[Valigarmander]

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty Preview for the PC from 1UP.com

I have to confess something: I kind of saw the whole "StarCraft 2 is now a 2010 title" thing coming.

Back in June, I visited the Blizzard campus to play some multiplayer matches, with the notion that the revamped Battle.net and the single-player campaign were taking a bit longer than anticipated. Last month, I came back and actually played six missions from the single-player campaign, with Battle.net still a no-show. Besides the lack of Battle.net's presence, I also heard lead designer Dustin Browder comment, "There are about 27 missions we're really satisfied with, and three others that we're going to have to revisit... When you see these missions, you can see that they're not things we crank out in a couple of days; each mission went through about two or three months of iterating and polishing." With that much work left on both single- and multiplayer, it's not a surprise that StarCraft 2 won't be making 2009. To tide you over a bit, here are five things that stood out as I played a small chunk of the campaign.

1) StarCraft2's a grandiose space opera with branching moments.

It's a bit easy to forget, especially with World of Warcraft's very structure and frequent use of humorous allusions, but Blizzard fills its universes with serious, and pretty good, lore. WoW has dominated most of Blizzard's output the past few years, and people tend to overlook its fantasy storytelling in favor of the quips and jokey names it uses. But SC2 is a serious reintroduction to Blizzard's grand storyline tradition.

For a bit of context, the player controls Jim Raynor, a mercenary commander rebelling against his government. He incites revolution on a few planets, hooks up with a space marine buddy (Tychus Findlay) to undertake some "steal an artifact and sell it to scientists for mad profit" missions, and eventually returns to his flagship, the Battlecruiser Hyperion, to perform more missions (either for revolution or pure profit). Of course, the big shift in priorities happens around the third mission, when Kerrigan (the main villainess) is spotted, and the whole "Terrans and Protoss and Zerg" conflict re-awakens. And for the lore nuts out there, vice president of creative development Chris Metzen teases, "This installment is still about the Zerg threat, but maybe we'll encounter something even bigger in the other games."

Gameplay-wise, StarCraft 2 has a branching storyline. After the third mission, the player then can check a starmap, and choose a specific mission from a list of about two or three -- with each opening up further ones in its chain. Most of the time, players can check out almost all the missions at any given moment, but the game also has some specific "choose your path now, and live with it," type of moments. Think along the lines of, "Do we arrest, or outright assassinate, the Emperor?"

2) The single-player campaign's full of things that would break multiplayer.

One of the first things I notice is that during an early mission, the player can use Firebats (a dude who sprays fire around and serves as a pretty powerful anti-Zerg infantry unit). But wait, Firebats were one of the first removals announced in the unit list, and now they're in the campaign? Browder explains: "Designing SC2 multiplayer is like designing chess, while designing single-player is like crafting an exciting experience."

This means that favorite units that would make the multiplayer game feel broken or unbalanced are fair game for single-player. Single-player can have upgrades such as suddenly making units cheaper (something that would cause an uproar if a player did so during a multiplayer match). It also means having crazy moments like alien statue ambushes or zombie invasions. In short, skirmish and multiplayer are maintaining the qualities that make StarCraft "feel" like StarCraft, and it's the single-player that adds some crazy new-to-StarCraft features to the experience.

3) You now have more to do in-between missions.

Usually, the downtime between missions is just a bunch of talking heads briefing you for the next mission. This time, your in-between mission tasks can include: detailed story elements, hiring mercenaries, checking the science research progress, and purchasing technology upgrades (this last point is so significant that it deserves its own subhead below).

For the first point, you can initiate conversations with multiple personnel and watch dialogue sequences that discuss the story progression. In addition, there are lots of little touches, such as the TV in a bar showing a news report that updates based on your general mission performance, or seeing a posterboard filled with pictures and newspaper clippings detailing your accomplishments as you progress. Now, if you don't care about that kind of stuff, you can still skip straight to the mission briefing or the gameplay specific activities.

Two minor gameplay activities include hiring mercenaries and checking on science research. For mercenaries, this means going to the bar in the Hyperion to hire mercenary versions of existing units that then, during gameplay, come out of the Mercenary Bar structure. If these units die in battle, they can't be rebuilt until future missions. Basically, think of it as "You can build one mercenary version per mission." Browder describes the mercenaries as "the StarCraft version of WarCraft III's Hero units." At the moment, mercenaries don't quite feel like heroes (the mercenary marine squad I hired did have more hitpoints and inflicted more damage than a regular unit, but not enough for me to really notice); Browder notes that the team is working on the art presentation and other gameplay tweaks to make mercenaries feel like "badasses who can 'hold the line' when necessary; not quite the singular Hero, but a squad of guys you can depend on."

Science research is the newest addition, and therefore most prone to development changes. At the moment, science research purely means finding either Zerg eggs or Protoss artifacts during missions. Every time you pass a milestone (such as finding four of each item, and then eight, etc.), you get a free upgrade. At the moment, that means things like "All infantry do additional damage to Zerg" if you find four Zerg eggs, while snagging four Protoss artifacts would grant you the ability to take out Protoss shields faster. Again, this is the most recent addition, and I wouldn't be surprised if this completely changes by the time of release.

