Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty Updated Hands-On - Single-Player Campaign
We get our hands on an early version of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty's single-player campaign.
Now that Blizzard has split the sequel to Starcraft into three chapters, the studio is starting to take the wraps off the sequel's story, which Blizzard's Andy Chambers says is big enough to fill three entire chapters. In fact, the creative director says that the sequel's story is so big that the three different games will let the studio properly tell the story of each of the three factions (Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg), rather than having to cut corners here and there to make everything fit in a single box. In any case, the single-player game of Wings of Liberty, the first of Starcraft II's three chapters, is finally coming together, and we had a chance to try out the first few missions of an early version.
Starcraft II's story picks up some years after the events of the Brood War expansion pack for the original Starcraft, after the vicious, three-sided conflict between Starcraft's three iconic factions: the macho Terran space marines, the noble-yet-inscrutable Protoss aliens, and the swarming, homicidal Zerg aliens. At the end of that story, the rebellious human officer Jim Raynor is set at odds against both his former ally, the treacherous human leader Arcturus Mengsk, and his former ladylove, the stealth-specialist-turned-Zerg-hive-queen Kerrigan.
The story of Starcraft II begins with Raynor dealing with these new and old threats. Though he's now considered a dangerous outlaw in the eyes of Emperor Mengsk, he remains a freedom fighter who leads his ragtag band of misfits into battle against Mengsk's oppressive regime--until a newscast on Jimmy's TV monitor reveals that the Zerg, which have remained dormant for years, have suddenly reappeared and have launched a broadening, full-scale assault on various sectors in the universe, and to make matters worse, Kerrigan herself has also resurfaced and been captured on film.
In fact, Kerrigan and Raynor even share a "moment" in the early part of the campaign, and though he still can't quite understand why Kerrigan has finally come out of hiding, and why the Zerg now seem so obsessed with collecting Protoss artifacts, he renews his vow to put her out of her misery and stop her mission of intergalactic conquest. About the only good news in sight is that Tychus Findlay, the hard-nosed commando and war criminal Raynor served with in earlier games, has escaped his sentence and proposed a new revenue stream to fund Raynor's army--selling Protoss artifacts to a collective of scientists.
This in-depth story is told not only by way of elaborate in-engine cinematics with plenty of fancy camera work on the game's highly detailed character models that cuts to and zooms in on different characters, but also through between-mission sequences that, surprisingly enough, resemble the point-and-click gameplay of classic adventure games such as Myst and Grim Fandango. These sequences take place in peaceful hub areas where key characters sit or stand around items and fixtures of interest--and you can click on these characters or items to examine or interact with them to get Raynor's take on them. For Wings of Liberty, it's clear that Blizzard has looked to a variety of different media sources for inspiration, such as Western motion pictures--at the very outset of the game, the between-mission sequences take place in an interstellar saloon with a burned-out Raynor sitting at a bar with a drink in one hand and a pistol in another.
However, there are also references to influences like the gritty, alien-killing military action of Starship Troopers and ripped-from-the-headlines news broadcasts on the Zerg swarm that appear periodically on TV screens in the game, reminiscent of modern-day news coverage of international conflicts. Clicking around on the items and characters in these areas will pull up little bits of information and lore for players who really want to delve into the story, but it's not at all necessary, and you can skip through them if you're the sort of player who prefers to focus on gameplay and achievements.
There will be plenty of incentives for players who prefer to focus on gameplay. The campaign will have a semi-branching structure based around a starmap of planets that will send out distress calls and offers for other sorts of missions, and completing any individual mission will unlock a new unit for use in the single-player game. (However, not all units that appear in the single-player campaign will appear in multiplayer--the Terran flamethrowing firebat unit, for instance, will be available only in single-player.) In addition, finishing any mission will also net you a wad of credits (cash) you can use to purchase powerful upgrades for your armies or to hire expensive mercenary units from mercs you'll meet in your travels.
These upgrades will make your single-player units more damaging and tougher than their base abilities to deal with the massively powerful boss characters that lie in wait, but they won't be available in multiplayer for gameplay balance reasons. Blizzard is also toying with an open-ended alien research system that will let Raynor's lab cook up anti-alien tech if you successfully collect enough Protoss alien relics or Zerg DNA samples, though this research system is still being worked on and may not even appear in the final game. Real completionists will also find reason to replay each mission, since Wings of Liberty will offer in-game achievements for completing each mission under certain specific conditions, such as quickly finishing a mission within a certain time limit, finishing a mission without losing a unit, or completing a specific side unit.
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