"Heart of the Swarm" Opening Cinematic

Got on Facebook a bit earlier than usual this morning and this is what I found. The opening cinematic for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm in all its glory.



We see just how terrifying and destructive a Zerg assault on a human world can be. We also see just how large the Terran battle-cruisers actually are. Based on their depiction in-game, I didn't think they'd be that big.

Enjoy!

Bigger "Heart of the Swarm" Trailer

The other day, I found a new trailer for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.  Apparently it was revealed at BlizzCon.



Looks like the Dominion has shown itself untrustworthy, on a much larger scale that just sending in a bunch of Ghosts to kill Kerrigan like the earlier, smaller teaser trailer revealed.  Like, attack-by-capital-ships untrustworthy.  And Valerian and Warfield might not be coming out of that treachery alive....

(Sucks for Warfield, as it seemed he was on the level and even made Rayor commander of the entire Dominion force while he was having his arm fixed.  But if Valerian went into this intending treachery from the beginning, to hell with him.)

Some of the promotional material makes what's going to happen in HOTS sound really GrimDark.  Raynor has gone missing, while some artwork on the Blizzard web-site depicts Kerrigan with a reinfested arm. 

I hope they don't kill off Raynor and then have Kerrigan go totally insane and reinfest herself or, worse, have her think Raynor is dead, reinfest herself, and then have Raynor show up alive again and think Kerrigan is truly irredeemable even with the use of the Zerg-purging artifact.  Heck, with the dialogue snippet "the girl you knew is dead," this makes it sound like despite being forcibly de-Zerged, Kerrigan is still evil.

Wings of Liberty was a lot more optimistic than the first Starcraft and Brood War, with the Dominion public rioting upon learning of Mengsk's true evil nature and the Swarm decapitated and Kerrigan returned to human form.  That was pretty refreshing, considering how dark the first games really were. 

One can hope they took the darkest quotes and scenes from Heart of the Swarm out of context and strung them together to make the story sound a lot more GrimDark than it actually will be--some of the promotional material describes Kerrigan only remembering some of what she did as Queen of Blades and not liking it, which shows there's hope for her.  She does look pretty angsty when she's loading her rifle, while the Queen of Blades would have probably been joyfully homicidal.  Raynor is only missing, not confirmed dead.  And the new trailer depicts a lot of human-on-human warfare, including what looks like a military drop on a human planet. 

Ending the Second Great War with Kerrigan's Zerg and Raynor's Raiders holding Arcturus Mengsk to account for his many sins would be awesome, with the Dark Voice and his Protoss-Zerg hybrid army over the horizon.  However, some stuff I've read on Battle.net indicates the hybrids will be entering the sector en masse and they'll put the hurt on the player, so punishing Mengsk might not in the cards for a bit...

BTW, the soundtrack in this trailer is just awesome.

It's Nice To Be Noticed, But...

I logged on this morning and found I was getting traffic from the Starcraft Wiki, this link in particular.

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Johnny_Raynor

The link basically states that Johnny Raynor, Jim Raynor's apparently-dead psionic son who is only mentioned in the novel Liberty's Crusade (and I think some of the comics as well) would have appeared in the novel I would have pitched to Blizzard had the company been willing to accept unsolicited submissions.

Thanks for the publicity, but that isn't accurate.

What I was suggesting on the earlier page was separate from my novel.  For the sake of clarity, I will explain both:

*My proposed novel would have taken place after Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and set the stage for Heart of the Swarm.  As I imagined it, the events of Wings of Liberty decapitated the Zerg Swarm and caused a lot of political instability within the Terran Dominion as Mengsk's greatest crime--calling down the Zerg on the Confederate capital of Tarsonis and obliterating it--was revealed.  Without Kerrigan, the Zerg Swarm was breaking apart and going wild and Raynor, Prince Valerian, and Valerian's General Warfield were going to liberate threatened worlds--and taken them from Valerian's evil, embattled father at the same time.  Meanwhile, Sarah Kerrigan, the Zerg Queen of Blades now restored to humanity, was dealing with the colossal guilt being the worst war criminal in human history brings as well as the hostility of Raynor's crew and the threat of revenge by another formerly-infested Terran freed from the Swarm.

I wrote a synopsis, a treatment, and all the other stuff for my submission and wrote William Dietz, author of the novel Starcraft II: Heaven's Devils, about how to proceed.  Unfortunately, I learned that Blizzard operates on a "don't call us, we'll call you" policy re: tie-in fiction.  My friend Matt Schafer later found this policy had been posted on Blizzard's web-site too.  No unsolicited fiction.

Darn.  In any event, the trailer for Heart of the Swarm and some early bits of the storyline show my predictions as to what would happen were off-base.  The Dominion appears to betray Raynor and company early on, Kerrigan escapes to take control of the Swarm, and Raynor has gone missing.  Ouch.  I hope he survives the whole experience.

*The scenario with Raynor's son was something I posted on the Battle.net forum as something I wanted to see in Heart of the Swarm.  My scenario was that Kerrigan's assault on the weakened Terran Dominion using Zerg she has brought under her control would take her to the Ghost Academy.  There, she would find  Raynor's son, who it turns out really didn't die in a "shuttle accident" soon after being taken by the Confederate government and had been part of the Ghost program ever since.  One fellow thought this was awesome and that he'd never imagined Kerrigan as being a stepmother before.

This scenario would have been a mission in the actual game (Kerrigan attacks the Ghost Academy), not part of the proposed book.

Could someone who is a member of the SC Wiki correct this?  Feel free to link to this page as well as the first one.  :)

"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.)