Ooohhh... They had better make each copy only cost $15.
That's just insane...

 

And I will buy them all... at 50 bucks apiece probably.

 

That's interesting that they're doing installments of the game.

But Warcraft 4? **** yeah!

 

You know, at first I thought it might be a scam to make more money on Starcraft, but after reading what was said during the panels I think it is more like the money is just a bonus for them. I really like the thought of around 90 missions for the full story, and three times the movies and cutscenes. That doesn't rule out the possibility of expansions in addition to the standalones for new units either...

 

Well sure, the campaign map is huge, but so are the campaign maps in Rise of Legends. But how many of those missions consist of easy breezy tutorials with a few triggers inside that require you to march your units from one waypoint to another? I'm betting that at least five of those missions will be to familiarize the player and not actually consist of proper 'storyline', but I'd love to see them prove me wrong.

One thing that does give me hope is the fact that the single player campaign, though relatively linear, still has branching opportunities that allow you to pick and choose your upgrade path throughout the game. That spells replayability, but it remains to be seen whether it has any depth to it. Battle Realms had similar replayability, but in the long run, the choices you made didn't matter all that much despite the fact that you got different units.

I'd like to see each campaign lasting as long as Warcraft 3: TFT did in its entirety, with difficult missions and interesting plotlines. I'd be disappointed if it all played out like the Human campaign in the original Warcraft 3.

In any case, the announcement comes as a major shock. It may be possible that Starcraft II was originally conceived as a gigantic campaign, but that they're only doing this now because their development of Starcraft II single player campaign (in its totality) is very behind schedule, and so they need to release the game by completing their work on the Terran campaign and brushing up on the multiplayer, which doesn't need anything more than polish and some balancing at this point. I just hope that's not the case and that the campaign really is as big as it seems on the map.

That said, I'm still buying all of them.

 

I'm trying to wrap my mind around this, and bit by bit, I'm coming to accept that having a 25-30 mission campaign for each faction, with separate campaign/gameplay mechanisms in three self-contained products is actually the best way to go about it.

It's preferable to splitting a 90 mission game into 3 products, spaced out over 3 years with 10 missions per faction in each product. That would suck because it'd simply result in cliffhangers and people wouldn't be able to experience enough with each of the game's unique campaign functions.

The Terran campaign follows Jim Raynor, who's a mercenary that buys upgrades for his army, and travels to various planets to earn allies and money. The Zerg campaign plays out like an RPG, where the Zerg (and Kerrigan) evolve as you progress. The Protoss campaign revolves around diplomacy and some other nebulous concepts. Having only 10 missions of each would kind of stink, especially when you want to keep a momentum.

What's really promising is that Rob Pardo stated that there will be no cliffhanger endings, and that each game will have a complete, self-contained storyline. That's good.

Likewise, I'm going to postpone my gamer outrage to see all of this play out.

 

Who cares about FMVs in the middle of games anymore, I thought we got rid of the majority of them like 5 years ago.

Its a scam to make more money.  Scam... maybe strategy but whatever.

 

So far I love the pro-blizzard expected responses.  If any other company did this... like. . . even their parent company Activision, then users here would be hating on them more.  And slapnuts would call them money grubbers

 

Hmm I don't know, there are many users hating on them over this as well on many sites around the net. So it's not completely eliminated just because they are Blizzard :p

However the one thing to realise is that they don't actually seem to be skimming the product, but rather making 3 quality titles (at least from what they say). Which is not what many other companies do when they make an announcement like this.

 

Wonder if blizzard will use the same kind of system as valve and steam, So you can log on to battle.net and buy the expansion trilogys online or even the main game itself.

Warcraft 4 fells faraway :/

 

I hope not :/

Living in Aus and having limited downloads, I hope I don't have to get the game online heh!

 

I did not mean that they should have it as the only choice for the buyers, It would be an option alongside the dvd/blue-ray-sell. :>

Limited downloads?! Sounds tough! :/

 

Ah lol, and yeah limited downloads suck... although seems like Verizon and so on are introducing caps now too

Although the 250 gigs they offer is way better than the 20 or 40 we get unless we pay way more