4) StarCraft 2 now has a persistent technology upgrade system.

This is probably the biggest "in-between mission downtime" addition. I spent the longest time not doing the other stuff, but sitting and seriously considering what to buy next. At the moment, each unit has two different upgrades (it's not an either-or system -- if you have the funds, you can purchase both). For example: Medics can either heal friendlies faster or heal multiple friendlies simultaneously, and Bunkers can either add space to hold more fellows or add a computer-controlled turret so that it can attack enemies even while unmanned (or simply have more firepower when occupied). These upgrades are permanent and they persist throughout the campaign. If I upgrade my Marines to have giant physical shields (that grant health and defense bonuses), then every time I build a Marine from that point on, he'll b e brandishing a shield.

At the moment, the question of "Can a player obtain every technology by the endgame?" doesn't have a definite answer, but in the build I was playing, that seems impossible. No matter how much I get as a reward, with the costs compared to my income, I wouldn't be able to afford every piece of technology. Browder notes that he slightly leans towards the present system -- that you can only get about 70 percent of all the technology upgrades in a single game. After all, that provides a measure of replay value; the technology purchases all tweak my individual play in different ways to make the general experience feel a bit different. For example, if I only purchase the Medic upgrade that heals units faster, then I will marshal more powerful and expensive units, knowing that the Medic can keep up with the healing demand. If I purchase the Medic's area-effect heal instead, I may use larger quantities of cheaper units (like Marines), since it's easier to keep a bunch of lower-tiered guys alive with area-healing rather than an equal force of more powerful dudes (since they won't heal as fast as the little guys). Or if I buy both upgrades, I'm foregoing some other technology.

Right now, Blizzard still needs to do a fair amount of tuning to this system. For example, the very first technology that pretty much everyone buys is one that reduces SCV cost from 50 minerals down to 35. This sounds silly, but it ultimately translates into being able to produce many more SCVs, which in turn harvest minerals and gas faster due to their increased quantity. "That's too much of a no-brainer," comments Browder. "There's no real player choice, because that is the most obvious and direct upgrade; we're going to need to tweak that more." He even admits that the original version of that upgrade had a literally game-breaking feature: SCVs would not count towards your food limit. "Engineering yelled at us, because people would fill their screens with SCVs -- since they cost no food -- and literally slowed down the entire system down to single-digit framerates."

5) Every mission pretty much has a crazy twist.

You know how in StarCraft's Terran campaign, the one mission everyone remembers is the "survive for 30 minutes until extraction?" How the traditional StarCraft gameplay was wrapped around a single high-concept hook? From what I've played, almost every mission in StarCraft 2 has a similar mechanic.

The first few missions are pretty standard: find guys and kill them. The third mission repeats the "survive until you get extracted" mechanic. And from then on, you can summarize each mission via its hook. One mission involves mining minerals from an unstable lava planet: every five minutes, the lava seeps up and submerges the low-tide section -- meaning that when the lava rises, you'll need to place your Terran structures in hover mode or have your ground units retreat to high-tide for the approximately 30 seconds before the lava tide sweeps back down. Though, you're able to use this to your advantage: bait the enemy into being trapped in the low-tide just as the lava rises and watch them melt away.

Another mission focuses on stealing a Protoss artifact, with the hook being that the Zerg are also attacking the Protoss, so you have an informal "timer" represented by the Zerg wave at the top of your screen wiping out the Protoss while they protect their artifact.

Another mission chain involves the evacuation of scientists from a planet. The first mission in the chain is the simple escort/evac. The player just has to make sure transports full of civilians make their way from the base to the starport on the other side of the map. Browder points out the two main methods that testers have done this mission: either marshal a large force to escort the transports one at a time and take enemies as they come, or build a series of bunkers along the road to wipe out the bad guys without much supervision/micromanagement. For the record, I did a bit of both: I built a decent force of guys and placed down bunkers in particular "hot zones" to reinforce the escorts.

It's the follow-up mission that I absolutely love, one that fuses StarCraft, Pitch Black, and 30 Days of Night together. In it, you're on a planet with an alternating day/night cycle (every five minutes, it switches). During daylight, you're safe. You can build forces and go out and destroy structures. At night, the infected Terrans will relentlessly stream towards your base, necessitating a strong defense against the "zombie horde." As you destroy structures, the rate of zombies increases, to the point where just as you have a handful of buildings left, they are popping out of the woodwork with no gaps or breaks in the action.

When it was announced that StarCraft 2 would switch from being a Terran/Zerg/Protoss game to a Terran-only game first, it seemed a bit odd. But now, it doesn't seem so weird. "You played six missions; if we stuck to the original formula, you'd be almost done with the Terran story, but now, we have room to explore these crazy new missions. We now have room for a lava planet, a day/nite zombie attack, and a train robbery," comments Browder. But man, if this means the campaign has more stuff like the day/nite zombie invasion, then go ahead and make this a Terran-only campaign (after all, Dawn of War already did the one-race-per-campaign deal). And most of all, take your time, Blizzard. Take your time.

This looks damn awesome. Damn awesome.

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