Gamers have been desperately waiting for a Nova game for quite some time. Sadly, Blizzard has never delivered... until now... sort of. The psychic-assassin Nova will star in a three mission campaign starting March 29th. To celebrate the expansion a launch trailer was let loose into the public.
The StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops trailer is only 40 seconds long but it keeps it short and sweet, focusing on the tension between Nova and Matt Horner, a Terran Dominion Admiral. The trailer went live over on the official StarCraft YouTuber channel and you can check it out for yourself below.
We don't get to see any gameplay whatsoever, and the cinematics aren't quite up to par to some of Blizzard's other work. Instead it only briefly centers around the tensions of Horner and Nova, as Nova appears to be in a prickly predicament and apparently needs to clear her name.
We get hints that her memories may have been altered, so it could be one of those things where Horner may have been playing mind games with the psychic covert operator... a dangerous thing to do especially considering what happened with Sarah Kerrigan, another Terran Ghost who ended up becoming the Zerg's Queen of Blades within the StarCraft II lore.
The whole arc of the StarCraft II universe centered around the relationship – the good and bad – between Kerrigan and Jim Raynor. So when it came to an end in StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void it definitely left a lot of people wondering what was up with Nova and would she ever get her own game?
Originally Nova was to star in StarCraft: Ghost, which looked like a very promising, stealth-oriented, psychic-based, third-person shooter. We don't get those kind of games very often, quite naturally a lot of gamers were excited about the prospect of playing as one of the other Ghosts within the StarCraft universe.
Unfortunately, Blizzard canceled StarCraft: Ghost and broke the hearts of many gamers. They've made some slight reparations in the format of announcing that there will be three parts with three missions each following the saga of Nova. It's certainly not the StarCraft experience that fans had been longing for, but it's going to make use of the StarCraft II engine. Additionally, it provides gamers with all of the basics they've come to know and love, while also introducing some brand new mechanics, skills and abilities specifically implemented to take advantage of Nova's abilities.
The in-engine cinematics look a-okay to be a low-budget side-project from Blizzard, and I'm still curious how they're going to handle the actual in-game play when StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops goes live on March 29th.
The rest of the Nova Covert Ops missions will be released throughout the rest of 2016, expanding the universe of StarCraft to potentially new heights. You can learn more about the first part of the expansion by paying a visit to the official website.
