It’s almost a terrifying experience to put in the old Starcraft: Brood War CD and just go onto any given server. There are still an astounding amount of people playing this game, even a decade after its release. It should be pretty obvious to anyone at this point that the sequel is only of the most hotly anticipated games for the coming year, and it hasn’t even gotten an official release date yet. One thing we do know now, though, is that Starcraft II is going to follow the same single player formula of one Terrain, one Zerg and one Protoss campaign. The catch is, however, that these will be split into three separate games to be released at separate times, even being a year or more apart.

PC users probably recognize this tactic from another major developer on the platform. Valve performed a similar scheme for Half-Life 2, promising episodic content to follow-up with the sequel itself, all within a year of the release of the game. Coming up to four years later we still have yet to see the third and final episode in the chapter, and while the games have been relatively good quality, they have not been very long demonstrating the need for the wait. With HL2 standing as a quality game on its own right, it seems like an odd choice for Blizzard to break up the game into separate campaigns, and doesn’t really seem to offer much to the players. It’s nothing if it isn’t a completely disappointing announcement to fans of the series, knowing they will have to wait another few years to see how the game plays out, and also knowing they will have to pay for each new chapter in a story that used to be wrapped up in the original enclosed packaging.

While Blizzard is not unfamiliar with expansion packs, delivering them for Warcraft II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, as well as having the Brood Wars expansion for the original Starcraft, it’s a brand new concept of not just expanding on content, but breaking it up into succinct and separate entities that are basically enticing you to pick up the next product. In the interview with IGN, executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo stressed that the game “wasn’t really living up to what our hopes and dreams were at first” when they tried to package all the campaigns together. Where there are roughly 32 missions per game for the original series, encompassing all three races, the new games will have a similar amount with only one race per game.

There is a lot of justification on Blizzard’s part with this decision. More developed stories, better time for players to understand the full mechanics of each race through a series of challenges, and more time to balance out just how they want the entire experience to shape out. To gamers, though, I’m sure that having a formula similar to what exists now would have been nice, perhaps adding expansions to the story later. These games are not considered episodic, but fully fleshed out and separate games that will share the same multiplayer experience. It’s a bit schizophrenic in design, and seems to have almost an isolating effect on each campaign, but hopefully it will be mean a better product in the end. Given Blizzard’s apprehension to setting firm dates, and the fact that regardless of it is comes out next week or next decade it will still sell bigger than any PC game on the planet, don’t expect to see the final act of Starcraft II to play out until well into 2012.

A bit of a sad realization.