At a recent press event, Starcraft II lead designer Dustin Browder told Shacknews about some of the game's single player missions.

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.

Reminds me of the mission in Halo Wars where defensive lasers sweep the deck of the ship and kill your units unless you garrison them inside.

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.

Day/night cycles aren't very common in real time strategy games. Vampires aren't very common either. Bring 'em on!

We've got missions where you're trying to defend a Terran colony that's getting infested one piece at a time, and you've got to try to put out all these fires while fighting off these infested units.

Oh dear. "Defend the base while it burns down" sounds like one of those missions you'll be glad to never have to play again once you've beaten it.

We've got this mission where you are a lone ghost trying to influence the course of an entire battle.

This sounds like a nifty idea for a commando mission. It makes me wonder once again what it might have been like if Starcraft: Ghost hadn't been canceled.

We've got missions where you're racing against the Zerg, both fighting your way to the same Protoss base trying to reach a goal.

So Blizzard is going to taunt us by making us play alongside a faction we can't use in the single-player game (Starcraft II will be split into three separate games, each with a campaign for one of the three races; only the Terrans will be playable in the first game).

We've got battles on ancient forbidden space platforms where the very space itself damages your units.

"The very space itself damages your units"? Sounds like it ranks right up there with "defend the base while it burns down".

I trust Blizzard has more surprises up their sleeve for the Starcraft II single-player campaign. To be fair to Browder, he was just talking off-the-cuff. But he was responding to a question about whether the single-player campaign would "catch some people by surprise". And while some of those scripting gimmicks might be fun, there's not a single one of them that's the least bit surprising. This is exactly the kind of stuff real time strategy games have been doing for over a decade.