My biggest question so far about StarCraft II's first expansion, Heart of the Swarm, is what sort of zerg-oriented metagame Blizzard will wrap around the add-on's new set of campaign missions. In the first game's terran campaign, you walked good ol' boy Jimmy Raynor around his flagship between missions, overseeing laboratory research and developing new vehicle modifications that subtly changed the abilities of your units in subsequent levels. But the zerg swarm has no labs or garages to work with, so how are you going to provide the player any sort of meaningful between-mission progression? What's going to make this campaign different?

Now that I've played a couple of missions from Heart of the Swarm and played around with the stuff you'll be doing between those missions, I'm at least tentatively equipped to answer that question, and also fill you in on where we're at in the storyline with this expansion. But hang on: it's impossible to talk about any of this stuff without directly referencing the pivotal event at the end of Wings of Liberty. If you haven't finished that game and care at all about being surprised by the end of it, stop reading.