StarCraft Remastered Coming Summer 2017

Blizzard has announced the much anticipated StarCraft Remastered, which maintains the gameplay and balance of the original StarCraft and polishes the rest.

Blizzard officially announced StarCraft Remastered, updating the classic RTS game for the modern era. Blizzard has gone a long way to preserve the original gameplay of StarCraft, even went so far as to build the remaster on the original game's engine. The remaster will instead update the visuals and audio of Starcraft, while adding modern features including matchmaking, custom keybinds, and connecting the game to Blizzard's social systems. Expect StarCraft Remastered to arrive this summer.

While preparing for StarCraft Remastered's launch, and as a sort of beta test, Blizzard will update the classic StarCraft: Brood War to patch 1.18 later this week. The patch will feature many of the additions which will be part of StarCraft Remastered. Those include custom keybindings, observer mode, anti-cheat measures, and compatibility improvements for Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. Even better, Blizzard will be making StarCraft Anthology, which contains both the original StarCraft and its Brood War expansion, completely free to download and play.

If Blizzard releases the non-remastered StarCraft for free, then they're definitely going to have to impress players with the premium StarCraft Remastered. As stated by Blizzard, all visuals inside the game have been modernized with widescreen UHD support for up to 4K resolution. That includes updated campaign cinematics. Regarding audio, StarCraft's soundtrack and dialogue has been rerecorded. There's even a new addition: comic book-style interludes to flesh out the original story.

The final package may not be as immediately appealing as if, say, the original StarCraft was instead ported into the StarCraft 2 engine. That sort of port would certainly be much more visually impressive, but it wouldn't be the original StarCraft at heart.

StarCraft Remastered is set to release this summer exclusively on PC.