With Starcraft II, Blizzard Returns to Storytelling
Monday, June 14, 2010
Warcraft Spoiler Warning
It’s been twelve (yes, twelve) years since the first Starcraft hit stores. Feeling old yet?
Coincidentally, it’s been 7 years since Blizzard released a major franchise game that wasn’t part of their ongoing MMO-Godhead, World of Warcraft. WoW, like many MMO’s, brought about an era focused on developing player controlled characters over plot progression. While quests and NPC interaction did yield hints of story-related material and instances occasionally functioned as vignettes or minisodes, the focus was always on repetitive farming or grinding to gear up for the next challenge. Likewise, outside of a few major changes that occurred with expansion releases (the greatest of which will occur when Catacylsm is released later this year), the world is painfully static. Newer expansions have featured “phased” content for leveling, but the dynamism is minimal compared to most single player RPGs or campaigns from earlier games in the franchise. To date the only occurrence with any real consequence has been the death of Arthas Menethil as the Lich King (don’t say Illidan, he was already dead in TFT), and that took 2 full expansions and thousands of hours for players to reach.
The result has been a number of Blizzard’s famous cinematics that focus purely on generic characters performing generic actions, like so:
An Orc waves a club! A Night Elf runs in the woods! Exciting, maybe, but certainly without reason or context for emotional investment. While this changed slightly in Wrath of the Lich King, the storytelling still feels dry compared to say, this:
And that’s one of the most exciting things about Starcraft 2. Already in the trailer we have cinematic representations of known franchise characters like Zeratul, Raynor, and Kerrigan (pre and post infestation). New campaign missions (outside of tutorials) will likely begin with goals that actually progress the plot, instead of involving killing 12 yetis or finding 17 apple cores (the last of which will take forever to spawn). Blizzard has, historically, been one of the better studios at storytelling. While they may not be Bioware, they certainly know how to set up a page-turner. I’ve greatly missed commanding troops into a battle that felt like it mattered, and defeating enemies that I know won’t just respawn in 10-12 minutes. To me, this sequel 12 years in the making is a homecoming for a friend that’s been on a 7 year sabbatical.
And finally, on July 27, 2010, they’ll be able to continue this. Blizzard RTS games may be known for their multi-player (ask the South Koreans), but I won’t be touching it until I power through what I hope is a fantastically engaging campaign. After over a decade, they damn well better deliver.
© 2010 Jeff and Company