Quick Look: StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

One piece of news I did not see reported on much from Blizzcon is that Blizzard is continuing development on new Starcraft II content next year.

The biggest piece of that is that they are continuing to create more campaign content. They will be releasing a 9 mission mini-campaign called Nova Covert Ops, it will be released in 3 parts with the first part releasing early next year.It has full cut-scenes and a metagame between missions. Nova will be controllable like Kerrigan was in the Heart of the Swarm campaign and she can be customized with different armor and weapons.

They will also be creating new co-op missions, releasing new commanders for that mode. They will be releasing new micro-content, as they call it, with stuff like unit skins. They are adding more features to multiplayer, like a revamp of their ladder and mmr systems. It was also mentioned that they will consider making big changes to multiplayer units as necessary, going so far as to create new units to address balance concerns or keep the game feeling fresh.

Also remember that whole thing about paid mods they were pitching before Wings of Liberty came out? Turns out they will finally be introducing that, the launch will have them working directly with established creators instead of the App Store model they originally pitched.

So it kinda sounds like they want to support Starcraft II in a similar manner as the live support they've been using for Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone. With a mix of Paid and Free content. As someone who never really put that much time into the multiplayer but really enjoyed their campaign content this seems pretty cool for everyone.

After being big into the multiplayer during 2011-2012, i can't really see myself doing much of that anymore, but the campaigns are enjoyable if you can live with a generic blizzard story.

@zaldar said:

While StarCraft is certainly still very fast-paced, they've made a lot of steps over the course of SCII's lifespan to minimise a lot of the "APM wins games" stuff. That said, it's always been more a game about decision-making and strategy more than speed of execution - you just have to make those decisions quickly.

@ripelivejam said:

Anime is for jerks. Wakakozake, however, is for cool people.

"In the rear with the gear!"

I know Brad never primarily played Terran in Starcraft 2, but it's crazy that he wouldn't know some of the basic way they operate from playing against them for a couple solid years of being way into Starcraft 2. The part where he thought you could accelerate build time by swarming workers (only true in Warcraft 3, or Starcraft 2 Terran campaign), or that he kept building individual Barracks to build more Marines when he could've built reactors on those Barracks.

@brad@jeff The ONLY anime!

Psuuuuuuuuu!

Blizzard confirming once again it has the worst writers out of all big budget video game developers.

SC2 is so good.