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StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm set for March 12, says Battle.net [update: confirmed]
StarCraft 2 expansion Heart of the Swarm deploys on March 12, 2013, according to a listing on Battle.net. There isn't an official announcement yet, but the digital purchase page for StarCraft 2 indicates Heart of the Swarm will be "available for play" on said date. The second expansion, combined with StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, is currently priced $59.99.During Activision's earnings call last week, Blizzard head Mike Morhaime said his studio was "working hard towards a first half 2013 launch" for Heart of the Swarm. This release date matches up, but it's surprising to see so soon after the reveal of a vague timeframe.Update: Blizzard confirm Heart of the Swarm arrives in stores and online on March 12, 2013, released individually at an expected price of $39.99. The game will also be available in Digital Deluxe and Collector's Edition versions, priced at $59.99 and $79.99 respectively. The Digital Deluxe version includes a Torrasque look for Ultralisks, new Battle.net decals and portraits, a Baneling pet for World of Warcraft, and a new sigil for Diablo 3 along with zerg wings for your character. The Collector's Edition includes all of what's in the Digital Deluxe version, and in addition a behind-the-scenes DVD/Blu-Ray, unique soundtrack, Heart of the Swarm hard-cover art book, and 'Zerg Rush' mousepad.
Blizzard 'working hard' to launch StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm in first half of 2013
Blizzard is hoping to push the first StarCraft 2 expansion, Heart of the Swarm, out the door during the first half of 2013. Blizzard head Mike Morhaime made the announcement during Activision's earnings call, saying the studio is "working hard towards a first half 2013 launch."Heart of the Swarm is set to add several improvements to StarCraft 2, including multiplayer progression and new social features.
StarCraft 2 beta getting multiplayer XP progression system
The StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm beta is still ongoing, and Blizzard has posted a preview of a new leveling feature coming soon to the game-in-progress.Blizzard's adding a progression system to the multiplayer mode, in which players will earn experience, on a race-by-race basis, as they play in matchmaking and custom games. Gaining XP for each of the various factions will unlock special portraits and decals for player profiles.Blizzard has plans for XP bonuses as well, either for specific awards like your first win of the day, or for more general happenings like XP bonus weekends and other special events. The leveling system is being added to the beta in the next patch (and will likely be reset a few times during testing), and will eventually be available in Heart of the Swarm when it's released.
Blizzard looking at F2P for StarCraft 2 multiplayer
Blizzard is "looking at free-to-play as an option" for the game's multiplayer mode, StarCraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder said at the Valencia eSports Congress panel.The free-to-play model brought its share of concerns for Browder as well. "We don't know how we would monetize it," he said. "While it might be good fun for me to play against someone with only half the units available to them, that's not going to be an enjoyable experience for them."Blizzard began rolling out beta invites for StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm earlier this month.
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm beta starts sticking out feelers
Blizzard is gradually rolling out the beta for StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, starting with a select few from the pro-gaming and shoutcasting communities, Arcade contest winners and games press. And because there is no NDA with this latest beta test, participants can stream and capture footage as they please. Heck, look at all the videos that are already live on YouTube.Sure, right now the number of participants is low but, like all Blizzard betas, more players will be added gradually. If you want in on the Heart of the Swarm beta, you'll need to first opt in to the beta through your Battle.net account, and then exercise patience – this is perhaps the most crucial step. "Signing up from a Battle.net account that's actively playing StarCraft 2 will help your chances of being selected," Blizzard says.No exact beta period has been determined and, if you do get in, you'll only be able to sample the multiplayer side of Heart of the Swarm, compatible with both PC and Mac. Blizzard will open up the beta to more people through giveaways and fansite promotions eventually, so we'll let you know if more (and faster) opportunities become available.
Finally, the perfect joystick for ... StarCraft?
