StarCraft II's "Devil's Playground" offered one of the more unique twists on traditional RTS campaign design. At timed intervals in the mission, magma floods the map's floor, making for some stirring play as you attempt to strip the terrain's mineral-laden belly as fast as you can and constantly prepare to flee to the relative safety of the high ground before the molten flood rushes in. And as unique as the mission is, its experience will no longer be tied to the campaign. "Burning Tide," the first official custom map from Blizzard, is a riff on Devil's Playground that seeks to combines the themes of the mission with competitive play.
Announced via the official StarCraft II blog, "Burning Tide" is described as a 3v3 map that has one goal: "greed." Like in the campaign mission that it's inspired by, you'll be competing against lava and your foes in an attempt to gather as many resources as possible, while at the same time attempting to keep your own spending down.
The map is available for download right now in the game's custom client. I'll warn you before you download that a few users are complaining about unbalanced play, while even more are complaining about a serious lack of vespene gas (though, to be fair, we always require more vespene gas). I don't know of a single SCII thread on the Internet that doesn't somehow involve these two complaints, so you may as well give this free map a spin if you'd like.
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