starcraft-ii posts

Diablo III fans who were hoping that the long awaited action-RPG sequel from Blizzard would be released in 2011 will not be happy with today's news. During Activsion Blizzard's conference call with investors today, execs said that projected earnings for the publisher don't include the release of Diablo III during 2011.

That means that while the game might still make it out this year the publisher doesn't want to take any chances and promise a 2011 release date for the game and then have the game be delayed into 2012. Activision did say that if a delay happens than there will likely be two Blizzard games out in 2012. It's not clear if the second Blizzard game would be a new World of Warcraft expansion pack or StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. During the Q&A Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime stated only that development of the game was going well and that more info on the title, including when the Diablo III beta will begin, will be announced in the future.

BlizzCon has now become a truly annual event for developer Blizzard Entertainment. Since the first fan event was held in 2005 it has only skipped 2006 during its short history. Today Blizzard announced that the sixth BlizzCon event will be held on October 21-22 at its long time home of the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California.

Fans can expect to see panels about current and upcoming Blizzard games at BlizzCon 2011 along with the spectacular costume contest, vendors, tournaments and more. It's likely that Blizzard will use BlizzCon 2011 to show off content from StarCraft II Heart of the Swarm and its possible that the show will debut the fourth commercial expansion pack for the MMO World of Warcraft. The biggest question surrounds the long-in-development action-RPG Diablo III. Could the game actually be finished by the time BlizzCon 2011 rolls around or will it still be incomplete in late October 2011?

Tickets for BlizzCon 2011 will be sold at a still unannounced date with pricing yet to be revealed. It's likely that tickets will quickly sell out when they are offered as they have for the past BlizzCons.

StarCraft II continues to use its public test server to try out new patches for the RTS game from Blizzard. Late on Thursday Blizzard put up the 1.2.1 patch that is now available to download for StarCraft II fans. An FAQ page tells people how to download and install the public test server patch.

The new test patch lets players check out a number of new maps that will be officially released when the patch goes live for everyone. In addition there have been some bug fixes for the game itself along with the StarCraft II editor. For example, the game's matchmaking service now is supposed to better help match players with pre-made teams.

Over three months after Blizzard announced and showed off four of its special custom maps for its sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II, during BlizzCon, three of them are now available for players of the game to try out via a beta test. Players can find the maps by heading to the Multiplayer tab in StarCraft II and find the maps in the custom games window.

One of the maps is Left 2 Die, based (sort of) on Valve's Left 4 Dead zombie shooter as players take out infected structures during the day and build defenses to deal with the Zerg infestation at night. There's also a survival-like mode in the map called Endless Night where daylight never comes and players must fight off wave after wave of Zergs.

Another map is Starjeweled which takes its inspiration from PopCap's best selling puzzle game Bejeweled. Puzzle solving becoming the key to training your troops and taking out enemies in this map. Finally there's Aiur Chef, where players must try to collect components on the map to make meals based on one main ingredient (in a nod to the Iron Chef TV show). The fourth custom map shown at BlizzCon, Blizzard DOTA, is not yet available for beta testing.

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]

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.