Blizzard is giving its fans a chance to participate in the making of StarCraft II by holding a month-long election to decide which model of the Dark Templar unit will end up in the final game.
“The protoss dark templar has always been one of the StarCraft community’s favorite units — now, the community has a chance to participate directly in the dark templar design process for StarCraft II,” Blizzard announced.
Fans can head here to see how the models look and animate and even take a look at their animated character portraits before casting their vote. Voting will be open until February 5th at 11:22 AM CET, but you’ll need a Battle.net account to participate. The winner will only appear, it should be noted, in StarCraft II‘s multiplayer mode and not in the campaign.
The first option looks more similar to the Dark Templar model that appeared in the original StarCraft. It wields a single energy blade on its right arm, has its hair pulled back and wears a cloth shroud over its mouth. According to Blizzard, it “represents the Lenassa tribe of dark templar.” My guess is that this’ll be the fan favorite based on how much it looks like the original Dark Templar, and because shrouds are cool! The second option, which “represents the Zer’atai tribe of dark templar,” wields two scythes and is clothed in heavy armor and the bones of slain Zerg. Its mouth is visible, revealing two fearsome-looking mandibles with fangs around its jaw. Finally, there’s a third option: include both models in the game and have either one spawn randomly whenever you build a Dark Templar.
Of course, Blizzard fans being Blizzard fans, they’ll probably be unhappy with either one, claiming one “looks too WoW” while the other is “for the gays.” Of course, hundreds will still vote despite complaining about a privilege they never expected to get in the first place, and it seems that a good number have done so already, as my initial expedition to StarCraft2.com to cast my vote was met with a 404 error. Awesome.
[Via Shacknews]
Published: Jan 8, 2009 09:33 pm