StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

is Blizzard Entertainment's sequel to their extremely popular, award winning RTS (real time strategy) video game StarCraft. Set in the 26th century, the game takes place deep within the Milky way galaxy, roughly four years after the timeline of events found in the StarCraft: Broodwar expansion. As suspected, the game features the same isometric top down view which gives players a birds-eye view of the battlefield that allows excellent control over building and maintaining large armies.

Races

The same three playable races found in the original games make their return: the Terran (Humans), the Protoss (Sophisticated Aliens with psionic abilities) and the Zerg (Aliens similar to insects). There no new playable races found within StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

Release Date

On May 3rd, 2010, publisher Activision Blizzard announced that SC2 Wings of Liberty will be released on July 27, 2010 worldwide except in China.

StarCraft 2 Expansion Packs

According to Blizzard, SC2 will be split into 3 different single player games. "Wings of Liberty" will be the single player campaign played from the Terran perspective, "Legacy of the Void" from the Protoss perspective and lastly, "Heart of the Swarm" from the Zerg perspective.

Cast

Many voice actors from the original StarCraft will make an appearance for StarCraft II, but there will also be many new additions to the cast. Over 58 voice actors were hired to create StarCraft 2.

• Robert Clotworthy (English) as Jim Raynor
• Neil Kaplan (English) as Tychus Findlay
• Ali Hillis (English) as Dr. Ariel Hansen
• James Harper (English) as Arcturus Mengsk
• Tricia Helfer (English) as Sarah Kerrigan
• Fred Tatasciore (English) as Zeratul / Swann

Gameplay

Blizzard has been extremely careful to keep the gameplay in StarCraft 2 pure and balanced like the original real time strategy game, however there will be new game modes. StarCraft 2 was designed to be much more focused on multiplayer than it's predecessor, as the developers have overhauled Battle.net to better accommodate players of varying skill. This will allow Blizzard to do a much better job of "matching" up players who are near equal skill level which will help prevent lopsided battles between players who are at completely different skill levels.

Map Editor

StarCraft2 will come shipped with a map editor that has been coined, the "Galaxy Editor". This full campaign editor solution promises to allow players to develop extremely sophisticated levels and campaigns, that will push the limits and allow players to modify the StarCraft 2 game logic far beyond any previous StarCraft editor. Blizzard will also allow map developers to list their maps on the StarCraft "Marketplace", where high quality user created maps may be listed for sale to StarCraft 2 fans for a nominal fee.

Units

Many units from the original StarCraft will make their return for SC2, however there will be many new additions as well. Blizzard has worked hard to add many new special abilities to the existing units which allows for deeper strategies and a greater amount of micro-management than previous titles.