"Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm" Trailer Is Up

I found a Blizzard newsletter in my Spam box the other evening and it sent me to the following link.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/heart-of-the-swarm-preview/

That link in turn sent me to this trailer, which is also posted on the Blizzard web-site.



So much for the grand idea I had for an interquel novel taking place between the human campaign and the Zerg one. 

(I actually wrote a query and a long and a short synopsis, and e-mailed William Dietz, the author of Starcraft II: Heaven's Devils, to see if he could get me the hook-up with Blizzard.  He said with Blizzard, it's "don't call us, we'll call you."  And there was something on the site I overlooked that Matt Schafer found for me that describes how they don't accept unsolicited content.)

It seems the Zerg campaign begins immediately after Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty with a backstab by Dominion forces--Nova and a bunch of Ghosts bust in and try to kill or capture Kerrigan while she's still recovering from being, as some Battle.net people have put it, "fumigated."

Raynor at the very least survives to see Kerrigan obliterate her would-be assassins, but some of the promotional material asks the question "Where is Jim Raynor?"  Hopefully he'll survive.  Maybe I'm just being a hopeless romantic, but I'd like to see a happy ending for both of them.

Based on what we see so far, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of conflict between the Zerg and the humans.  Kerrigan apparently makes war on the Dominion forces seeking to cleanse Char and later wages "genocidal" wars with the Protoss (given how the Protoss exterminate the Zerg whenever they find them, it might not be the Zerg being the bad guys this time), but the campaign looks like she's reuniting the Swarm and assimilating dangerous wildlife to use their genes to create new Zerg war-breeds.  Something tells me it'll be primarily Zerg-Zerg and Zerg-Protoss combat, with the only anti-human fighting being at the beginning of the campaign.

Drat.  I was hoping she and Raynor would team up and take down the Terran Dominion once and for all.  I even had a scenario I suggested on Battle.net for a campaign mission where she brought down the Dominion Ghost Academy and found Raynor's son, who was taken as a child into the Ghost program, and brings him back to his father.  It would be a good tie in with the books--little Johnny Raynor is mentioned in Liberty's Crusade--and would tie the expanded-universe in with the actual games.

(Blizzard, if you do intend to use this plotline, don't junk it because someone else came up with the idea and you fear lawsuits.  I promise here, in view of the world, that I didn't suggest the idea to you.)

Nothing definite on the release date, just the usual "we've got high standards and we'll release it when it's ready."  Not that there's anything wrong with not releasing products prematurely--far from it--but I would like to know when it comes out.

(My computer can't run the first game as it should be run, let alone this, but I could always play it elsewhere.)