Heart of the Swarm unit stats/lore and beta access

[Hawki]

We will. A "Warcraft Encyclopedia" has been confirmed along with a Book of Cain sequel. No word on a StarCraft one though.

Technically it's understandable since in terms of lore, StarCraft is arguably the smallest of the 'big three.' And after BoC, I'd gladly pick up any encyclopedia from one of said three. Still, hope SC gets some love eventually as well.

[Pr0nogo]

Blizzard are lore-master-fuck-ups. SC will never have any 'love' from them.

[Kimera757]

I'm pretty sure StarCraft is the second (after Diablo), although still well behind Warcraft in terms of lore development and love it gets from Blizzard.

[TcheQuevara]

Well Kimera, in one of the Q&As Brian Kindregan said he wasn't participating in anything like a Starcraft "book of cain". So unless he was hiding information, we got nothing.

Starcraft is the smallest of the three indeed. They just translated Tides of War (Warcraft) and The Order (Diablo) to Portuguese, but they didn't do it to Flashpoint. To me it's a sign that they aren't investing that much in Starcraft lore. Could also be just a sign that Starcraft is not as popular in Brazil, but you know, Blizzard's strategy in Brazil, IMHO, haven't been trying to supply our demand; they're trying to expand here. I'd risk to say there isn't that much demand of Warcraft books in Brazil either, but it's an investment. The book works as advertising for the game. Why wouldn't they be doing the same effort for Starcraft in Brazil? Seems to me it's because of the central strategy.

We make all those assumptions. I wish we could bet on them.

[Hawki]

Were the above books translated simultaniously with the English releases though? Flashpoint has only been out for a month after all.

(Puts on nerd cap.)

As for lore investment...well, let's be honest, Warcraft will always get the top spot. It's been around the longest, it's got the most fans, it's the most lucrative via WoW, so it makes sense that it gets the most investment. StarCraft and Diablo are pretty even I guess at the end of the day. Diablo's got a longer core game series, while StarCraft has had more EU works written for it. Looking at product chronologies, StarCraft had a vacuum between 2002 to 2006, while Diablo had one from 2007 to 2012. One could call Diablo the black sheep of the 'big three' in that it never had an RTS phase, doesn't have "craft" in its title (nah, really?) and was an inherited universe rather than one Blizzard really designed itself. Or you could call StarCraft the black sheep by virtue of it being the only sci-fi media of the 'big three' (although Titan could change that). And if we're only focussing on game releases, both of them had an extremely long hiatus over the last decade, not helped by the cancellation of Ghost and the original version of Diablo III.

Personally I'd label Diablo as the 'black sheep' of the three, if only because of its different origins and the difference between D2 and D3 (across the entire spectrum) feels far more pronounced than the difference between SC1 and SC2 (to me at least). Still, storywise I guess, there are distinct projections concerning where each series will go post-LotV and D3, so we'll probably be following them for awhile.

(Takes nerd cap off.)