Starcraft 2 Trilogy – Worth Paying Three Times?

July 2nd, 2009

Starcraft 2 has announced that the game will be released with 2 expansion packs planned and they are calling it a Trilogy. The first will be Terrans: Wings of Liberty, the second is Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and the final one is to be Protoss: Legacy of the Void.

This announcement caused an uproar in the community, with questions being thrown around like – why divide it up? What is the value of the proposed expansions? All with the usual moans and wails of course.

As a gamer, I would like to take what may be an unpopular stance. This is strictly my opinion based on a long history of gaming with Blizzard and their many games.

I have been a Blizzard customer from back in the good old days when Diablo was new and we had to walk uphill 2 miles through fire and lava both ways to get to the hostiles…or something like that.

My experience with Blizzard has been, well, to put it mildly – love and hate. I love to hate them especially when they make me wait. However, I dutifully purchased each expansion, on every game I owned to feed my addictions.

Recently with World of Warcraft, I purchased not only the games but the expansion packs, in addition to paying a monthly fee to play it. There’s no free ride in Wow and no single player mode either. Each time I purchased an expansion, I grumbled and griped, but was anxious to get to the new content.

So, you ready to hear my opinion? It sucks that we pay to play, but it’s our entertainment. I have yet to purchase a game or an expansion that did not live up to my expectations or Blizzard’s promise.

Unless you are a pro-gamer or even if you are a pro-gamer, things will get old in any game after a while. Blizzard knows this, and unlike their other games where it seemed that expansion packs were often decided on mid-stream, they have taken steps from the first moment to ensure that boredom doesn’t set in.

I would expect these expansions to be released just as the danger of boredom becomes the greatest. I would also expect based on Blizzard’s history, that each will carry with it, not only new artwork but new abilities and exciting new places to see and battle in, and brand new strategies to devise or revise.

No, I am not a Blizzard lackey, and everything they do doesn’t sit well with me. However, when it comes to dividing the release of Starcraft 2 into segments, I see the logic of it, and the long term benefit to us as gamers, and I applaud.

If you buy Starcraft 2, and enjoy it, you will probably go for each of the expansions and pay what is a fair price for some awesome long term entertainment. If you don’t want to purchase them, fine, just quit whining about them.