With StarCraft II's single player experience spread across three titles, how is Blizzard going to keep things fresh? Sam "Samwise" Didier answers the question with hatchet wounds while dodging the fierce enemy UI.
The art director for StarCraft II when he isn't belting out vocals for Blizzard's house band, The Artists Formerly known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, was quite vocal about keeping things fresh across the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg campaigns during our interview at BlizzCon 09. "We definitely have ideas that we haven't include in this one to keep the next games unique. We always joke around that every expansion has to have the snow tileset, so there we go, we've got the snow tileset. We do that just for a goof. "Hey, there's the snow tileset!""
All joking aside, Sam explains that certain ideas have been held back for the two single player expansions, in order to ensure that each has its own unique flair.
"There's a lot of really cool unit ideas that we have that we probably could have squeezed onto one of these, but instead we wanna let them shine more in the next one - let them be a little more unique. This is an expansion, but it's the Zerg campaign or the Protoss campaign. It's not like a one-off sort of thing. It's gonna have all its unique sets.
"We're going to go back to the same planets. My hope is that we can affect those planets somehow, so if you're on Korhol in Wings of Liberty, when you return in the Zerg campaign or the Protoss, I want something radical to have happened to it or changed, whether a change in leadership or some "Cataclysmic" event," he jokes, referring to the newly announced World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion.
"That's the sort of thing that I really dig. I love it in movies when you see a character from the original one except now he has a cool hatchet wound on his face - what happened to him? So basically we'll put hatchet wounds on the planet. The +2 hatchet of doom!"
Did I mention I love this man? He's like me, only with a fully-working face and hair. He's even at my same skill level in StarCraft. "Everybody is better than me. I get beat by the UI. Not the AI, the UI. Waitaminit, what do I have to build here? What, I have to build a - ah damn."