Hold onto your seats StarCraft fans.
Blizzard have just announced that the original genre defining RTS is coming back later this year, completely remastered with 4K graphics and 1080p cinematics, upgraded audio, new comic-book-style mission interludes and introductions, all the while keeping the gameplay and balance “precisely preserved” from the original games.
This is truly welcome news, but also surprising considering the recent remarks from Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime that the developer most likely wouldn’t be revisiting older titles.
Classic Games senior producer Pete Stilwell weighed in on what StarCraft means to the company and fans,
“StarCraft remains very popular, especially in Korea. It’s doing so despite legacy Battle.net’s aging infrastructure, and from the client perspective, graphics, compatibility, and online features that are not up to modern standards. We decided this was going to be our love letter to the SC diehards. So while the team dusted off the repos, rebuilt the pipeline, and rediscovered the codebase, we also spent hundreds of hours connecting with passionate and proactive folks all over the globe: The ones who have been keeping this game going. They gave us insight into the add-ons, game servers, and defined what made Brood War, Brood War.”
Also..
At the end of March, Blizzard will also roll out a new patch for StarCraft: Brood War, updating it to version 1.18. Once that goes live, StarCraft and the Brood War expansion will both be made free for everyone—not free-to-play, as Blizzard emphasized, but straight-up free.
Check out the first trailer for StarCraft remastered below.
Although he has been gaming since the Sega Mega Drive launched in 1990, he still sucks at most games. When not being trash he watches French horror films, drinks herbal tea and secretly loves the music of Taylor Swift.
