraft. Any RTS fan worth his salt will buy all three.

But then there's the concern about why Blizzard is doing this, and here's where I simply can't defend the decision. According to Blizzard, it's not a business decision. According to Blizzard, it's a matter of being able to do justice to the single-player campaign, which is big. Way big. Too big for a single game. Epic big. In fact, it's so big, they haven't even started working on the non-Terran parts of the campaign.

Blizzard would have you think it's no longer content to simply offer incredibly polished and derivative games, and now it wants to jump on the narrative bandwagon with BioShock, Lord of the Rings Online, Grand Theft Auto IV, Braid, Call of Duty and Portal. Like Miramax chasing Oscars, maybe Blizzard wants someone to look at its games and go, "Now that's some great storytelling!"

But with an RTS? There are only a handful of types of missions in a real-time strategy game, and the stories they tell are pretty much the same. It goes like this: "So I harvested some stuff, then I built a base, then I killed all the scripted AI dudes." Sometimes you have to play a commando mission without base building, which goes like this: "I killed all the scripted AI dudes." The better RTSes tell the same story minus the word "scripted."