Blizzard Entertainment has finally unveiled the official debut trailer for the second part of its StarCraft II trilogy, the Zerg-centric Heart of the Swarm.
This trailer marks the culmination of a recent stream of media on the new game, which includes a teaser trailer dropped a few days ago and a batch of fresh screenshots straight from the title.
It would take thousands of words to give a proper backstory for this trailer (no hyperbole), but in case you’re a StarCraft naif, I’ll attempt to offer something of a primer.
That pretty girl in the skin-tight lycra/spandex/kevlar/magic space clothes featured heavily throughout the trailer is Kerrigan. There was a time when she would have been the space marines’ busty female analogue of Solid Snake, but during the events of the original StarCraft she was captured by the Alien-esque Zerg and turned into something of a Zerg/Lady hybrid.
Apparently this process gave her an intense desire to genocide mammal-kind (along with rad chitinous dreadlocks), and at the time of Heart of the Swarm, she serves as the half-breed warhawk leader of the bugs.
Obviously her bloodlust is a problem for the humans, and the techno-shamanistic Protoss see her as an anathema to the natural order that must be purged lest her creepy crawly army turn the entire universe into a live-action Giger painting.
Aside from that, the trailer is notable for giving us a relatively good look at the Zerg unit upgrade screens. They seem pretty analogous to the ones the human forces used in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, only with the requisite insectoid aesthetics.
As with all Blizzard games, the official company line is that StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm will be done when it’s done.