Well, Blizzard has rolled out with its first prank of April Fools' Day — renaming StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void into Herald of the Stars. It's all part of Blizzard's new renaming structure, in which all of their games follow the "HotS" trend.
"As you might expect, Blizzard Entertainment is constantly researching the aspects of our games that our community of players enjoy. One thing that has unexpectedly come to our attention is our audience’s love for the acronym HotS. With recent successful titles Heart of the Swarm, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearth (of the) Stone, we took notice of players’ absolute love for this particular string of letters. This caused us to reconsider everything, and the results were nothing short of spectacular," Blizzard says (remember this is a joke!).
"Over the last few years, through deep market analysis, ethnographic study, and highly advanced acoustic research, we have come to scientifically prove that the player community prefers games with titles that form the following acronym: HotS," adds a fake Jack Sterling, Blizzard's Head of Trend Studies. "We were amazed. It’s quite unexpected. For some reason, people just synergize with the acronym HotS. In one study, 87% of respondents choose the HotS acronym over another random video game acronym. People seem to like how easy it is to say, how attractive they feel when saying it, and the sudden rise in body temperature associated with such an impactful acronym. Other than that, it’s baffling, but it’s awesome at the same time!”
A fake Hony Tsu, Senior Game producer, chimes in: “Developing the StarCraft II franchise puts a lot of responsibility on us at Blizzard. There were many creative hurdles between Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, and we just love the acronym HotS. We’ve spent so many hours of time searching for names in the past. In fact, more than half of the time we spend in development is on hair-brained, outlandish, theory-crafted suggestions from random co-workers. With Herald of the Stars, our team saves not only frustration and time, but we get to hold on to superior acronyms. It’s hard, on the spot data that can’t be contested. HotS is like a … hug of the soul. HotS will hugely overhaul the sacred naming conventions of our games. I just realized that thanks to my name – Hony Tsu – my e-mail address is HoTs@blizzard.com. That just makes heaps of total sense.”
Ready for the details of the new expansion? It'll feature a "revolutionary" non-linear campaign that can be played "backwards, forwards, with any mission in any order, or not played at all, while still delivering the exact same life-affirming storyline."
It'll answer "the important questions" about the Protoss, like what they eat and how they breathe. New weapons, new items, and new hairstyles on Stalkers. There's even a dance editor!
Check out the new website for the fake expansion. Make sure you also look at the HTML code; there's a nice surprise.
