Captain Picard isn’t here, man.
Maybe, but after two months of multi-player goodness (and badness, believe us), we’d love to get our hands on some single-player action.
The SC2 Blog recently managed to get a representative into Blizzard’s top-secret California HQ to get a look at the single-player campaign in Wings of Liberty. It took planning, dedication, and distracting the guards by showing off some leg, but they got in, and the police didn’t even get called.
Small victories, gentlemen.
In reality, of course, they, along with representatives from several other websites got the chance to hang out with Blizzard execs for a day and get their greasy paws on the Beta build of the single player game. We can only imagine the number of Lysol wipes Blizzard was forced to use after their visit – how many would it take to clean a screen that had been lovingly grasped, licked, or otherwise fondled, we wondered?
Then we stopped wondering, because that’s gross. Just…yeah.
But regardless of their predilection toward human-electronic love, the “journalists” that entered the closed world of Blizzard emerged with some very interesting news about the single player campaign.
It was already a well-known fact that players would have access to Jim Raynor’s ship, the Hyperion, which serves as the main hub of the game. From there, players will be able to navigate to new missions, research upgrades, and get information about all of their units, but this trip into Blizzard’s maw brought some more specific information to light.
The Hyperion has four main sections, the Bridge, the Cantina, the Armory, and the Lab. On the Bridge, Raynor can send the ship to its next destination, or interact with important storyline-related characters that will appear on it. From the Bridge, it is also possible to go back and replay a previously completed mission, either to earn more credits or to access parts of the map that might not have been available based on your current unit setup.
This is not the bridge of the smooth lines and contralto voice of Star Trek – there’s no Earl Grey tea here, and Raynor won’t be smartly tugging his jacket down. He’ll be pulling jackets over heads, hockey-style, while throwing scalding hot water on faces. Let that steep, sucka!
Ahem.
Next is the Cantina, which is mostly for entertainment’s sake, but also allows access to the Merc vendor, who sells specialized units. There’s nothing like the loyalty of man who works for money – leaders come and go, but money is forever.
To check out your new (and old) units, you can visit the Armory, which contains detailed stats on each unit. It also holds the upgrade interface, which, with enough resources, will let you give your units two levels of upgrades. The great thing here is that upgrades are permanent. Unlike multiplayer, where a tech lab needs to be researched every game, once you buy an upgrade in the single-player campaign, it stays bought, and is useful in every mission thereafter.
The last of the main rooms on the Hyperion is the Lab, where new technologies for buildings and units can be researched. Each map contains a set amount of “research points” that can be collected, and then spent on new tech. This tech isn’t simple Terran junk like a better machine gun or new tires for the space Winnebago – this is Zerg and Protoss technology.
There are two tech trees, one for each race, and they offer bonuses like regenerating vehicle health and automated gas refineries. Sweet.
The single player campaign is shaping up to be a completely different experience from the multi-player, and frankly we couldn’t be happier. We like the multiplayer aspect of the game and are fully aware that it will take the lion’s share of praise when the game is released, but sometimes its fun to spend some time in the single player campaign, achieving concrete and interesting goals rather than the ubiquitous “blow ‘em all up” scenario.
One might be the loneliest number, but if Three Dog Night and the multiplayer experience has taught us anything, it’s that two can be just as bad as one*.
* Provided that two is prepubescent whiner who cares more about winning in 30.62 seconds that having fun. Occurs in 58.6% of all Starcraft 2 multiplayer matches. Whiners void in Quebec.
