At Blizzcon, Blizzard’s annual convention, Starcraft 2 lead designer Rob Pardo announced that the single player campaign of Starcraft 2 will not be complete when the game ships, but instead is going to be split up into three separate games.

Three seperate games. As in, you need to buy 3 different titles to get the complete single player campaign for the same game.

Now I’m a huge Blizzard fan. But I’m seriously scratching my head at this. On one hand, Blizzard is probably the best game studio in the industry when it comes to putting out a quality game product. After all, they’re the same company that made a decision to essentially terminate production on Warcraft Adventures, a game quite far along in development, because they felt the game just would not have met their high quality standards. So I don’t doubt Blizzard’s commitment to and integrity in game quality.

But another part of me just can’t shake the feeling that this move feels was something pushed by the suits for more money. Expansion packs like Brood War or Warcraft III’s Frozen Throne were a different story; not only did the single player campaign get furthered, but more importantly, the multiplayer game was expanded with more features, units and gameplay changes that made it a completely different game. Each title of Starcraft 2 is only going to expand the single player while the multiplayer will stay the same. Wha?

I have enough faith in Blizzard to reserve final judgement, but I’m pretty skeptical right now.