starcraft-ii posts

IGN's second episode of The Jace Hall Show is now online and it has the second part of the former Monolith head's visit to Blizzard offices. We also get to see some funny-weird stuff in this segment including Stan Lee ruining Hall's copy of Incredible Hulk 1 and original V's star Jane Badler seemingly swallowing a real life mouse (and we are not kidding about that).

But you don't really care about that. You want to know if anything was revealed in the Blizzard visit. As a matter of fact the show did show what looks like some legit art designs for the female Monk class in Diablo III . . . which Hall then tried to steal. Nice. And next week's episode takes place in a StarCraft II design meeting. What will we learn, if anything, from that show? Stay tuned. In the meantime you can check out the episode after the jump.

[Via BlizzPlanet]

It's February 2010 and we thought we would be well into playing in the multiplayer beta for StarCraft II by now As it is, developer Blizzard is still keeping the many millions of people who want to get their hands on the sci-fi RTS sequel waiting, and waiting and waiting even more.

However the game's official web site is still being updates with some lore-related content. This week the site has added a bio of one of the game's characters. Matt Horner who is one of the main allies of one of StarCraft's main characters Jim Raynor. In the meantime, publisher Activision Blizzard is expected to give a status report on StarCraft II's progress as part of its quarterly financial results which will be revealed on Wednesday.

A few months ago there were strong indicators that the 2010 edition of BlizzCon would be held in Las Vegas. Those reports were pretty quickly proven to be incorrect. Now our sister site WoW.com has posted up word that Blizzard's (sort of) annual fan event may have a final date and location.

According to a post at the Anaheim (CA) Convention Center web site (that has since been removed after WoW.com's first story) BlizzCon 2010 now has a date of October 22-23. Of course the convention center has been the home of BlizzCon since its start. Blizzard has yet to officially confirm the dates and location for BlizzCon. Last year the event had 26,000 fans attend (ticket sold out almost immediately) who got to play new builds of StarCraft II and Diablo III. What's in store for this year's show? Stay tuned.

It's a new year and the first month of January 2010 was a busy one for PC gaming news. Part of the reason was the annual Consumer Electronics Show where there were a few interesting announcements that concerned PC gaming. However there were also plenty of other news items in the past 31 days that will affect us in the coming year.

In fact our normal top 10 list was so full of things we could report that we managed to stick in a couple of extra items as honorable mentions. If this list is any indication 2010 will be a very busy year for news in our industry.

Click on the image above to continue reading The Top 10 PC Game News Stories For January 2010

So there's been a flurry of activity on the StarCraft II side this week, some of it true and some of it . . . well, just wishful thinking. But Blizzard does have another game in the works. Even though the title won't be released until 2011 at the earliest, the official Diablo III web site has posted up 10 new screenshots to remind us that , yes, they are still working on their action-RPG sequel.

We have added all 10 new visuals to our own Diablo III gallery. They all appear to be from the desert-dungeon area that was first shown during BlizzCon last August. We suspect new screenshots will all we will be getting from Blizzard on the game until the next BlizzCon.

All of us would like the beta test for StarCraft II to begin. However it looks like some unnamed person at Blizzard unwittingly decided to get tons of web sites in a frenzy by posting up a placeholder for the system specs of the long awaited RTS sequel on the European StarCraft II support site.

Lots of web sites quickly posted up the info but didn't actually read the system specs. If they did they would discover they are exactly the same as World of Warcraft's system requirements. In any case, Blizzard's PR folks have been contacting those sites to squash the "news" of the system spec. The game's official message board also has a statement, saying,"The page where this information was found was a placeholder that should not have gone up. We will have more information about the system requirements once the beta starts." In the meantime the official Blizzard support page for StarCraft II is indeed up and running and has a couple of nuggets of info but with no system specs yet.

This just in: Blizzard still hasn't started the official beta test for StarCraft II. Ok, that's not really news but fan sites that like to hype up such info are abuzz again about rumors that Blizzard might be getting closer to launching the long awaited multiplayer beta to the even longer awaited RTS sequel. Starcraftwire.net, a fan site which has given its readers lots of false hope in the past that the beta launch was imminent, is doing it again. They are linking to another fan site has gotten emails from Blizzard that ask for info about some of their members so they might be included in the beta test.

As the fan site admits, that doesn't mean the beta is launching this week or event in a few weeks but it does show that Blizzard is prepping for the time when the beta launch will begin. In related news, a teaser video for the upcoming third season of The Jace Hall Show at IGN shows the former Monolith head man at Blizzard with a glimpse of what appears to be a StarCraft II beta welcome screen.

[Via Blue's News]

Blizzard continues to operate in semi-stealth mode in terms of development updates for StarCraft II but they have been updating the game's official web site with some relevent info on their long awaited RTS game. A few days ago the web site has posted up a new fictional short story that centers on one of the game's more powerful units.

That would be the Protoss Mothership and the short short also comes with a new short gameplay trailer showing the Mothership and other Protoss units in action. You can check out a YouTube copy of the trailer after the jump. In the meantime Blizzard is still keeping us in the dark in terms of when StarCraft II's long awaited beta test will finally begin.

We are a few days into the new year but Blizzard must know that nearly every PC gamer is waiting to see if StarCraft II really will be coming out "soon". There's still no word on when the multiplayer beta test will begin, much less a solid release date for the long awaited sci-fi RTS sequel.

However, Blizzard continues to promote the game with more glimpses and this week the game's official Facebook page offer up a single new screenshot showing the Zerg and Protoss factions going at it. As we first reported a few days ago, StarCraft II will have some single player Protoss action in the main Terran campaign when its released.

Ever since Blizzard announced that their long awaited RTS sequel StarCraft II would be split up into three parts, most folks had assumed the first installment, Wings of Liberty, would be all about the Terran race in its single player campaign. As it turns out, the game will also have something a little extra for Protoss fans.

As confirmed by Blizzard's European community team in a Battle.net message board post, the single player campaign for Wings of Liberty will have a main Terran campaign and "a Protoss mini-campaign that lets you control Protoss units. This part of the campaign mode is of course way shorter than the Terran part, but it is very fun to have a very different playstyle to add even more variety to the game."