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1 month ago
Ten years after the StarCraft II saga started and five after its final episode, Blizzard have announced they're winding down development. They still plan to tweak balance, but won't be making new paid content. Not putting a pillow over its spaceface, but shuffling it off to a spacehome. Their announcement also muttered about thinking about what's next for StarCraft, though I wouldn't take that as…
1 year ago
Your next Starcraft II opponent might be a robot in disguise
Google's DeepMind AI division will likely end up making the next generation of military killbots, but before then, at least they'll provide new challenges for the esports crowd. In January, their "AlphaStar" StarCraft II agent trounced a crew of pro players ten to one. To make sure it wasn't a fluke, they've unleashed AlphaStar on the European public. According to this official blog post, AlphaStar…
2 years ago
Feature: Terrans for nothing and Zerg for free
Best StarCraft 2 mods: huge RTS campaigns you can play for free
StarCraft 2 remains an RTS esports favourite nine years from launch, but its mod scene never got the love or attention it deserved. Despite Blizzard's support, an in-game mod browser, powerful editor and even a short-lived premium mod program, a lot flew under the radar. While some mods and standalone missions remain popular in the StarCraft 2 Arcade, we're going to be diving deep into…
3 years ago
Let’s get Raynor to rhumble: StarCraft 2 launches free version
Blizzard have released a big free version of sci-fi real-time strategy game StarCraft II, offering one full singleplayer campaign along with all the multiplayer. This launched overnight, available now if you sign up for Battle.net and download its client doodad. The free version contains the campaign from 2010's Wings of Liberty--the one focused on humans--plus bot battles and online competitive, casual, and co-op action. That's…
If you, like me, bought the original StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty then skipped the sequels, good news: you can now get the Zergy one, Heart of the Swarm, for free. This little freebie comes ahead of Blizzard launching a big free version of SC2, including the Wings of Liberty campaign, next week. Yeah, I'll give this a go now for free. Stomp around as…
A huge chunk of StarCraft II is going free later this month as a sort of big 'ol demo for the wider trilogy. From November 14th, everyone will be able to play the full Terran story campaign from the original Wings of Liberty, the competitive multiplayer including units from all three chapters, and -- with some limitations -- the cooperative mode too. If you dig…
Blizzard and Google betray humanity with StarCraft 2 tools to train artificial intelligences
When the robots come for us, bad sci-fi has taught me, it'll be teenage whizzes who save the world. In light of that, I believe that Blizzard and Google's DeepMind Lab are taking the audacious and treasonous step of pre-emptively toadying to our future robot overlords. They've teamed up to release a machine learning API and toolkit to use StarCraft II [official site] as a…
5 years ago
Blizzard are jazzing up co-op missions in StarCraft II [official site], adding optional 'mutators' to change missions in strange and difficult ways along with a rotating lineup of 'weekly mutations'. Each week, expect new preset challenges on a certain missions, such as the combination of infested hordes spawning in waves, infested monsters bursting out of corpses, and a deep dark fog of war for the…
'Legacy Of the Void', 'Whispers Of Oblivion'. Man, whoever's in charge of names at Blizzard needs to go and lie on the grass in the sunshine for a while, otherwise we're going to end up with 'Warcraft IV: I Just Feel So... Empty, Y'know?' The aforementioned Mutterings Of Unconsciousness is the name given to a 'prologue' for upcoming Starcraft II [official site] expansion Inheritance Of…
