What do we know so far of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void?
When Blizzard Entertainment announced StarCraft II at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational on June 2008, then Blizzard Executive Vice President Rob Pardo pointed out that the popular military science fiction real-time strategy game will consist of one main game, Wings of Liberty, and two expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void.
Each of these titles would revolve around one of the three races in the StarCraft universe.
Wings of Liberty, which launched in 2010, followed the adventures of Terran hero Jim Raynor as rebelled against the Terran Dominion power.
Heart of the Swarm, which was released in 2013, centered around the Zerg race and hero Sarah Kerrigan, a power psionic Terran-Zerg hybrid. The expansion had an RPG-like element about it, as players could level up and upgrade Kerrigan, the self-styled Queen of Blades.
The alien Protoss race will be the central race in Legacy of the Void, and the hero-protagonist is slated to be the legendary dark templar prelate Zeratul.
Not much details are known of the plot at the moment. Blizzard developer Chris Metzen did tell PC Gamer in an interview that: “There’s a 300 component to [Legacy of the Void] where the mighty rise, and start pushing back against the shadow.”
The story has been written though. Robert Clotworthy, Jim Raynor’s voice actor, said at the 2013 StarCraft II World Championship Series America Finals that the “story has already been written, a lot of the cinematics have been done, and the voice actors are in the studio and working on it now.”
The last real information about Legacy of the Void came in November 2013 from game director Dustin Browder.
Browder noted that although the “missions are coming along,” they need “more work,” and the “campaign mechanics — like how you progress as the Protoss — needs some more work before we are ready to show anything.”
“It didn’t feel like you were playing the Protoss. You want to have that feeling like ‘We’re the Protoss. We’re these bad-ass space Samurai. We’re going to lay down our lives for the greater good ... oh, and by the way, we could glass you planet if you mess with us,’” said Browder.
Blizzard are notorious for not releasing games until they get it almost perfectly right, so going by what Browder says, Legacy of the Void could still have quite some way to go.
There is no release date for Legacy of the Void though, so Blizzard are not exactly being constrained by a time line.
Reddit user Beakyboo has come up with a plausible reason for why Blizzard are not exactly rushing to release Legacy of the Void:
“Blizzard has more active games right now than ever before. With hearthstone and RoS [Diablo III: Reaper of Souls] just releasing, Heroes nearing beta and another WoW [World of Warcraft] expansion coming this year, I think they want to save LotV for a bit. They might also consider that holding back on LotV will help Sc2’s lifespan since it’s the last content we will get.”
Still, fans have commented on reddit that they are expecting some sort of Legacy of the Void announcement to be made at Blizzcon 2014, which will be held at Anaheim Convention Center from November 7-8.
Ultimately, given that Legacy of the Void will probably be the last full StarCraft II game for a while, and that Blizzard took three years to release the first StarCraft II expansion, fans shouldn’t get their hopes up for a quick launch of Legacy of the Void.