The proprietors of fighting game fan site Shoryuken posed an interesting question to its community recently: Can you design a functional fight stick for playing StarCraft 2? It appears you can.The winning design – as demonstrated by "Mauricio" in the video above – sports a modded Ultrastik joystick as the mouse, and about a billion Sanwa buttons in LED housing for illumination. It may look odd, but it apparently does everything a keyboard and mouse can, using one USB input.As it's a fan mod, you can't actually purchase this device. Learning how to make one yourself, though, sounds like a great resumé booster, right below "Proficient strategist in StarCraft 2."
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, WoW: Mists of Pandaria playable at Gamescom
Blizzard will attend Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, and bring its latest wares to the show. From August 15 to 19, Blizzard will showcase new content for Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft.Attendees will be able to sample the new Terran, Zerg and Protoss units coming to multiplayer in StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, which is slated to launch sometime this year. Blizzard will also give patrons a chance to check out the starting zone in Mists of Pandaria, the fourth expansion for World of Warcraft.Finally, Blizzard will have Diablo 3 available to play, but you're probably doing that now anyway.
Blizzard talks Heart of the Swarm multiplayer, and what's next for Starcraft 2
Just as E3 was ending last week, Major League Gaming's Spring championships were getting underway in Anaheim, California. Blizzard held a press preview during the opening hours of the tournament to show off the new units and features coming to Starcraft 2's multiplayer component in the upcoming Heart of the Swarm expansion.Each of the three races in the game has a few new units and abilities to study (which you can see in the included trailer), and hardcore players will no doubt be combing through them as the expansion goes into beta. But Heart of the Swarm's multiplayer represents an interesting change in Blizzard's original plan for the three-part series that is Starcraft 2.As lead producer Chris Sigaty (who doubles, by the way, as the lead guitarist for Blizzard's in-house metal band L80ETC) tells Joystiq, the new units are all about adding something to the game without removing what's there.%Gallery-157828%
We require you to Google 'zerg rush'
Stop reading. Start Googling. Just try to take out a few of the little buggers before you're overrun, okay?
How Blizzard makes the StarCraft 2 races so iconic
The StarCraft 2 preview for Heart of the Swarm on display at BlizzCon 2011 last week was pretty much the same thing we saw a few months ago on the Blizzard campus. Fun as it was, we instead used our short time talking with with Blizzard's lead art director Samwise Dider to have him let us in on just how Blizzard is able to make StarCraft's three races so darn iconic. His answer was pretty simple. "Protoss," he says, "they're basically elliptical and circular. Terran are basically angular and square, and Zerg are very erratic and organic and spiky." Sounds plain enough. But when one of the game's new units (specifically the Protoss' Tempest, a strong capital ship with some heavy anti-zerg ability) showed up on the screen during the Opening Ceremony, players immediately knew the 'toss were getting a new toy. Is it as easy as shapes? "With Protoss," says Didier, "as long as you have a few of the basic things; big golden arcs and sweeping sort of angelic-looking wings and surfaces, you can make almost anything into Protoss. With Terran, they're all about the clunkiness, boxes, utilitarian. You take em out of the box, they're ready to go." And the Zerg? They're "just a gumbo of teeth and snot and bile," according to Didier. "We wrap them in the movement of a snake or a spider or a roach, there's your Zerg stuff." Boiling these races down into their elements like that is just another reason why this company, and its games, are so incredibly popular. "It's very easy to tell these races apart, because they are so diametrically opposed," Didier concludes, before deconstructing the series completely: "Gold, gray, brown." %Gallery-137265%
Blizzard DOTA, coming soon to a new platform called Blizzard Arcade
