Blizzard begins work on StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on August 23, 2010

News: Are you ready for more StafCraft? It won't take a decade, but don't hold your breath.

With StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty now in stores, Russ Frushtick of the MTV Multiplayer Blog decided it was the perfect time to grill Blizzard on the status of the second game in the trilogy, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

Speaking to Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design, Frushtick asked the question that's on everybody's mind... will Heart of the Swarm be a sequel or an expansion pack. The answer is that it'll be a bit of both:

[According to Pardo,] "From a single-player point of view, they're going to kind of feel like sequels. It's going to be a pretty meaningful amount of content."

"Multiplayer is going to be more like an expansion set sort of vibe. We're not going to ship all brand new races. There will definitely be additions to multiplayer, but that's going to feel like an expansion set." Pardo went on to compare the amount of new multiplayer content to what was added for multiplayer in StarCraft: Brood War."

The developer would go on to reveal that work is just now starting on Heart of the Swarm, so don't hold your breath waiting to play it. MTV predicts we won't get a chance to play it until 2012 and I'd have to say that sounds like a realistic expectation. Especially after Pardo says this:

"Now that we've shipped [Wings of Liberty], we're just now getting serious about breaking ground on [Heart of the Swarm]. We always have a lot of ideas and there's been some design work on it, but hardcore art and programming is just now starting to begin. It's too early to estimate, but as soon as we can get them out there, we'd love to."

But while that may seem like a long time to wait for the second episode of a purported trilogy of games, Pardo also talked up the differences between the three games, pointing out that they're not all that similar:

"We're going to do some things that are pretty different, based on the races themselves. We really want to make each racial experience feel true to the race and feel interesting, so I think there will be some similar stuff and some stuff that really diverges to make sense for the race."

We'll have more on the future of the StarCraft II trilogy soon... but probably not too soon.