The Starcraft title used to be a favorite amongst many of our administrative staff. We felt like this deserved some attention.
At one of the panels at this year's BlizzCon, Blizzard vice president of game development Rob Pardo showed off the single-player campaign of StarCraft II for the first time. The presentation focused on the Terran campaign and humanity's hard-drinkin' hero Jim Raynor.
The big departure from StarCraft is that story won't be doled out only in cut-scenes and through in-game conversations. Instead, in between missions, you'll get to control Jim on board the battle cruiser Hyperion, interacting with different elements of the ship and chatting with shipmates in role-playing-game style conversations with branching dialogue trees. The way you navigate the ship (click on a control panel, point of interest, or character milling about the deck) is reminiscent of a modern-day Wing Commander III or IV, only minus Mark Hamill and giant kitty puppets.
The campaign also allows a good deal more freedom than the original StarCraft's. A mission-control interface on the bridge brings up a map of local star systems along with information on all the nearby planets, and in certain situations you can choose which missions to undertake and which subplots to follow or ignore. In Hyperion's ship bay, you find a terminal that allows you to purchase units (Vultures, Banshees, etc.) for use in further missions with the money you collect as you successfully complete campaign missions -- meaning that you may not end up having the "ideal" unit combination when it comes time to do a certain mission. Pardo indicated that while you have multiple ways to get through the campaign, there won't necessarily be multiple endings, and all roads eventually lead to the same conclusion.
After showing off the Terran campaign, Pardo was quick to point out that each of the other campaigns (Zerg, Protoss) would be "very different" from one another, and hinted that the return of Kerrigan would play a major part in the Zerg section.
