I just came back from a very pleasant tour of the Blizzard meeting rooms. After seeing so many videos of the actual fights in StarCraft II, I must admit I was getting a little anxious to finally see how the game is progressing on other fronts as well.

Luckily, the SC II team was on hand to show off the single-player campaign, and really, to go beyond simply showing units going at each other and discussing the finer points of balancing, but to actually demonstrate the wonderful in-engine cinematics that are going into the single-player campaign (on top of the pre-rendered stuff that Blizzard has become famous for).

My tour of the single-player game started with a note that before they do any work on the story and the single-player missions, Blizzard takes time to focus heavily on the multiplayer aspect of the game. That's how these strategies are built - you lay down a foundation and then, once that is ready enough, you build on it with a structured single-player game.

The team that worked on the original StarCraft, Brood Wars, and then WarCraft III and the Frozen Throne expansion is actually heading the development of the sequel, so, as you can imagine, you can expect good stuff from this talented group of guys.

The single-player game, the Terran campaign that is (or part of the story related to the campaign) takes place onboard a mercenary ship. There, a familiar figure from the Brood War expansion, Jim Raynor, is trying to gather enough resources to get back into the big leagues so to speak. To essentially raise an army.

The fantastic thing about this is that, firstly, the quality of the models up-close, as rendered in the game's engine, is absolutely gorgeous for a strategy game. Clearly, the polies have been beefed up and the detail on the textures (for the cinematics), but you can immediately recognize the familiar Blizzard art style and quality. The look on Jim's face is extremely expressive; that of a battle-worn veteran trying to find meaning again in his life while being a little too heavy on the bottle. As the in-engine cinematics continue, we discover that the goal of the developers is to immerse you into the story as much as possible, to actually go beyond simply having little animated portraits on screen as was the case in the original game. This made me think, "man, I can sort of understand now why 'StarCraft: Ghost' was cancelled." Blizzard is looking to essentially transfer the type of cinematic narrative experience you'd expect in a, say, action-adventure, into a strategy game.

The course that the presentation took prompted me to ask whether hero units would be an option in StarCraft II and for now, that one is off the table. But if you think about it, this makes sense, seeing how hugely popular StarCraft multiplayer still is. When I mentioned this, the SC II team responded, "oh we could pull it off, it's just that we want to stay true to the original concept of StarCraft." Fair enough, at least it's good to see the guys are confident (and I can sort of understand why).

Next up, I was shown what looked like a tactical map. Essentially, in StarCraft II, even though the "game will have a definite ending," probably meaning that the main course of the campaign would remain linear, players are free to choose which mission they want to take, thus influencing the way they go about actually achieving the main goals. The concept itself is not particularly new, but it is new for Blizzard.

The same could be said about in-engine cinematics (although those are becoming very popular in WoW), but in StarCraft II these look much more impressive, given the amount of detail on the characters.

Finally, I came as close to the LCD screen as possible, trying to make out all the intricate features on the units, as Blizzard showed off a sample mission, which introduced a new Terran mech-like unit, The Viking. Another unit I was shown was a huge Terran walker unit with guns on its back and in the front. This one they would send against a sizeable Protoss force, and even though the unit was eventually destroyed, it actually withstood an amazing amount of damage (tanking) and did a lot of damage in return. Clearly, these are some of the most powerful Terran units we'll see in the game.

All the while though, I kept admiring the amazing fluidity of the explosions and the amount of detail in the debris and the force fields as a Protoss unit would burst into pieces.

Finally, AT gets a chance to properly sample StarCraft II and we definitely like what we're seeing, especially in the single-player department.

-- Uros '2Lions' Jojic