What happened
On 20 October Blizzard published an interview in Talent Tree, its own staff series, with Jens, the senior creative director for brand and creative. His team makes the trailers, campaigns and events that introduce Blizzard’s games, and this year that included StarCraft’s. [A]
It is the first thing Blizzard has published about the game since the reveal week. It has nothing about gameplay, platforms or dates. It does explain three parts of the announcement.
The signal was planned
“In the lead-up to BlizzCon, we also let a ‘rogue signal’ cut through on StarCraft.com and left it to the community to piece together what it meant.” [A]
So the disturbance on the official site before the show was part of the campaign, not a fault or a leak, and Blizzard now says so in plain words. It does not say what the signal meant. Fan readings of it are in circulation. We do not repeat them, because Blizzard has confirmed the signal and not any meaning.
The logo, and “Join the Dominion”
On the new logo: “The question we kept coming back to was how to feel unmistakably true to StarCraft while signaling that something has changed.” It had to carry “the weight of thirty years of history” while saying that “this chapter is its own thing”. [A] That is intent about branding. It says nothing about how the game plays.
The interview also names “the STARCRAFT Join the Dominion experience at BlizzCon this year”. [A] “Dominion” has now named the reveal cinematic and an event at the show. [B] That makes it a theme of the marketing. It is still not a subtitle, and it says nothing about whose side the player is on. The game’s name remains STARCRAFT, with no number and no subtitle. [C]
The interview credits the cinematic to Blizzard’s Story and Franchise Development team, and calls the game “a return to interstellar war from a new point of view, much closer to the action”. [A]
What changes
Nothing on the list of confirmed facts. Our reading of the “Dominion” cinematic has a section on this interview, and the sourced overview records it with the reveal.
Change history
- First published version, as a report of its own. The interview was read and cited on 21 October in the cinematic analysis and the overview.
Read and released by a named editor before publication. This is a report on a published document or a recorded statement, quoted from the source cited. We have no access to the unreleased game, and nothing here describes firsthand play.