StarCraft II Beta To Begin This Month 182
mrxak writes "It's official; Activision Blizzard's much-anticipated sequel to 12-year-old StarCraft is going to enter closed beta 'this month,' according to company President Mike Morhaime during an investor conference call. This comes in the wake of the SC2 beta forums showing up briefly on Battle.net. If you've got a Battle.net account, it's probably not too late to opt-in for upcoming Blizzard beta tests."
Re:This beta should be...fun? (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, so one $60 game and two $50 expansions. (plus DLC or some other asinine way to milk more funds out of the customer, er, consumer.)
SC2 = Star Control II (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I enjoyed StarCraft, the acronym "SC2" will always be reserved for Star Control II [wikipedia.org] in my mind.
Re:This beta should be...fun? (Score:5, Informative)
You're seriously comparing hosting that many live-action gaming servers with some match-making servers?
The game servers are hosted by the players, not Blizzard; only the match-making server will be hosted by Blizzard.
Re:Obligatory release date question (Score:2, Informative)
It's done when it's done. If the balance appears to suck during the beta, then we might even wait another year.
Re:This beta should be...fun? (Score:5, Informative)
According to Blizzard; no. The first game will only contain one campaign, the human one I think, but will contain full multi-player, including all the units and races from the next two expansions. Thus, if you are only interested in multi-player you can completely ignore the two other campaigns.
You are unfortunately wrong there.
From http://www.starcraft2.com/faq.xml [starcraft2.com]
How will the expansion sets impact multiplayer gameplay?
The expansion sets will add new content to each race for use in multiplayer matches. This could include additions such as new units, abilities, and structures, along with new maps and Battle.net updates.
In other words you *will* need all three expansions for multiplayer matches. Of course they won't force it, but that would be exactly like playing wow at lvl 60 when everybody is lvl 80.