Starcraft 2 is without question one of the of the biggest games of the year, and the question on everyone’s mind is this:
When will we get the first expansion?
Battle.net project director Greg Canessa may have inadvertently tipped Blizzard’s hand on the release date of Heart of the Swarm, the first expansion for Starcraft 2, during a presentation at GDC Online yesterday.
While discussing future features (including trading replays, broadcasting replays, and upgrading profiles) coming to Battle.net, Canessa said,
a main area of focus we’re going to be seeing on the Starcraft side over the next 18 months between now and Heart of the Swarm.
If this estimate is true, that would put the release of Heart of the Swarm around April 2012. If that schedule holds true, it would put the third installment of the series, Legacy of the Void, in late 2013 to early 2014.
None of this would be a surprise, as Blizzard is famous for taking as much time as they need to complete expansions for their games. According to GameSpot, a Blizzard representative stressed to them that there currently is no announced release window for Heart of the Swarm. Of course, they also said that the expansion will not be shown at Blizzcon this year.
We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out, but don’t be surprised if it’s an election year again before you get your hands on the Zerg expansion.
During a GDC Online session today, Blizzard's Battle.net project director Greg Canessa may have made a revealing slip of the tongue. During a Q&A session, Canessa fielded a question about future Battle.net feature updates like trading replays, broadcasting replays, and upgrading profiles. During his answer he said that these features would be "a main area of focus we're going to be seeing on the Starcraft [II] side over the next 18 months between now and Heart of the Swarm." Heart of the Swarm being, of course, the next planned installment of the company's world-beating Starcraft II. Eighteen months from now would put the release of Heart of the Swarm sometime in early 2012, just in time for the end of the world. Let's hope it doesn't get pushed back. Of course, Blizzard has said there is no official release date, but this comment seems pretty telling. At the very least it's more than the traditional Blizzard response to release date questions: "When it's done."
Let's hope that the third iteration of Starcraft II, Legacy of the Void is out sometime before 2020.
Are you one of the lucky people attending BlizzCon this year? Blizzard has announced the official schedule for its annual convention, which is packed with sessions on the developer's three major franchises.
While you'll have to wait until BlizzCon (on October 22 and 23) for all of the juicy details, you can get a taste of what the various panels will offer by checking out their descriptions. Highlights include a showcase of Diablo III gameplay and a discussion of the art style in StarCraft II. You can see everything on the schedule right here.
Of course, nothing beats being at these panels in person, but if you aren't fortunate enough to be attending BlizzCon yourself, we'll keep you covered with all the big news from the event.
Blizzard has been warning players that they would be banning hackers and cheaters in Starcraft 2, and now they’ve followed through on that threat.
According to a post on the official Starcraft 2 site,
We recently took action, including suspensions and bans, on over 5,000 StarCraft II players who were in violation of the Battle.net Terms of Use for cheating and/or using hack programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair competition that’s essential to play on Battle.net, cheating and hacking can lead to stability and performance issues with the service.
Now, we know that Starcraft 2 sold 3 million copies in its first month. Five thousand out of three million isn’t all that many, but if Blizzard took the time to make certain that those being banned were actually cheating, I’ll take a few thousand at a time.
It’s no surprise that there are cheaters in online games, and there will likely always be. Cheaters can destroy an online game’s community, and if a company doesn’t deal with them effectively, they can negatively impact sales. Blizzard is trying to stay out in front of this issue, and they should be commended for that. Let’s just hope the whining doesn’t get too loud.
If you take a look at the North American leaderboards for Starcraft II, you'll notice that few Zerg players have cracked the top 200. This has led to some members of the Blizzard community complaining about the Zerg being underpowered. Is this something that the developer plans on altering? Lead producer Chris Sigaty responds in a recent interview with PC Gamer.
“You can go up and read on the forums at any one time and there are a bunch of different theories about balance and imbalance. We’re being very cautious about making large swinging changes right now because at the highest level things are actually very strong. The things that we’ll probably be addressing are the 2v2 and larger scale games. Ultimately, the 1 to 1 is what we want to keep as sacred as possible, but as a result right now there are some things that we need to address in the 2v2 at the higher level. We’ll be looking at ways to do that without affecting the 1v1 balance," said Sigaty.
It sounds like Zerg balancing issues aren't the first priority for Blizzard right now. But how does he feel about the race, personally? "I avoid playing Zerg as much as possible because I find them to be just more complex in general. Zerg, or rather larvae management is harder for me to deal with, so I don’t enjoy playing them as much," said the producer.
As for the argument regarding the leaderboards, he chalks it up to there simply being fewer Zerg players overall.
Via Big Download comes exciting news that I think it’s safe to say the StarCraft II community has been eagerly fantasizing about: Coming soon (TBD), there will be new tools for the Galaxy Editor, and more official mods. The announcement, actually more of a vaguely specific but very promising tidbit, came during an exclusive chat over at Game Informer with SCII lead Desgner Dustin Browder. Amid a lot of other rather interesting information about how StarCraft’s patches, changes and upcoming content are progressing, he had this to say about goodies for modders:
“We’ve got some mods we’ve developed internally that we’re going to put out to get some more art into the hands of the mod makers but also provide what we hope are some polished gameplay experiences for our fans to get more value out of Battle.net. ”
Coming so soon after Blizzard released their first SC2 custom Map, this is really promising news. Best of all is Browder’s confirmation that Blizzard fully intends to add Protoss and Zerg to the single player campaign. We’re just going to have to be patient:
“When fans said we weren’t giving them value, we knew that wasn’t true, but we knew that we were costing fans something if they only came to the game for Zerg and now have to wait another two years. That was a price we had to pay.”
So what can we expect first?
“We felt very sorry for our Zerg players, but we’ll have to pay it back to them when we get to that campaign with a larger campaign, with more details on Kerrigan, a more in-depth look at what it means to be a Zerg. “
You’ll find the wine bottle corkers in the corner. In the meantime, now is a good time to remind you that you can check in with our in-development How-to series on modding StarCraft II. Now, go forth and slay some Zerg.
Name: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Release date: July 27, 2010 Platform(s): PC and Mac OS X Publisher: Activision Blizzard Developer: Blizzard Entertainment Video Rating: 4 / 5
Not content with putting out an awesome game, Blizzard has announced that it is releasing Patch 1.1 this upcoming Tuesday.
Among other things, the patch addresses some balancing issues, adds some new hotkey functionality, and includes support for NVIDIA's 3D Vision, and more.
For more on Starcraft II's 1.1 patch, head over to Blizzard's website.
