Blizzard Entertainment today unveiled StarCraft II, the sequel to its award-winning real-time strategy game StarCraft, at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea.
The announcement took place inside the Olympic Gymnastics Arena, in front of thousands of attendees, who received a presentation that included a StarCraft II cinematic trailer and a gameplay demonstration by the development team.
Designed to be the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game, StarCraft II will feature the return of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg races, overhauled and re-imagined with Blizzard's signature approach to game balance. Each race will be further distinguished from the others, with several new units and new gameplay mechanics, as well as new abilities for some of the classic StarCraft units that will be making a reappearance in the game. StarCraft II will also feature a custom 3D-graphics engine with realistic physics and the ability to render several large, highly detailed units and massive armies on-screen simultaneously.
StarCraft II will include a unique single-player campaign, as well as fast-paced online play through an upgraded version of Blizzard's renowned online gaming service, Battle.net. In addition, the game will come with a powerful, full-featured map editor that will put the same tools used by Blizzard's designers into the hands of players.
Blizzard is developing StarCraft II for simultaneous release on the Windows and Macintosh PC platforms.