StarCraft Remastered Confirmed, Bringing Original to 4K
The original StarCraft is getting quite a facelift, along with some new bells and whistles, but the original gameplay is staying perfectly intact.
Blizzard has announced StarCraft: Remastered, a high-def release of one of the most iconic real-time strategy games of all time, after months of speculation and rumors.
The announcement on the official site details the new additions and revisions. StarCraft Remastered will include sharper 4K visuals, cinematics at 1080p resolution, and upgraded audio tracks. It's also adding a few modern additions, like cloud support for replays and keybind settings. It will connect to the newer version of Battle.net for modern social features, and it has added support for eight more languages, bringing the total up to 13.
Of course, as a remaster, it will still retain the standard gameplay, as the trailer below shows units behaving exactly as they did in the original. Blizzard appears to have left the core gameplay untouched, which makes sense considering the venerable classic was widely played for well over a decade and helped popularize professional esports.
Check out the announcement trailer for a comparison of the old visuals to new.
StarCraft: Remastered will drop sometime this summer. If earlier rumors are to be believed, that will mean sometime in May or June. But the preparations for it will start much sooner than that. This week, the original StarCraft: Brood War will update to version 1.18, which will add observer mode, key rebinding, improve compatibility with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and put in some new anti-cheating features.
For those who may have missed it the first time around, Blizzard will be releasing the StarCraft Anthology as a free download, following this week's update. That includes the original, non-remastered StarCraft and Brood War expansions, so those of you who weren't in college in the early 2000s can experience the magic like we did.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, StarCraft Remastered Confirmed, Bringing Original to 4K
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W00t!
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The problem with Blizzard's engines is that they're hard-coded and designed to support only a fixed set of resolutions and aspect ratios. Had the graphics engineers and UI designers allowed arbitrary resolutions, then even Warcraft 2 would still look great these days. The sad thing is that even Overwatch only supports 4:3, 16:10, and 16:9, but not 21:9.
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Well, you'd be insane.
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I haven't played TA in a long ass time, but I remember it being a very engrossing strategy game almost like a sim. SC was never a sim, and it was better for it.
I also remember TA crashing a lot, but that may have just been me.-
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Kpop is legit, fuck outta here with that
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What's Cavedog up to these days?
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LOL, Starcraft has stood the test of time extremely well, are you fucking kidding?
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A game needing a remaster or some code updates to be playable in the modern era has nothing to do with the strength of the game itself. A game can stand the test of time and still need a tune-up every once in a while.
Even the greatest paintings in history need a little restoration from time to time.-
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I don't think you understand what "standing the test of time" generally refers to with regards to games. When someone says a game has stood the test of time, they usually mean the game play itself. You know, the entire reason to play a game in the first place?
Starcrafts gameplay is among the best in gaming history. So it needs a code update to run on modern OS's, so what? So we in the 4K future wants it to look a little nicer than was possible when it was made? None of those things have anything to do with how good of a game it was, or how well it has stood the test of time.-
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I don't care about your opinion of TA one way or the other, or of Starcraft in general for that matter. The reaction you're getting here, my response included, has to do with your patently false claim of "this just shows how badly the original game has stood the test of the time." You're wrong, Starcraft has stood the test of time immensely well. And it has absolutely nothing to do with how it looks, or how easy it is to play on Windows 10. It's stood the test of time because it's just as fun to PLAY today as it was when it was released. And it still stands as a landmark for the genre.
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It's still not the best RTS from the late 90s, in my opinion, but great nonetheless. I don't think my opinion about TA being the greatest of all time is that controversial or unique either, no matter how popular StarCraft is or how much money has been made with it in tournaments.
This is where you're losing it. How many live television channels were there that were dedicated to people playing Total Annihilation ? How many arenas have been filled to watch people play total annihilation for the last 20 years ?-
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The only thing from TA that stood the test of time is its soundtrack.
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Artistically - yes. From a technical/performance standpoint; not at all.
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Its a completely different game. I mean I'll take Quake over ARMA or OpFP any day of the week...Quake is in my mind one of the best if not the best multipayer game ever...I'll also take Tribes over ARMA or OpFP. But truth be told they're different game to such an extent that you might as well be comparing Civilization and IL2 Sturmovik.
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I highly doubt it. They're claiming it uses the Brood War code base, which would not support it.
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Seeing as it's still 2D I'd say no, not likely at all, would be surprised if it supports 16:10 properly.
It's funny they're claiming the game is unchanged with this release, even though the 16:9 playfield is quite a bit wider than the 4:3 original. That's a big change if we go by their standards.
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I can appreciate what they're doing in terms of preservation - taking an old game exactly as-is, warts and all, and making it more playable in the modern era. It's not for me but clearly there's a community who cares about that. I'm surprised Blizzard funded it given the very niche audience, but I'm guessing it was done by a very small team who didn't have the resources for a full remake anyway.
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I'm sure the real reason is basically "the Korean market wanted it" but something I did notice because I'm weird:
A few months back they put out new versions of OS X/macOS clients for Diablo II and WarCraft III. They had already run on OS X previously but back in the PowerPC era, they had never been updated for Intel. I'm thinking most of the work there was just getting things up and running in Xcode again.
However they didn't do StarCraft 1, and that game was pre-OS X, like Mac OS 9 era. So it would take a bit more work to get that ported over.
I'm wondering if maybe that was part of the spark of the idea for the remaster.
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I'm a little surprised about that honestly. I'd been hoping to get the original game in SCII's engine. I'm still excited about the remaster, but honestly a little less so now.
Of course, I'm still totally going to buy it and play through that epic campaign again.-
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People are still going to be playing brood war ten years from now so an updated version that plays well with modern operating systems and wide screen monitors and is equivalent to the original game is exactly what the community wants.
What they could add are things like matchmaking based on an MMR and better spectating options.
And here's another thing that is mind blowing: despite the fact Starcraft hasn't received a balance patch in 8 years there is an still an evolving meta game in the pro scene.-
Is this cs1 complete, or just the main game?
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I was wondering when this would happen! So excited
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I thought it would look better... I'll stick w/ my SC2 mod... :P
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I just think it's amazing that technical limitations from games around that era led to gameplay that still have people addicted today. For example dota is a game defined around quirks in the warcraft 3 engine. And brood war has this mechanical element that modern titles would get rid off in a heartbeat. Compelling gameplay is often shredding efficiency and imposing arbitrary boundaries on what the player can do.
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Yeah, reading about the limitations of the engine is interesting. Patrick Wyatt (programmer for SC) has some great insight into the development of starcraft and how the glitches eventually served as some kind of magic soup of balance. Here's one on path-finding:
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack
and a few more:
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tag/starcraft
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That and Diablo 1 are far more exciting prospects than Starcraft.
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God yes!!
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Cool. I think this is pretty rad but I have to say they should of 100% done a full Star Craft 2 engine upgrade for it seem like a waste. Always go "full retard".
It looks like they did not re do the animation and it does not look massively better visually so to me it feels like a missed opportunity :( To me if you want to keep it old school in the same old engine 100% re do the sprite in HD not just a few steps above the old one. Most remaster would have this mode and also have a new one that is 100% re done that you could toggle.
See what I mean how StarCraft remaster should of been, see Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uljAYCJec0&t=3m12s
I really hope Diablo 2 will be in Diablo 3's engine or they 100% give it HD sprites and do what Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap did.
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