starcraft-2 posts

After a few days of silence, Blizzard has now sent out a press notice to the media responding to the "World of StarCraft" MMO mod. If you remember Blizzard got YouTube to remove the trailer for the mod to its sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II which generated a ton of protests from the mod maker Ryan Winzen and a number of his supporters. We are posting Blizzard's response in full:

Earlier this week, a player-made StarCraft II mod called World of StarCraft and described as a "StarCraft MMO" was featured on a number of prominent gaming news sites, catching the attention of gamers as well as our own. With the name so closely resembling that of World of Warcraft, we wanted to discuss the title of the mod with the developer, and as part of our routine procedure, we contacted YouTube to request the video be removed while that discussion took place. We were also curious about the project and wanted to discuss with the developer what the mod entailed.

It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor. As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past. That's why we release an editor with our RTS games, and why we feature top player-created content in the custom game search. It's also why we held a contest to spotlight the best community-crafted StarCraft II mods at last year's BlizzCon, and why we'll continue to improve Battle.net to better showcase player-created content.

Like many players in the community, we're looking forward to seeing the continued development of this mod, and as part of our ongoing discussion, we've extended an offer to the developer to visit the Blizzard campus and meet with the StarCraft II development team. As always, we appreciate all of the efforts of the talented and enthusiastic mod-making community, and we look forward to seeing and playing what they create using the StarCraft II editor in the future.

As previously reported, Ryan has since been contacted by League of Legends developer Riot Games about a possible job at its studio.

The person in charge of a mod that would have turned StarCraft II into an MMO game may just become a pro game developer after all. After Blizzard put a copyright notice on his World of StarCraft trailer (most likely due to the name and not the content of the mod) Ryan Winzen has now got an offer to an interview for Riot Games, the makers of the free-to-play action-RTS game League of Legends.

All of this came about because Ryan really, really wanted to get into the game development business and felt that making an MMO out of Blizzard's sci-fi RTS game was the way to do it. As Pixelated Geek reports, he's happy that this opportunity has come this way, saying, " ... I've waited my whole life for something like this."

[Via Blue's News]

Forget about that IBM computer that is beating the champions in Jeopardy. The real test to see if a CPU can defeat a human is if an AI program can beat a human player in StarCraft. That's the opinion of a group of programmers at the University of California at Berkeley. As reported in a new Ars Technica story, the group have created the Berkeley Overmind which, after lots of matches, defeated a skilled pro StarCraft player in the fall of 2010. The program later won a StarCraft AI tournament held as part of the 2010 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference.

The article, written by one of the team members behind the Berkeley Overmind project, goes over in great detail on how the team developed the AI program. As you can guess some of it is on the technically side but it's some fasinating reading. Yes, an AI program can be faster than a human when it comes to building units but as the team discovered it';s harder to get the AI program to actually decide the best way to defeat a StarCraft human foe. There are also videos showing the Berkeley Overmind program in action and you can follow the team's future progress at its web site.

We have seen gamer-themed food products before (Gamer Grub, for just one example). Now a new company called Gamer Food has announced its presence and is selling health bars with names that are inspired by StarCraft (Protoss Delight) and World of Warcraft (Mana Bar).

The makers of these new products claim these health bars are all natural, organic and hand made to give gamers a quick pick-me-up in between online matches. The Mana Bar, for example, has ingrediants such as organic clover honey, rice cereal and more. Each bar costs $9.99 each for a three bar pack or you can get all six bars shown above in a 12 bar bundle for $32.99.

Yesterday we reported on a mod team's plans to make World of StarCraft, a StarCraft II mod that would turn the sci-fi RTS game into a full MMO title. In retrospect it was perhaps not the best idea to call the project World of StarCraft. Lawyers from Blizzard have apparently stepped in to stop the mod from at least using its current name. The pre-alpha video of the mod posted on YouTube have been pulled.

That doesn't mean the mod itself is shut down but one of its team members, Ryan Winzen, is acting like it is in a post on the mod's message boards. His post, in all honestly, reads like the reaction of a 12 year old who got his toy taken away from him.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Before StarCraft II was officially announced in 2007, many people believed that Blizzard was about to reveal a "World of StarCraft" MMO game. While that didn't happen, a group of mod makers for Blizzard's sci-fi RTS sequel say they will make it happen via StarCraft II's own mod tools.

We have to be honest; we seriously doubt that these mod makers will be able to come up with something that is a true MMO with things like persistent servers, quests and huge maps to explore. However we say, "More power to them" if they can actually pull this off. We just hope the music score is better than the Techno crap that is in the video for the mod after the jump:

[Via PC Gamer]

The launch of two PC games from Blizzard helped boost sales of the overall PC game software industry in 2010. A new report from the NPD Group said sales of PC games in retail stores in the US were 3 percent bigger in 2010 compared to 2009. The biggest reason were because of sales of Blizzard's sci-fi RTS sequel StarCraft II and the MMO expansion pack World of Warcraft Cataclysm. According to Gamasutra, NPD stated that those two games generated 14 percent of all PC game sales in 2010.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm was the third best selling game, console or PC, in December according to NPD's numbers. Call of Duty Black Ops was the number one selling game in the US for the month of December and for 2010 overall.

Earlier this week developer Blizzard released a large 1.2 patch for its sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II. One of the features in the new patch was the establishment of a new online Master League for the truly serious and skilled online players. According to Blizzard only the top 2 percent of all online gamers in each of the game's regions will be picked to join the new Master League.

The official StarCraft II web site has posted up some more info about the new Master League on its web site. One of the info bits is that there are plans to launch an even more elite class of players called the Grandmaster League, which will have the top 200 players in each of the game's region. There's no work yet on when this league will begin.

For those having trouble with the StarCraft II auto-patcher, the stand alone patch for the v1.2.0 update is available to download for both PC and Mac. The patch includes a number of bug fixes and game enhancements such as race balance changes, editor improvements and additional Battle.net chat channels.A full list of changes can be found on the official website.

Download StarCraft II v1.2 Patch [US] (275 MB)
Download StarCraft II v1.2 Mac Patch [US] (242 MB)
Check out all StarCraft II downloads

The long awaited official 1.2 patch for StarCraft II is now available to all players of Blizzard's hit sci-fi RTS sequel. Beta versions of the 1.2 patch were made available to any player if they signed onto a public test server but now the patch is now public in its final form.

As previously announced this large 1.2 patch adds the long awaited in-game chat features, featuring both public and private channels. Customizable hotkey support has also been added along with an "Extreme Graphics" option that turns on the game's ambient occlusion visuals. There's also a new Master League, allowing the best online players of StarCraft II to compete against each other. There's also a ton of bug fixes, unit balance changes and editor additions. The full patch notes can be found at the game's official web site.