Blizzard DOTA was back on the floor of BlizzCon 2011 last week, after spending a year away from the spotlight being "completely rebooted." We played the game as soon as we possibly could, finding it to be a much more polished take on the popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) gametype. "Last year we had basically the style of the art, and the look that we were going for," says Samwise Didier, Blizzard's Senior Art Director. But as I said when I played the early version of the mod, the game itself wasn't quite as polished as the look and feel. "This year," says Didier, "we really focused on taking the DOTA-style game and really making it our own." Blizzard has done a few interesting things to the gametype that has made League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth so popular. But the most interesting may just be how the company plans to release it. Blizzard is going to make sure everyone has a chance to check it out, even if they don't own StarCraft 2. "We haven't figured out the details," says Didier. "But there will be a free-to-play Blizzard DOTA on our Blizzard Arcade. We don't know how many heroes there will be, or how many maps, but we definitely want to make sure that everyone knows it will be free-to-play." %Gallery-137263%
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard DOTA teasers evoke some emotion
Our hearts beat with a combination of blood, Big Macs and Dr. Pepper. StarCraft 2's heart beats with millions of ruthless, juicy aliens, and as the above BlizzCon teaser shows, Sarah Kerrigan's heart doesn't beat at all. We're not saying she's heartless, but to be a strong female lead these days, not giving a crap about anything except revenge is sometimes necessary. Being a cyborg and making that distinction truly literal is just a bonus for game journos everywhere. A teaser for the Blizzard DOTA mod for StarCraft 2 channels a markedly different emotion than vengeance -- watch the video and decide for yourself what emotion that may be, but for now we're going to call it "Valvey scorn."
Blizzard to release six 'proven' properties over next three years
Blizzard will release six "proven property" titles over the coming three years, Activision Blizzard COO Thomas Tippl said at the Citi 2011 Technology Conference. Tippl named five of these six expected releases: Two World of Warcraft expansion packs, two StarCraft 2 titles and Diablo 3. Tippl also pinned a Diablo 3 expansion as the possible sixth title. Blizzard said it is immediately focused on updates for Cataclysm, releasing Diablo 3 and finishing StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. It would satisfy our OCD if these six games would release two-a-year at six-month intervals for three years, and it would satisfy our ADHD if all six titles dropped on the same day, but Tippl didn't provide any more specific dates. Titan, the mysterious next-gen MMO from Blizzard, wasn't mentioned, but it's not a "proven" property and could still launch in its rumored timeframe of late 2013.
Blizzard Dota hits the reset button
Blizzard's internal Defense of the Ancients mod for StarCraft 2, cleverly titled Blizzard Dota, is starting over. Eurogamer reports that Blizzard Dota Senior Game Designer Jonny Ebbert said the title has been "flattened," with what the company showed at BlizzCon last year being "completely rebooted." In May, we were told that the mod had experienced "some massive overhauls." "One of the important things to note with that space is the DOTA everyone plays on Warcraft 3 is not particularly accessible to the novice," said Blizzard Product Development and Co-Founder Frank Pearce. "One of the game development philosophies we have at Blizzard is: easy to learn and difficult to master. That mod for Warcraft 3 doesn't really fit that description." Meanwhile, elsewhere in the lands of the massively online battle arena genre, Valve is targeting a 2012 launch for Dota 2 and League of Legends continues its ascension with a new mode, expected soon. More official details about Blizzard Dota, along with however it looks now, will likely be shared at BlizzCon in October.
BlizzCon 2011 will host two StarCraft 2 global tournaments and more
Blizzard has shared the plan for two big e-sports events at BlizzCon in Anaheim, CA, and it looks like there's going to be a full plate of noobs, ownage and ggs yet again this year. Not only will the Global Battle.net Invitational showcase some of the best StarCraft 2 players from Blizzard's online multiplayer service, but the 2011 Global StarCraft League Final matches will be held at the same event, pitting the best of the best at the game against each other. Those are just the two StarCraft 2 events -- Blizzard traditionally also holds contests and tournaments for World of Warcraft arena matches and the World of Warcraft TCG at BlizzCon, and though we haven't seen an official announcement yet, it's possible we'll see some Warcraft 3 or even Diablo 3 e-sports play as well. Outside of competitive play, Blizzard usually also offers new content for attendees to play through, so Diablo 3 specifically, plus any other unannounced games, may be playable too. Tickets for the October 21-22 event are sold out, but the tournament play will likely be streamed online through "virtual tickets" later on this year.
