(Anaheim, California) - Blizzard's Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design, made a surprising announcement at BlizzCon on October 10, 2008 regarding StarCraft II's single player campaign.

"We probably started talking seriously about this a year ago, so it wasn't that early in the process," Pardo told IGN. "We certainly talk about the single-player early on, and we talk about the big ideas about what we want the single-player to be, but we didn't get serious about single-player development until a lot of the technology and artwork from multiplayer was in the game."

As of now, the plan is to have three stand-alone titles for StarCraft II - one for each campaign: protoss, terran, and zerg. The first part of the trilogy is for the terran, titled Wings of Liberty. The second installment is for the zerg, titled Heat of the Swarm. The final part of the trilogy is for protoss, titled Legacy of the Void.

The reasoning behind releasing three separate titles is to allow the developers to expand the content, characters, and storyline for each campaign. Pardo also explained that these will not act as expansion packs for the game once they're released.

When asked about the progress of the different parts, Pardo said that the terran campaign was much further along in the production stages than the other two.

It is not confirmed as to when a release date for StarCraft II will be set by Blizzard. However, he did confirm that StarCraft II will be shipped out before Diablo III.

SOURCE: IGN