Blizzard releases StarCraft's sequel

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., a division of Vivendi Games, on Saturday announced the release of highly anticipated StarCraft II, the sequel to its award-winning real-time strategy game StarCraft, at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea.

Blizzard, the premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating many of the industry's most critically acclaimed games, presented the game before thousands of attendees gathered inside the Olympic Gymnastics Arena.

The presentation by the development team started with a StarCraft II cinematic trailer before launching into a demonstration of the new features in the game.

The epic saga of three distinct and powerful races, Protoss, Terran, and Zerg, will continue in the second installment of the legendry original, StarCraft. Besides complimenting some of the classic StarCraft units with new abilities, Blizzard would provide several new units to each race in the StarCraft II.

StarCraft’s sequel will feature a custom 3D-graphics engine that will be able to render several large, highly detailed units and massive armies on-screen simultaneously.

“With StarCraft II, we’ll be able to do everything we wanted to do with the original StarCraft and more,” said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We recognize that expectations are high following the long-running popularity of the original game, but we plan to meet those expectations and deliver an engaging, action-packed, competitive experience that StarCraft players and strategy gamers worldwide will enjoy.”

StarCraft II will have a single-player, multiplayer campaign, as well as fast-paced online play through an upgraded version of Blizzard’s renowned online gaming service, Battle.net. The sequel will also ship with a powerful, fully features map editor.

The title will release simultaneously on the Windows and Macintosh PC platforms. Blizzard has no current plans to bring the game to any console platform. Details about the availability of the game, system requirements and pricing will be announced in the months ahead.

The original StarCraft, which pits humans against two alien races in a science-fiction environment, was released in 1998 and to date has sold more than 9.5 million copies worldwide.

The Irvine, California based Blizzard has recently been more famous for its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft. In January, Blizzard announced that WoW has achieved a new subscriber milestone, with more than 8 million gamers around the world.

Apart from the global subscriber milestone, World of Warcraft has also succeeded in achieving 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe and more than 3.5 million players in China, while another million or so is spread throughout other territories, including Australia, Blizzard said.