StarCraft’s reveal trailer squarely put the focus on the Terrans, who later in the cinematic face a terrifying confrontation with the Zerg. The franchise’s three franchises–including the Protoss–have always been a central element of what distinguishes StarCraft from other strategy games. Although the Protoss were effectively absent from the trailer, they are a foe you will face at some point.
GameSpot spoke with GM and creative director Dan Hay at BlizzCon and asked him about how the three factions will interact with each other. Although he was expectedly coy on specifics, he did offer up some thoughts.
“The answer to that question is I absolutely unequivocally can’t say,” Hay said. “But what I can do is tell you what I would want as a player. I’ll hint at sort of not what we’re doing, but some of the things that we think about.
“Of course, what you want to be able to do… you think about the Protoss and how reverent we are. They’re older, and there’s a mystique and a grandness to them, right? They have just a completely different flavor. Then you have the Zerg, and the Zerg are just numberless; they’re infinite from the standpoint of they just overwhelm you with sheer organic power. Then you have the Terrans, that are this group of… they’re working their way through the sector in kind of a haphazard and industrial way. We want that feeling.
“We want it to not all just be one taste. So we want to have moments where you’re fighting things that are organic, and then moments where you’re fighting things that are this wonderful legacy and that are ancient. I want to tell you a lot more, but I can’t.”
Hay did point out something that was easy to miss in the trailer: a small hint of the Protoss.
“You saw more than the Zerg in the trailer,” he said. “If you look a little deeper, there’s a moment when the thing opens and you hear that great horn go off. If you look in the background—just in the background, adjust the lighting just a tiny bit—you’ll see some architecture that is very not Terran and very not Zerg. It’s there.”
Hay also confirmed a third-person perspective for StarCraft. While the trailer may not reflect gameplay, it does showcase one way that could impact the feel of the game, as we see the Terran soldier look up in terror at the size of a Zerg Overlord, something you ordinarily only see from an isometric camera view in past StarCraft games.
He also said StarCraft will have a “single-player focus” and offered some insight into why the game was announced now despite arriving in 2030.
