Throughout the year, we've been privy to quite a lot of StarCraft 2 details and media, the game is still months away (its release recently bumped out of 2009 and into a non-specific 2010 timeslot) but we've already seen the entire multiplayer tech-trees and we've seen several great extended multiplayer gameplay walkthroughs. What we haven't seen or heard much about since the original reveal is the singleplayer campaign and the storyline.

Now with Blizzard's annual BlizzCon exhibition taking place this coming weekend, they've lifted some of the gag orders and we're now able to tell you all about our recent hands-on play session with the game. For the newcomers StarCraft is to sci-fi as WarCraft is to fantasy. Drawing inspiration from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe, StarCraft, like WarCraft takes things in a much brighter and light-hearted direction, and despite many obvious Warhammer parallels, comes complete with its own intricate lore and memorable characters.




As in the original, the three playable factions are once again the human space-marine Terrans, the hi-tech ethereal Protoss and the organic alien hive-mind, the Zerg. As those who've been following the news will already know, StarCraft 2's storyline is planned as three separate retail releases with the first instalment being the human-centric Terran campaign, Wings of Liberty, and that's what we're here to tell you about today.

Right off the bat we're treated with one of Blizzard's famous cinematic CG cut-scenes - as polished as ever and setting expectations quite high for what was to come but I'm pleased to report that we weren't disappointed. The first thing we're told is that StarCraft 2 singleplayer is not a tutorial for multiplayer. Blizzard have consciously departed from the mindset of using solo play to groom players for Battle.net, allowing them to focus on the storyline with the freedom of unique gameplay mechanics and units that won't appear in the multiplayer component.

Following the introductory pleasantries, the game kicks off with a series of ease-in tutorial missions. The story is set four years after the events of StarCraft: Brood War and the Galaxy isn't in great shape. You play from the perspective of fan-favourite badass Jim Raynor, heading a resistance movement against the corrupt Dominion establishment. You start the tale on on a mining planet and begin liberating the oppressed citizens from Dominion control. Controlling units is immediately familiar and one of the first things I noticed was that you can now select more than 12 units simultaneously, a limitation of the original that will no doubt be a welcome change for lazy RTS players everywhere.

As always, each type of unit has several spoken command acknowledgements with plenty of the requisite humorous quips and pop-culture references. I also made a point of checking the old click on the same unit repeatedly trick and was delighted to find the resulting wisecracks were as good as ever.




When done with the introductory missions, you're picked up by the familiar Battlecruiser Starship Hyperion which then becomes your base of operations; a lobby of sorts from where you'll be managing your campaign's progression. You can navigate around the ship in a kind of point-and-click adventure game manner and upon clicking on a mouse-overed character, Raynor begins a dialogue with them. You get a fully voiced, in-engine mini cinematic sequence for every encounter and it's at this moment you really take notice of how impressive the graphics engine is- capable of both fast-paced RTS action as well as these high-level and detailed interior close-up scenes.

The Hyperion is divided up into four areas: Bridge, Armory, Cantina and Laboratory, each functioning as an interface for a different aspect of your campaign progression. While there will be a distinct start and finish to the storyline, there is still plenty of variation on how you play through the game. Completing missions earns you varying amounts of currency which can then be spent on improving your force in several ways. In the Armory, you can purchase persistent upgrades that augment your units and structures - for example: Stimpacks for your medics or an area of affect modification for your missile turrets. In addition to a detailed written description, there's also a short video demonstration of what each does - little things like this that make Blizzard games the best at what they do.

We're told that you won't be earning enough money to unlock every upgrade and that the concept here is to allow you to tailor your army to your style of play. If you're a defensive player, you'll want to select upgrades that help you turtle down whereas aggressive players will want to be choosing the upgrades that help them deal more damage - great examples of options that would be near impossible to balance in multiplayer but go a long way to enriching the solo experience.




Currency-earned can also be spent in another manner: mercenaries. Accessed via the ship's Cantina, mercenaries are specialised unit variants that are more powerful than standard units. Once purchased from the Cantina, you can then build that particular merc group in-game via the Mercenary Compound structure for the remainder of the story. Again, these are a singleplayer-only device - in multiplayer, the Merc Compound is used for building Reapers and some general infantry upgrades.

Then there's the Laboratory which is where you can reap the rewards of the game's side-missions. In the instance we encountered Zerg Crysalis egg-like things could be found in-game and harevsting several these netted yet another persistent upgrade for our army via the lab. The examples we saw were all just simple fetch x number of artefacts but we're told they are working on implementing more interesting ways to unlock these as well.

Finally, the Bridge is where the action happens, it's your war room before entering each mission where you can chat with the key members of your crew about the current state of affairs. The mission select menu is accessed via the bridge console and presents you with a list of currently available missions which you can play through in any order you like. We're told that there will be points in the campaign where choosing one mission over another will result in a character either living or dying or otherwise difficult moral choices, but that there will still be one ultimate singular ending to the tale.




Making a point of not just being the same old build a base, destroy the enemy base over and over, StarCraft 2's singleplayer missions are perhaps the biggest divergence from the multiplayer experience. Even in the short section of the game that we were able to experience we met with some cool ideas to keep things interesting. One mission was paced like a zombie movie (Pitch Black or I Am Legend style) where with a day/night cycle you had to bunker down during the night to fight off a non-stop onslaught of Zerg-infested Terrans, then during the day go out and destroy the infected lairs, making sure to get back to base before the next nightfall.

Another example was on a volatile volcanic map with lava eruptions every 5 minutes that flooded all low-ground with liquid-hot magma. The catch being that all the tasty minerals are down in that low-ground and your goal is to harvest a specific amount of them, so you need to evacuate your little SCVs and order any structures to lift-off before each wave until the floods subside.

The RTS team at Blizzard have been working on this game since the completion of the WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne expansion all the way back in 2003 and while six years of development is a really long haul, it does show. The choice to focus on each faction one retail release at a time was a bold one, but from what we've seen so far there's more than enough depth in the singleplayer of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty to stand on its own. If the other two also live up to their promises, then three purchases should be well worth it.


Check out AusGamers' exclusive interview with StarCraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder for even more details.