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| - Any piece of literature authorized and licensed by Blizzard Entertainment is in-fact, official. The book series written by Richard A. Knaak in particular is an excellent example of real 'Azerothian' history and lore available outside of our game software. We work closely with authors that help us expand our game universe, and the material should be considered official.
- Question: Will you be referencing any of the character development like, say, Queen of Blades towards the ending in any of the upcoming games like StarCraft II... do you kind of say the books were the books and the game is the game?
Chris Metzen: These books specifically are kind of the definitive take in my mind, which means we got a chance in Queen of Blades to show you a lot of scenes we could not show in the game. When does Raynor actually meet these guys? When does [sic] Tassadar and Zeratul actually hook up and meet? That's a huge part of the game that we never show. How does Tassadar, this Executor of the Protoss, this really talented, driven guy, get jumped into this whacked cult that his bosses hate and by the end of it become this Twilight Messiah and take down the monster alien of the galaxy. How did that all happen? We never actually touch any of it in the game. I don't even know if it occurred to me that we didn't when we published it... talk about a galaxy-sized hole.
So, the books have been our chance to fill in some of those gaps, and try and tell more the story, make it make sense more [sic].
But of course, like Liberty's Crusade wasn't quite as full. There were events in the game that we didn't cover in that book, but the soul of the book is true, like the idea that there were small interaction with Raynor and Kerrigan that we didn't see in the game. A lot of times, so we're trying to tell a story, and it's a wargame, which was difficult to do back in the day, thus our pretty new story mode, but the idea was that you couldn't always get all the beats in that you wanted, even the beats that really make it make sense in a linear fashion and from a thematic standpoint. We actually didn't always get to say everything we needed to say. Surprisingly, the game held up pretty well, like you know, what it was in the day, we're still very very proud of it, but it's almost like despite the technology, we always had a lot of frustrations... we were not able to get everything in, so I guess what I'm trying to say with way too many words is the fact that the books are our chance at redemption and telling the whole tale, so my hope is that they do it well.
Andy Chambers: Well, as I mentioned earlier on, we're also taking the opportunity to take characters who may be appearing in the books and put them into the game of StarCraft II, like Matt Horner, as an example, never appeared in StarCraft, but he's there in Queen of Blades... he's a pretty cool guy, we should really use that character. That's all part of trying to make everything together into this grand universe ideal, which I what I trying to shoot for. It's like it doesn't matter how obscure the reference is, if it's out there its got some role that crosses over to the rest. I'm not a big fan myself of "well, they're in the novels, they have nothing to do with the game"... It's a big living breathing universe ... every time you put a brick on the wall it becomes a part of the universe.
- We’ve had a discussion about that and there’s a couple ways we’d like to handle it but we have to have canon in that this is the definite choice. So what we’ve come up with is what we call the “A” choice is always canon. So in that case it would be siding with Hanson so that she is alive. Siding with Tosh and choosing on Char to take out the air platform.
However, we’re trying not to actively deny that your experience has never happened. So what we’re doing is, if we ever need to reference something, we have a canon version. But the truth is, my preference is to just avoid those topics all together so that your experience is never invalidated. So you play Wings of Liberty and you make certain choices as you go forward in the StarCraft Universe. You don’t run into anything that invalidates your previous choices.
- ...We didn't want to answer the big questions. I knew that this sequel was not going to materialize for many years. We had a lot of projects ahead of us, and I didn't want to get ahead of the bus. I wanted to pick nice, safe little books that would be cool stories in and of themselves but wouldn't necessarily put us in a bad spot and set up questions that we weren't prepared to answer.
- Yeah, the novels are pretty much considered canon, um, the funny thing is some things are less canon, we shoot for canon...typically the characters in novels are canon...
- Chris Metzen: ...We didn't want to answer the big questions. I knew that this sequel was not going to materialize for many years. We had a lot of projects ahead of us, and I didn't want to get ahead of the bus. I wanted to pick nice, safe little books that would be cool stories in and of themselves but wouldn't necessarily put us in a bad spot and set up questions that we weren't prepared to answer.
So what's been cool lately, Christie Golden has been doing the Dark Templar trilogy, which at its base is an attempt to tell more of the Protoss history, but at the same time, get the engines lit for this sequel, and begin to set up some plotlines.
Andy Chambers: Yeah, we've taken that opportunity to actually start building in and foreshadowing some of the events that are going to happen in StarCraft II. It's been a lot of fun...
Chris Metzen: It's cool 'cause we're kind of developing them concurrently.
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