Many times a game developer or publisher will give advanced copies of a finished gold copy of a game to members of the media so they can play and have a review ready to publish when the game itself ships to stores. That won't be the case for StarCraft II, however. Blizzard's RTS sequel will launch worldwide on Tuesday but members of the media will get to play the full version of the game alongside the game's many fans.

The reason isn't that Blizzard is imposing an embargo on reviews of the game. Rather, as told to Eurogamer and also as told to Big Download via Blizzard's PR rep, StarCraft II's use of Battle.net for the game's servers and authentication makes it impossible for reviewers to play the game ahead of its launch. Blizzard will also be releasing a "day one" patch that will fix issues that have been found by Blizzard in between when the game went "gold" (i. e. when the game's retail disks were replicated) and launch day on Tuesday. That also means reviewers will get to check out StarCraft II's long single player campaign on the launch date (Blizzard has only shown a small part of single player gameplay at press events).