Thinking more about the ‘Starcraft Trilogy’, even by Blizzard standards they wouldn’t allow such developer narcissism to run so rampant or bloat a game due to hype.
I should smack myself with a two-by-far for not seeing the obvious. The ‘Starcraft Trilogy’ is obvious to set up a Starcraft MMO.
When Warcraft 3 was in development, the game was intended to be a RPG-RTS. Everyone, everywhere, chanted, “Hail Blizzard and their innovative genius!” “Hail! Hail! Hail!” went the chants. Blizzard eventually abandoned the RPG-RTS concept and just made Warcraft 3 more of a RPG with some RPG elements thrown in (the Orc Campaign in the Frozen Throne was likely closest to the original vision of RTS-RPG).
What we discovered was that Blizzard was not being ‘innovative’ with RPG-RTS. Rather, they were trying to drive the Warcraft fanbase into the World of Warcraft that was being made. Could we be witnessing the same with Starcraft 2 and its ‘MAGNIFICENT SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN!”? Very likely.
It is probable that the single player campaign became so critically important to demand the RPG and branching like campaigns, so critically important to create three games, that it is to drive Starcraft fanbase to the Starcraft MMO.
In other words, what happened to the Warcraft franchise appears to be happening to Starcraft. The Warcraft franchise, which was comically fun and was about (get this) ‘war’, ended becoming totally twisted in Warcraft 3. In Warcraft 3, the fun, crazy Orcs became ‘misunderstood’, ‘exploited’ savages in a fashion reminiscent of American native indians. We got character biographies of Thrall, Arthas, and other characters. Frozen Throne was a blatant attempt at the MMO set-up as there appeared to be very little ‘war’ with the factions and more of setting up territories within the fictional game world.
Many Warcraft fans consider the Warcraft franchise dead… or rather castrated. No longer is Warcraft about war, and even the fun lore (never taken too seriously) has been butchered beyond belief. Now, some might say that 10 million subscribers of World of Warcraft cannot be wrong. Are they the ‘casual’ warcraft players and the RTS players the ‘hardcore’? Absolutely not. RTS players are simply RTS fans. MMO players are MMO fans. Fans of the Warcraft RTS games are bitter that WoW has generally gutted their franchise. Why make a Warcraft IV when a WoW 2 can make so much more? And the only reason why a Warcraft IV would be made would be to introduce WoW 2 which is not what Warcraft fans want.
Diablo and Starcraft fans have been already very uneasy. This is why many of the Diablo fans, already on edge, kinda lost it when Diablo 3 was unveiled and they declared the game looked like it got infested by ‘WoW’. While they are overreacting to syptoms that haven’t appeared, their fear of such a cancer is real.
Starcraft fans fear that Starcraft 2 will have a generic multiplayer gameplay with the emphasis being entirely on a huge, vast single player whose purpose is to set up the lore for Starcraft MMO. After Starcraft 2, the lore no longer gets defined by RTS but entirely through the Starcraft MMO.
When Starcraft fans say, “Leave Starcraft pure!” they mean don’t put in the RPG, adventure, character junk that was injected into the Warcraft franchise (whose purpose was to set up WoW).
On a business sense, a Worlds of Starcraft seems very attractive. However, in gaming it is not about creating customers as it is about creating passionate customers. The customers of World of Warcraft are not the passionate customers of Warcraft RTS. What does this mean?
Lore, or what I prefer as mythos, is like a well where too many trips dilute and eventually destroy the brand. A great example of this would be the Star Trek franchise. After so many spin-offs, the franchise couldn’t continue. There were too many trips to the well.
A new sci-fi MMO made by Blizzard would be very cool. But a Starcraft MMO would not be greeted happily by fans because the MMO not only takes over all the lore, it dilutes it. The nature of MMOs have the players spend so much time within that fictional universe that they cannot but help to be sick of the mythos after a time. Spend enough time in WoW, and you will become tired of Azeroth. This is the nature of things.
A MMO is not simply taking a bucket from the well, it is installing a water facility and charging money for each pump of water as it streams to MMO players. MMOs drain the well dry very fast. Much more quickly than another genre of game.
Lightning will not hit the same place twice. Blizzard makes MMO Starcraft at their own peril.
People, who try to be the smartest people in the room, point and laugh at anyone who dares admit their customer frustration at the Starcraft trilogy by arrogantly saying, “You should be grateful. Why, they are giving you HUGE, felshed out campaigns! They are giving you more Starcraft 2!” But no one asked this. The problem with giving us ‘more’ is not just that no one asked for it, it is that people would prefer Blizzard spend that time doing something else. Instead of making bloated single player campaigns for Starcraft (which will take years), why not make a new game, test-drive a new IP?
Why not Blizzard make a turn based single player game? Or another Rock-and-Roll Racing? Or another Lost Vikings? Or something else for that matter? What is so god-damn important about the single player campaigns of Starcraft 2? If you were a creative developer, you love starting and exploring new ideas. So why aren’t developers itching to carve out a new franchise? It is because the huge single player campaigns are needed to bridge the gap between RTS and MMO.
Bah. Let’s hope the Warhammer MMO ends up being good. I would like to see Blizzard suffer some real competition.
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