Blizzard dropped a bombshell on fans at the Starcraft II gameplay panel at Blizzcon on Friday. Citing the epic scope the game’s story had taken on, and their desire to not cut any of it, while still maintaining a realistic development cycle, Blizzard have decided to release the highly praised real time strategy game’s sequel as a trilogy of stand-alone campaigns. Fan reactions were mixed.

Blizzard said Starcraft II will be released as three separate standalone single player campaigns, one for each race, which will be self-contained stories with no cliffhanger endings, but will still be tied by an overarching plot. The campaigns are titled Terran: Wings of Liberty, Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and Protoss: Legacy of the Void. All three races will be available from the get-go in multiplayer, regardless of which campaign(s) you have installed.

Blizzard said that the campaigns, each running for 26-30 missions will feel like games unto their own. Blizzard Executive VP of game design Rob Pardo says that while the second and third campaign "will be like expansion packs," the company isn’t planning on sacrificing content and that it “really want[s] them to feel like standalone products."

This will be the first Blizzard RTS to feature more than one expansion pack, as all previous titles since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness in 1995 have had exactly one expansion pack each.

Fans have had mixed reactions, and while some praise Blizzard’s dedication to not cutting content, others see the move as simply a scheme to make customers pay three times for what is essentially just one product.

No official release date or schedule for any of the trilogy’s parts has yet been revealed.