WTF!!!?????

I read This earlier this eventing... and quite honestly it leaves me rather irritated. I love Starcraft, but I'd rather not pay three times the price for it.

This is terrible news. I'm kinda shocked that any company would try to pull this off. News like this would automatically make me hate a non-Starcraft game. My knee jerk reaction is to claim that I won't get Starcraft 2 after all...but I need to give this some time to sink in before I come to such a rash conclusion.

"Pardo explained that the multiplayer remains relatively unchanged; each StarCraft II game will have a fully functioning multiplayer suite with all three races playable. "[In] the shipping product, all three races will be fully featured and balanced in gameplay and also in content," he said. We asked whether that meant the multiplayer suite in each game would be exactly the same, and he said, "More than likely, the successive products will add multiplayer content; we haven't decided right now what that is." That brought up the question as to how multiplayer would work if some players only buy the first game while others only buy the second or third games. He said that they haven't made any determinations yet as to how that would work."

This is the biggest issue to me. If I can buy the Terran version and have full multiplayer support, full skirmish support against comps, full map making support, and everything but the zerg and protoss campaigns, then I will likely still buy it. But if there is evidence that they planning multiple expansions that I have to buy to play online that justify their $50 price tags on single player campaigns alone, then I will do everything in my power to stay away. I am very disappointed in you, Blizzard. For shame and such.

If they just charge a bit lower for each individual piece I'll be okay...

If they don't make owning all three pieces a necessity for any future expansions that add to multilayer I'll be okay...

If I can just patch the multilayer to match any changes with the subsequent releases I'll be okay...

If any of those things mentioned above turn out to be untrue I'll be a massive pile of disappointment no matter how good the game is...and I'm sorry but no matter how good the game is it's still Starcraft and it's still Blizzard. What I mean by that is it's damn near the same game we played ten years ago. Sure units are different and it's been given a nice 3d engine but mechanics remain almost identical. Why would I want to shell out $150 for Starcraft just for visuals when I have supcom currently on my HD (which I think looks better, but I digress).

For now I suppose I'll give blizzard the benefit of the doubt, because they really have had the Midas touch over the last decade and a half...but still...if they charge full price for three parts each of which are essentially 1/3 of the total game I'll be mightily disappointed.

Is there outrage in the gaming community about this? Surely its not just us that are cheesed by this. Blizzard had to know that there would be some PR backlash, but even if they lose half their fan base because of this, they will still come out on top financially.

Most of the posts I've read at IGN indicate skepticism. Most people think it's a money grab. I'll reserve that judgment until I see the pricing however.

plus the game won't be out untill 09... more sadness for DIII lovers.

I really don't think this affects DIII at all. I know that they supposedly won't release DIII until after SC II...but come on. We all thought that the game was all but done a couple months ago only to find out that they haven't even started on two of the campaigns yet. I imagine that D III is at least two if not three years off.