This is one of those good news/bad news situations. The good news is that StarCraft II will be a trilogy. The bad news is that StarCraft II kinda won’t be a trilogy. Let me explain — Blizzard has announced that the StarCraft II single-player campaign will be released as three separate products, each containing one of the three races. First up will be Wings of Liberty (Terrans), then Heart of the Swarm (Zerg), and finally Legacy of the Void (Protoss). Meaning if you want to get the full StarCraft II experience, you’ll likely have to cough out three times as much dough as you previously thought.

Blizzard justifies this chopping block treatment by saying that the overall vision of StarCraft II as a whole was simply too huge to fit into a single game. Each release is said to be big enough to be considered a full blown stand-alone title on its own and thanks to treating each of them as such, Blizzard says they’ll be able to deliver more missions and characters in each of the three releases. But three games worth of content or not, Blizzard will be taking some heat for extending three arms instead of one for the races everyone was expecting to be included in one package.

If you’re one of the people terribly saddened by this news, perhaps these fresh gameplay videos from BlizzCon will lighten the mood. Both are three minutes long and show some Protoss vs Terran and Zerg vs Terran action.