Remember how in StarCraft's Terran campaign, the one mission everyone remembers is the "survive for 30 minutes until extraction?" How the traditional StarCraft gameplay was wrapped around a single high-concept hook? From what I've played, almost every mission has a similar mechanic.

The first few missions are pretty standard: find guys and kill them. The third mission repeats the "survive until you get extracted" mechanic. And from then on, you can summarize each mission via its hook. One mission involves mining minerals from an unstable lava planet: every five minutes, the lava seeps up and submerges the low-tide -- meaning that when the lava rises, you'll need to place your Terran structures in hover-mode or have your ground units retreat to high-tide for the approximately 30-seconds before the lava tide sweeps back down. Though, I occasionally use this to my own advantage; I'd sometimes bait the enemy into being trapped in low-tide just as the lava rises and watch them melt away. Another one focuses on stealing a Protoss artifact, with the hooks being that the Zerg are also attacking the Protoss, so you have an informal "timer" being represented by the Zerg wave at the top of your screen wiping out the Protoss, and the Protoss' defense of their artifact.

One mission chain involves the evacuation of scientists from a planet; the first mission in the chain is the simple escort/evac. The player just has to make sure transports full of civilians make their way from the base to the starport on the other side of the map. Browder points out the two main methods that testers have done this mission: either marshall a large force to escort the transports one at a time and take enemies as they come, or to build a series of bunkers along the road to wipe out the bad guys without much supervision/micromanagement. For the record, I did a bit of both: I'd build a decent force of guys and place down bunkers in particular "hot zones" to reinforce the escorts.

It's the follow-up mission that I absolutely love; one that fuses StarCraft, Pitch Black, and 30 Days of Night together. In it, you're on a planet with an alternating day/night cycle (every five minutes, it switches): during daylight, you're safe. You can build forces and go out and destroy structures. At night, the infected Terrans will relentlessly stream towards your base -- necessitating a strong defense against the "zombie hoard." As you destroy structures, the rate of "zombies" increases, to the point where just as you have a handful of buildings left, they are popping out of the woodwork with no gaps or breaks in the action.




When it was announced that StarCraft 2 would switch from being a Terran/Zerg/Protoss game to a Terran-only game at first, it seemed a bit odd. But now, it doesn't seem so weird. "You played six missions; if we stuck to the original formula, you'd be almost done with the Terran story, but now, we have room to explore these crazy new missions. We now have room for a lava planet, a day/nite zombie attack, and a train robbery," comments Browder. But man, if this means the campaign has more stuff like the day/nite zombie invasion, then go ahead and make this a Terran only campaign (after all, Dawn of War already did the one-race-per-campaign deal). And most of all, take your time, Blizzard. Take your time.