The sound you just heard was a million message boards devoted toand real-time strategy games going up in flames. At the BlizzCon 2008gameplay panel, Blizzard's VP of game design Rob Pardo dropped a bombshell on the attendees. Apparently faced with the choice of delayingor drastically scaling back the single-player portion of the product, the design team decided to do neither. Instead they're going to be breaking the single-player portion of the game into three different products. We sat down with the game's Lead Designer to discuss the decision and probe a bit deeper into what players can expect from's single-player game.According to Dustin Browder,'s design team never intended to break the game up into three separate parts. "This decision was all about trying to get enough choices and options into the game," Browder said as we began our discussion about the "trilogy." "We got to a really bad place in developing the campaign where the story had become too big. There were too many things we wanted to do, too many characters we felt needed to be in there and 25 or 30 missions we'd need to provide enough variety."More importantly in the decision making process, according to Browder, was the sinking feeling the development team got when they started cutting campaign features to squeeze the whole thing into one product. "We didn't want to tread water with this game and just give the fans something slightly better than. It felt like we were going backwards.", the game's first campaign, will be shipping with a full and complete multiplayer suite with all three races available. The subsequent titles will add campaigns for the Zerg and Protoss races and both will carry additions for the multiplayer portion. While no price point has been set yet, Browder stated that if the follow-up games feel like full-featured games, they'll be priced accordingly. If they don't they'll probably be priced around the average expansion pack price. "We usually don't think about price points until we're relatively close to shipping," Browder said. Whatever the price is, though, we want the fans to feel like they've gotten their money's worth."Looking back now, Browder can see that in a weird way, this particular decision was inevitable given the development team's attitude about the single-player portion of the game. "A lot of games try to use the single-player campaign to teach the players how to play multiplayer. The problem with that is, no matter how good a player is at the single-player portion, there's no way to eliminate that gap between being good enough to finish the final mission and winning online. Eventually everyone who ventures online for the first time finds their butts getting kicked by real people." That's why the development team decided that the single-player portion of the game would need to stand on its own and would have to be divorced from multiplayer."Not having to worry about multiplayer really freed us up creatively," Browder said as we moved into a discussion of the game's design. "We were able to put in extra units and fool around with stuff without having to worry about multiplayer balance, just whether a particular mission worked." Among the other goodies awaiting players of the single-player campaign are the possible return of the Goliath, the Wraith and the medic units from the original. "The rationale is that Jim Raynor's been around for a while and a lot of this older technology is cheaper and would be the kind of thing a guy like him would have access to." The game will also sport an interesting economic system in which the player will be able to purchase various upgrades that would never pass muster in multiplayer, such as the ability to build both a reactor and a tech lab on a barracks or a larger splash damage radius for units that do AoE.