Blizzard Dota still on the way, has undergone 'some massive overhauls'
Blizzard Dota, the Defense of the Ancients-style official mod that was shown off at last year's BlizzCon, is still a work in progress, according to lead producer Chris Sigaty. The other three mods shown last year were released a little while ago to the community, but the Dota mod, which pits all kinds of Blizzard franchise characters up against each other in a real-time battle, needed a little extra work, apparently. "We basically put it back up in the shop and did some massive overhauls to some things, which I'm not going to go into specific detail about," Sigaty told Joystiq at a press event last week. "But yeah, we are working on Blizzard Dota, and we do intend to launch it at or around the time of Heart of the Swarm, but the official details will be online later." Will the mod eventually require the upcoming Heart of the Swarm expansion to play? Sigaty's got nothing yet: "We're not even talking about the business level decision of it at this point." But rest assured that, somewhere on Blizzard's Irvine, CA campus, there are still developers fighting over who'd win in a fight, Thrall, Diablo, or Tychus Findlay.
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm preview: Kerrigan, again
When Blizzard announced that StarCraft 2 would be split into three different games years ago, there was quite a bit of weeping and gnashing of teeth -- lots of complaining that the new corporate entity of Activision Blizzard was triple-dipping our wallets. But time heals all wounds and in this case, the great reviews of the full-featured first title didn't hurt either. So it may come as something of a surprise to be reminded that as much fun as StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty was, you've got two more campaigns coming your way. At a recent press event inside Blizzard HQ in Irvine, California, we got to take a look at two single-player missions from Heart of the Swarm, the first expansion pack-priced followup, focused on the popular Zerg race. One note of warning before we begin: There are story elements revealed in these missions that will sorta, kinda spoil the plot of Wings of Liberty if you haven't finished it yet. If you aren't done with Jim Raynor's Terran campaign, play that and then come back. Otherwise, feel free to read on.%Gallery-124602%
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm teaser shoots its way onto the Internet
We're not sure what the original distribution plan for the 45-second teaser for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm was, but we're pretty sure it wasn't "Let it leak onto every video site on the Internet." Regardless, we're glad it's here -- and after watching it below, we wager you will be, too.
Blizzard 'hard pressed' to make 2011 for next StarCraft 2
Blizzard may not have an "official" release window for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, but don't expect it to occur in 2011.SC2 Lead Producer Chris Sigaty told IGN the company would be "very hard pressed to bring [Heart of the Swarm] out next year." He noted that there is no release date, but because the sequel-spansion is more ambitious than Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne was to its core game, he doesn't "anticipate it being done in that one year time frame." Sigaty's words are in the same vein as those of Battle.net project director, Greg Canessa, who implied the game would have an early 2012 launch. So, for those still holding out hope for a 2011 release for Heart of the Swarm, just keep on weaning that dream.
BlizzCon 2010 Opening Ceremony liveblog
BlizzCon 2010 is upon us and, as is customary, Blizzard will use its Opening Ceremony keynote to kick off the event – of course, WoW Insider already kicked things off last night at its annual meetup, but let's not stray too far from the purpose of this post. Things get underway, right here, at 11AM PT (we've posted handy alternative time zones for you below). Check back then for all the latest from Blizzard: from the impending WoW expansion, Cataclysm, to future StarCraft 2 installments, to the much-anticipated Diablo 3. Maybe something about that long-in-development unnamed MMO? Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? 08:00AM - Hawaii 11:00AM - Pacific 12:00PM - Mountain 01:00PM - Central 02:00PM - Eastern 07:00PM - London 08:00PM - Paris 10:00PM - Moscow 03:00AM - Tokyo (October 23)
