A Behind the Scenes DVD of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is provided in the collector's edition of the game. Among its features are the compiled cinematics of the story, along with interludes. It suggests that the "true story" involves Jim Raynor choosing to aid Agria and siding with Gabriel Tosh over Nova.[1]
↑Was there ever any plan or had you ever discussed having the story branch off more based off the player’s choices?
We did, and there were a couple of factors that went into why we decided not to go that route. One of them, of course, was simply the cinematics we’d have to do. If we had a really widely varying game, we’d have to create multiple end cinematics, and if we wanted those to be pre-renders, that wouldn’t have been feasibly possible for us. At that point, they could have been in-game cutscenes, of course, which I think look pretty good. That’s an option we could have chosen.
But the second factor is more of a creative choice. We’re even now struggling with this a little bit with what has happened in Wings of Liberty. There isn’t really a canon. We felt like a lot of our players and we ourselves wanted to know what happened. We wanted to have that sense of story. While other games – Mass Effect being a great example – do embrace that sort of player-chosen story, and that’s really one of the core hooks for their entire game – that’s really what their game is about – we didn’t feel like that made as much sense for our game. We felt like people want to know, “How did StarCraft end?” not “Which ending did you get?” Dustin Browder, Phil Kollar. 2010-09-19. Afterwords: StarCraft II. Game Informer. Accessed 2010-09-21.
