The principal developer of Starcraft II, Dustin Browder, says that the campaign for the next arc of the Starcraft II epic will be all about "fury, revenge, hatred."
"Kerrigan has been grievously wronged by the universe," said Browder in an interview with GameSpot. "Arcturus Mengsk has betrayed her, left her behind, and taken by the Zerg to become a murderer of billions."
"After the events in Wings of Liberty, she now has some of her free will back and she's pissed. That's going to be one of the challenges for the character. Does she succumb to that rage completely and be destroyed by it, or does she transcend in any way?"
Browder says that Kerrigan, rather than being treated like a Mary Sue, will be treated harshly by the campaign's storyline. "We're going to beat up on the poor girl really badly in the story. Raynor had it easy in Wings of Liberty. Kerrigan has experienced a lot of losses and destruction, and she's going to be enraged by all that's taken from her."
Additionally, Heart of the Swarm will bring some changes to the game's online matchmaking system on Battle.net.
"Right now, there's an arcade where we overhaul our custom game interface to make it easier for players to search for custom mods, as well as filter searches so that it'll display the most popular, the most-played ones, and new ones off the assembly line."
""This would lead to a quality-based mod ecosystem, right? The current interface just shows off the most-played ones all the time, so we wanted to shake that up a bit."
Browder also reiterated the design team's desire to implement custom map selling.
"We'll also have to add in the ability for users to share and sell their custom games to other users," he said.
Heart of the Swarm is set for a PC and Mac release in 2012.
