Blame Blizzard's PR campaign, blame the length of PR the game's endured, but I don't think I've ever seen Starcraft II's singleplayer campaign really laid out in front of me before. And now, I'm kinda glad that I have.

In an interview with Shacknews, Blizzard's Dustin Browder has outlined some of the variety slated to appear in the game's story mode, and in the process may just have justified the fact we're only getting one campaign at a time.

He says the missions aren't linear, so if you can't beat one, you can say "I'm going to go [get] myself something powerful and come back here and make this one suffer". Which sounds almost RPG-like. Interesting.

Browder also describes some of the mission scenarios for the story mode, which aim to add a little originality and spice to the standard patrol/destroy formula most RTS games go for.

We've got a mission right now where every five minutes, lava rises and kills everything on the ground. Everything dies. You've got to get to the high ground or die. We've got a mission right now where infested Terrans are attacking at night, but they're hiding in the ground by day, so you need to just hold out all night long like you're in I Am Legend. Like, "I've got to live!" and then day, "Get 'em! Kill 'em while they sleep!" And you run out and you burn everything as fast as you can, and then when darkness starts coming you have to get back and hide out.

He describes each of these vastly different singleplayer missions as a "minigame", ranging in time from 15-45 minutes long, with as many as possible featuring truly unique content that's not just a recycled variant of a previous mission.

Add in the fact you access these missions from a central, immersive hub - ala Wing Commander - and you've got something that may breathe a little more fresh air into the RTS genre than anyone was originally expecting from a game that, superficially, looks so similar to something from the 1990's.

StarCraft 2 Interview: Reaction and Reflection