Two New StarCraft 2 Videos Surface

gametrailers.com - August 23, 2008

Two new HD videos have surfaced over at GameTrailers.com and features a brief look at all three races. Intriguing is the Zerg creep and the general 'alive' feeling it has to it at this point in development. There's also some nice close-ups of the Terran SCVs mining away at the mineral deposits.

The second of the two videos focuses on the Protoss and shows a very brief look at some early game scenes. Nothing too exciting here, though definitely worth a watch!

GC 08' StarCraft 2 IGN Progress Report

ign.com - August 20, 2008

GC 2008 in Leipzig is about to get underway starting tomorrow but IGN has already managed an early insight into the current developments for StarCraft 2. Frank Pierce, Senior Vice President of Production Development, was on hand to give them some details regarding the games' current development state and the chance of seeing a public beta anytime soon.

Currently the testing for StarCraft II doesn't include that many people. "It's like a limited internal alpha phase," says Pearce. "The development team that's working on it is playing it and we've released some alpha builds to some other development teams internally and then the quality assurance department is also playing it."

Pierce goes on to answer the pressing question everyone has been curious about -- when will we see beta.

"That's months away," said Pearce. "We still have to expand our internal alpha to include the rest of the organization, iterate on that feedback, and then we have to evaluate what kind of beta we need, whether we need one at all. There's a pretty high level of certainty that we're going to need a beta and then we have to decide if we want to host beta or a closed beta or both. So, months."

So there you have it folks. The game is still in a closed internal alpha state and with confirmation from Pierce, it's safe to say we won't see a beta till early next year at best.

StarCraft 2 Single Player Images Released

starcraftwire.net - August 19, 2008

StarCraftWire.net recently discovered some never-before-seen campaign screenshots that were found in technical documentation handed to AMD from Blizzard. Among the handful of images are the very first glimpse of the bar aboard Raynor's Hypernion space ship.

First look at the Hypernion Bar

What's interesting is the amount of detail found throughout the bar scene. Even more intriguing is a slightly more concrete bit of information regarding what graphics cards will likely be supported for the game as found from this recent Blizzard post.

For Starcraft II, we wanted to maximize compatibility with less capable systems to ensure hassle?free game play for as broad a player base as possible. Yet we also wanted to utilize the full potential of any available hardware to ensure the game’s looks were competitive. This meant supporting a wide range of hardware, from ATI Radeon 9800/NVIDIA GeForce FX’s to the ATI Radeon HD 4800s and NVIDIA GeForce G200s

You can find the rest of the released images here, and be sure to let us know what you think!

Karune Q&A Batch 43 Released

Battle.net - August 19, 2008

Karune's latest Q&A his finally here and covers numerous details regarding unit balancing and art design. Dustin Browder was also able to fill us in on some art changes that are in development right now for the Terran Nomad and Protoss Colossus.

What units are currently undergoing major art changes? (starcraft2forum.org)

There are several artistic revisions every week, though the two newest units to get some artistic updates are the Nomad and the Stalker. The Terran Nomad is getting a complete artistic redesign from any versions the community has seen thus far. Furthermore, the Protoss Stalker is also being updated to look more similar to the concept art piece as seen here: http://starcraft2.com/art.xml?s=6