Shack: You haven't shown much of the singleplayer component, and that may be one reason for a lot of the skepticism. Do you think the Terran campaign will catch some people by surprise?

Dustin Browder: I hope so. It's going to be pretty huge. It's really different than anything you've seen before in our titles. This is sort of a level of choice and options for the player--RTS is typically, you're on the rail man. And if you get a mission you can't beat, I guess you'd better take it back. Well, you can't take it back anymore. [laughs] I'm [thinking] of when you could take games back at [Electronics Boutique].

But you were just stuck right, and that's terrible. But now if you get stuck, you can go, "I'm going to come back to this one. I'm going to go myself something powerful and come back here and make this one suffer." At the same time, I think players--we learned a lot obviously in StarCraft, and I think this team learned even more in WarCraft III, in terms of the kinds of mechanics that you're going to get in this campaign. The kinds of things you're going to be doing in missions, I think is pretty cool stuff that maybe players aren't quite prepared for.

We've got a mission right now where every five minutes, lava rises and kills everything on the ground. Everything dies. You've got to get to the high ground or die. We've got a mission right now where infested Terrans are attacking at night, but they're hiding in the ground by day, so you need to just hold out all night long like you're in I Am Legend. Like, "I've got to live!" and then day, "Get 'em! Kill 'em while they sleep!" And you run out and you burn everything as fast as you can, and then when darkness starts coming you have to get back and hide out.

We've got missions where you're trying to defend a Terran colony that's getting infested one piece at a time, and you've got to try to put out all these fires while fighting off these infested units. We've got this mission where you are a lone ghost trying to influence the course of an entire battle. So each of these missions is like a little minigame.

Shack: Yeah, that's what they sound like.

Dustin Browder: It's like a 15-45 minute minigame. Depending on how fun the mission is it'll be longer or shorter. But each one is its own little game for you to play.

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Shack: At this point, are they mostly unique missions, or are there archetypes and repeated content?

Dustin Browder: As much as we can, as much as we can. I'm sure there's repeated content, but it's not by choice. As much as we can we try to make them different. So if we have a hold-out, we try to make the hold- outs different as much as possible. There's some mechanic about it that's fundamentally different.

Shack: It almost sounds similar to the approach taken with the World of Warcraft quests, in a way.

Dustin Browder: At its best. At its best it is, I agree. We've got missions where you're racing against the Zerg, both fighting your way to the same Protoss base trying to reach a goal. We've got battles on ancient forbidden space platforms where the very space itself damages your units. We've got all kinds of crazy stuff. So this is what we're working on the solo campaign that takes so much time. Each mission is a little game.

And we do this all the time--we come up with a little mechanic that sounds really cool, and we go, wait a minute, what if I just do this and build the 200 food and I'll win. [sighs] It's a constant check and balance between what is fun, what feels unique, and what's too fancy. What's just over-the-top too complicated, can't possibly understand it. So I think for a lot of players it'll be a pretty unique experience. It offers a lot of choice for the player.

They can choose the order of the missions, they can choose which units they want to upgrade. So if you love yourself some medics, hey I got a couple upgrades for you they would make them so powerful we'd never put them in multiplayer. We've got a couple upgrades in there--oh, did you want an eight-man bunker with three armor? Go you. Did you want a Hercules dropship that can carry three Thors into battle, and looks like it can? There's all kinds of crazy stuff that you only get through the solo campaign. I think it'll really rock 'em, but we'll see.

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