
But instead of waiting two years, we’re delivering work as we complete it.” “The work that we’re doing is commensurate to what we would do when we make a full. “It’s sort of changing the way we approach releasing content,” said Morten. The first chapter of the StarCraft II trilogy, Wings of Liberty, came out in 2010, and Heart of the Swarm appeared on store shelves in 2013. In the past, it made expansions that were two or more years apart from release. It’s a different schedule from what the StarCraft team is used to. After Blizzard releases the first set, some time will pass, and then they’ll release the next one, and so on. They’ll come out in three different sets, with each set containing three missions. But Blizzard isn’t going to release all of them at once.

Nova Covert Ops is a standalone story arc told over the course of nine different missions. Image Credit: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat Nova Covert Ops will come out in three chunks Like the main campaigns, Nova Covert Ops will have cutscenes that help tell the story. She doesn’t know how she got there, but through the course of her adventure, she’ll find out what the Defenders of Man is really up to. In the teaser trailer for Nova Covert Ops that debuted last week, Nova wakes up in a mysterious place - this facility actually belongs to the alliance. On the surface, it vows to protect the world from future alien invasions, which makes the Defenders of Man popular among the people. One of those alliances is the Defenders of Man. Valerian worries that his outspoken enemies are forming secret alliances to try to oust him from power. But this leaves him open to attacks in the media from his critics. He grants his people civil liberties (like freedom of the press) that they never had before. They just want peace.Įmperor Valerian Mengsk is a much more progressive ruler than his father Arcturus, who perished in Heart of the Swarm (the second StarCraft II expansion). Over the years, they’ve been through different battles, both against each other and against the bug-like Zergs. The Dominion (the governing body of humankind, or Terrans in StarCraft parlance) consists of a war-torn people.

During a BlizzCon panel about the future of StarCraft II, writer Valerie Watrous dropped a few details about what the universe is like in that time. Nova Covert Ops takes place a few years after the ending from Legacy of the Void. Here’s a detailed breakdown of what Blizzard has in store for both Nova Covert Ops and future Mission Packs.

“We feel like there’s so many potential stories to be told in the StarCraft universe,” he said. According to Morten, the majority of people who play the game play it for the story campaigns, so it was only natural for the development team to continue working on that kind of content. I met with lead producer Tim Morten at BlizzCon to find out more about the company’s commitment to expanding StarCraft II. Pre-order my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook. Not for a long while.įollow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Maybe we will see StarCraft again someday, but not now.
#STARCRAFT 3 SERIES#
Losing them, losing the series as a whole, losing any chance at spin-offs, it really feels like the firm end of something that was a big part of who I was as a gamer. Maybe I’m also just feeling nostalgic with the recent untimely deaths of Geoff “iNcontroL” Robinson and John “TotalBiscuit” Bain who were huge figures in the StarCraft community and icons when I was growing up with StarCraft esports. Halo was essentially the shooter version of StarCraft with its own races equivalent to Terran (humans), Protoss (Covenant) and Zerg (Flood), but Blizzard itself could never get it done, and still can’t get it done, as recently as this past year. Ever since I was a kid I have been dreaming of an expanding StarCraft universe with new games based on the worldbuilding of the original series, and yet it seems like that’s just never going to happen.
#STARCRAFT 3 HOW TO#
It also stands to reason that Blizzard just cannot figure out how to get StarCraft outside of its RTS framework, as evidenced by two cancelled StarCraft shooters now, which is a huge shame. The genre is just not popular anymore, and for Activision’s purposes, it’s one that is very, very hard to monetize effectively post-launch, given how that type of game rests on a knife’s edge of balance, and even cosmetics could upset that. StarCraft 3 doesn’t really seem like a logical thing to pursue at this point, especially if Blizzard has decided that if they are going to make another RTS, it’s going to be Warcraft 4.
