There was a bit of confusion when Blizzard announced that Starcraft 2’s single player campaign would be split into three separate titles. There were rumors and speculation as to what they would charge for the games and when they would be released, with the pessimists of the gaming community expecting simultaneous releases of $50 titles. Blizzard VP of Game Design Rob Pardo has explained in an interview with Joystiq that this isn’t the case. Well, the release situation, at least.

With the announcement about Starcraft 2 being a trilogy, do we know how long it'll be between releases?

We don't know yet, because we don't even know when the first game is getting released yet. I think there's some feeling out there that because we're treating each of the campaigns as almost like separate products, that people have somehow confused that into they're going to be separate products. In a lot of ways, you should think about the follow-ups as being kind of expansion sets to the original. It's just that the campaigns are not going to feel like expansions, they're going to feel like full, independent stories.

So, you know with any luck, it would be like a year for each successive one, but that's going to be a target date, that's not a promise.

Do you know what the pricing on it will be? People are bristling at the thought of having to pay for a game three times.

We would do the retail price based on the value that we're putting in the box. So, if the value in the box is less than the original, then we're going to price it like that. We're not just trying to get people to pay full price for something that's less, if the followups end up having the feature set of an expansion, then that's how they'll get priced.

I can understand and support the idea of calling these expansions, but their reluctance to do so is questionable. I suppose it could make players expect more multiplayer enhancements like full blown expansions usually deliver, but if they referred to them as “Single-Player-Expansions” from the beginning I don’t think there would have been as much outcry. Yearly releases of $30, 6-hour expansions to the campaign mode make sense, and would be preferred to Blizzard’s usual schedule of taking twelve-year gaps in-between sequels.

I don’t expect to hear much more in the near future as Blizzcon comes to a close, but I’m sure it wont be too long until Starcraft 2 is on store shelves, grinding productivity to a halt across America and Korea. You’d think with this shared love there would be better relations between the two countries… oh well. Or is that the wrong Korea?

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