Blizzard Entertainment has announced unveiled StarCraft II, the sequel to its award-winning real-time strategy game StarCraft, at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea. The announcement took place inside the Olympic Gymnastics Arena, in front of thousands of attendees, who received a presentation that included a StarCraft II cinematic trailer and a gameplay demonstration by the development team.
Since its debut in 1998, the StarCraft series has sold more than 9.5 million copies worldwide.
Designed to be the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game, StarCraft II will feature the return of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg races, overhauled and re-imagined with Blizzard’s signature approach to game balance. Each race will be further distinguished from the others, with several new units and new gameplay mechanics, as well as new abilities for some of the classic StarCraft units that will be making a reappearance in the game. StarCraft II will also feature a custom 3D-graphics engine with realistic physics and the ability to render several large, highly detailed units and massive armies on-screen simultaneously.
“With StarCraft II, we’ll be able to do everything we wanted to do with the original StarCraft and more,” stated Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, in the press release. “We recognize that expectations are high following the long-running popularity of the original game, but we plan to meet those expectations and deliver an engaging, action-packed, competitive experience that StarCraft players and strategy gamers worldwide will enjoy.”
StarCraft II will include a unique single-player campaign, as well as fast-paced online play through an upgraded version of Blizzard’s renowned online gaming service, Battle.net. In addition, the game will come with a powerful, full-featured map editor that will put the same tools used by Blizzard’s designers into the hands of players.
Blizzard is developing StarCraft II for simultaneous release on the Windows and Macintosh PC platforms. Further information about the game, including details on the single-player, multiplayer, and map-editor features, as well as system requirements, pricing, and availability, will be announced in the months ahead. To learn more about StarCraft II, please visit the official website at http://www.starcraft2.com
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Stoo” for the heads up.]
Globally this should be one of the biggest games of 2007, and simultaneous release on Mac goes to show that Blizzard are awesome.
Nice!! Wanted to see a Starcraft MMO, but support of online will will be a start.
Everygame needs to be released for the Mac platform.
Wot? Wot!?
Great – another time waster.
“Globally this should be one of the biggest games of 2007, and simultaneous release on Mac goes to show that Blizzard are awesome.”
I’d be surprised if this makes release in 2007. A 2008 release is much more likely given Blizzard’s track record on delays. But yeah, this will be huge and the simultaneous release policy is awesome.
I’ve viewed pretty much all there is to see on this game so far, and it looks amazing.
This game will be rediculouse in the fact that Starcraft is a bad ass game, and that it is Blizzard. SC:Ghost was their only flop… That is pretty good.
This is one of the few “real” computer games that I really got into, but alas, it always came down to how I was going to spend my precious little free time, and I still find life in general interesting enough that most everything else wins out over computer games.
I still own and play computer games, but none of them are on the grand scale of games like Halo and Warcraft et.al. My games are ones that I can just as easily spend five minutes as fifteen on – Mostly payed-for shareware games from developers like Ambrosia and FreeVerse, and others.
But I’m very glad to hear that the Mac remains on Blizzard’s radar.
Hell yeah. The Mac *needs* this from the major gaming companies if it wants to carry it’s market-share into the double digits. Hopefully this becomes a trend rather than an exception.
Can’t wait to remake the BGH map with unlimited resources :p
MAcss suuk cUas daY dont hav GaMesz. WindoOs rools!
Any chance this will play on a Mac Mini?
Also, they did have another flop a few years ago:
a point and click adventure game called “Warcraft Adventures: Lord of The Clans.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_the_Clans
re: This game will be rediculouse in the fact that Starcraft is a bad ass game, and that it is Blizzard. SC:Ghost was their only flop… That is pretty good.
—-
Ghost was NEVER finished or released to the consumer for purchase. So therefore it was’nt a flop.
Blizzard pulled the plug on Ghost because of a strategic change in the development of the game.
Ghost was going to be Blizzards’ first game for the console market. And was scrapped because they decided not to go into that market.
Best decision they ever made imo.
Uhm, an unreleased game cannot be a “flop”. A flop has to be something that failed commercially.
“Deidric
This game will be rediculouse”
Ready & lousy? That is ridiculous.
MW – children. Poifict!
good, hopefully more will start following their lead
Blizzard has had simultaneous – same CD, even – releases since Diablo ][, possibly earlier. They have been in the lead on this for a while.
I got into Starcraft a while back. Got “sorta interested”, then decided Diablo LoD was more my style. The “-craft” games were just too “programmed” for me. Now my allegiance has shifted to WoW. And I’m wondering when WoStarcraft will come along. Sorry this isn’t it.
DLMeyer – the Voice of G.L.Horton’s Stage Page Pod Cast
*puts on geek hat*
Hi Petey, Blizzard had done console games in the past…
The Lost Vikings, Blackthorne, Rock and Roll Racing, and The Death and Return of Superman, granted a couple of those were done before they changed their name to Blizzard…
*tries to remove geek hat but it appears to be stuck*
This is probably a bigger deal as far as games go than most of you realize. Starcraft is essentially a professional sport in Korea. The top player at one point was making $300,000 USD a year before sponsorships.. he was well over a million after… just playing the game. They’re celebrities. Blizzard has been releasing games for Macs forever.. I’m staring at my Warcraft 1 cd, which came out around 1992… “MS-DOS & Macintosh CD-ROM”.
This is the reason I support Blizzard as much as possible. Of course the kick ass games make it easy to do so!
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