Release date of November 10th was revealed on their stream.

Also here is the new cinematic.

Man, I gotta finish HotS.

The same day as Fallout 4. Gutsy

I do love me a Blizzard cinematic. Never got around to the Zerg game, but lookin back on it I really enjoyed my time with that first StarCraft II.

The thought that this release might also bring some StarCraft themed Heroes of the Storm stuff has me most excited though.

I just got weirdly emotional during that cinematic. I always assumed I was a Terran, but maybe I'm truly a Protoss at heart?

My life for Aiur!

@spoonman671: I'm a Zerg player so you're weird either way.

I did find that cinematic kind of funny though. The archon fucking shit up and then Protoss' secret weapon? Building a pylon so they can warp more cheap units.

@fallen189 said:

Who will be MGSV and who will be Mad Max? YOU DECIDE.

Would it be too disrespectful for me to post a recording of crickets chirping? I'm sure Legacy of the Void will be well made, but the brief renaissance of "people giving a shit about RTS" that was started by Starcaft 2: Wings of Liberty also ended within about 2-3 years of its release, and Blizzard took way too fucking long to make these two expansions/expand-a-lones.

@bisonhero: I think that's a bit pessimistic. Sure it won't be the biggest thing ever again, but there are still a pretty decent number of people that play the game. I'll happily buy the game for the campaign and poking around online for a week or two, and that's enough to justify the cost.

Oh my god that cinematic so many feels that zealot blocking a baneling with his face and the archon and the pylon and the warp-in ahhh so hype! Now they just need to figure out how to get the prologue missions to physical CE preorders like meeeeeeeeeeee!

neither. the answer is neither will be the mad max

That's a lot sooner than I expected, I was assuming winter 2016 at the earliest.

@starvinggamer: Denied.

Good deal, I'm curious if my ancient comp will successfully not explode when I try to play it, but I can always go play it at my brother's house and maybe even record it.

So much hype

man i really hope they hired some better writers 'cause that looks cool as shit. never seen an archon form in full pre-rendered glory, pretty neat.

I enjoyed the cinematic quite a bit but anyone else miss the style of starcraft 1 cutscenes? They were slower paced, gritty, and took time to establish a tone e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnL3GjOIb_M. All the new Starcraft 2 cinematics are anime fight scenes.

@spoonman671: I'm glad I'm not the only one. I don't often find myself browsing through the Youtube comment section, but that thing was littered with folks who even admitted to crying. One way or another, that is a hell of a cinematic. The bait and switch at the very end with the lone zealot remaining all battered and desperate, only to charge ahead of his reinforcements, was terrific. I might just have to pre-order this thing to satisfy the anticipation with those prologue missions.

And just for the record, Terran player here.

@tjk: I remember a ton of stuff in that vein from Wings of Liberty, it was just mostly rendered in-engine which still managed to look terrific somehow. If they're going to go spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on CGI, I can understand that they're seeking an emotional response to it, and seeing the battles you've fought in an isometric perspective rendered this lovingly is a hell of an effective way to accomplish that.

Am I a bad person for totally thinking this is like 3 years too late? I feel like MOBAs sorta came and ate Starcraft 2's lunch (including Blizzard's own entry) after Wings of Liberty made big RTSs relevant again for a brief window.

Obviously I'm simplifying things, but this is a case where "Blizzard time" has worked against them. I'm sure the campaign will be fun (though they could do with hiring better writers) and the people who have stuck with it will still like it. From the outside looking in though, I don't see a ton of fanfare.

I'm hoping all the big changes to the multiplayer get me back into the game. I already have it preordered for the campaign and beta, but heart of the swarms multiplayer was pretty meh for me compared to Wings. I played over 2,000 1v1 matches in wings and got myself to diamond league from bronze but then hots came out and i wasn't feeling it anymore. Granting me sucking against zerg didn't help (I'm a ptoss player) but i think I "only" played 300-400 matches of hots. I just didn't like the changes and the new units were super boring across all 3 races. I've liked the legacy beta so far though, archon mode and the new allied commanders mode sound great too so I'm hopeful! Too bad it is the same day as fallout, I was hoping for a January release, but I can see how they will want the game out right after WCS championships end so the pros can immediately get ready for the 2016 season.

I built a PC for Wings of Liberty. Safe to say I'm pretty excited for this coming around, if only for the more casual modes (Archon) and to see how it changes the pro scene.

@tjk said:

Yeah, the vignettes of the Starcraft universe are woefully missing. The closest bits were the news broadcasts in Wings of Liberty, but they were more of a send-up of FOX news than they were actually very informative about what's going on with the Terrans.

Yeah, Blizzard time pushed this game way past the time that it's particularly relevant. Heart of the Swarm needed to come out about 18 months at most after Wings of Liberty, and then Legacy of the Void about 12 months after that. ORRRR they needed to actually stress that these were full blown sequels (and actually make them sequels) instead of downgrading both of them into large expansions. It's preposterous that it took them 2-3 years each for expansions.

Wow that game me chills, Protoss are the best. So excited for this.

Wow that cinematic was incredible, can't say it enough.

Silly Blizzard, Archons don't beat Ultras.

I mean RTS was never going to be a popular competitive genre in the modern era because it's way too difficult, but I'll sure be happy with my 40 bucks for 20+ awesome singleplayer missions. Also the best achievement system ever still?

They do when they cast their crazy new black hole sacrifice attack!?!?!?!?!!!??? MAYBE!?

I really like the Protoss redesign Blizzard made with SC2. I always thought the Protoss in SC1 looked really spindly and weak.

Look at the Difference between Artanis in SC2 and SC1:

@doctordonkey: To be fair, I think that the Protoss being spindly and weak was the point. They rely on their psionic whosawhatsit power for everything, using robotics for everything else. Zealots are punk ass Protoss who wear powered armour, Dragoons were injured/dead(???) Protoss war vets in a mech that keeps them alive if memory serves, Reavers and so on were robots, High Templar and Archons use their psionic powers for attack and defense. Dark Templar were just about the only units that attacked directly without assistance because they eschewed the traditional psionics/robots method of the Aiur Protoss, and those Dark Templar were spindly motherfuckers with crap armour that just had endless stealth on their side. I think that rationale for how the Protoss fight mostly holds true for the units in SC2.

I guess I'm fine with the changes to Artanis, since he was kind of a nothing character in Brood War. It feels like they introduced Artanis because they had killed off Tassadar pre-Brood War, and they knew that by the end of Brood War they were also going to kill off Fenix, Aldaris, and Raszagal, and they were rapidly running out of named Protoss characters who aren't Zeratul.

I thought they were going to make it a ARTS/MOBA for a quick second when it showed 5 protoss people standing there. You have to imagine they spent the last 3 years trying to crack the multiplayer, find some way to make it popular again.

I never much liked most of the unit redesigns that happened from SC1 to SC2, but the archon redesign was always one of the ones that made the least sense to me. Two templars fuse into a being of pure energy, sacrificing themselves. In SC1, that was basically what it was, a ball of energy, and you could only vaguely discern a figure within the ball of energy. In SC2, it's a protoss unit wearing armor, face visible, but admittedly still with a gassy cloud of blue around him.

And in this cinematic, it's literally just a floating guy in armor.

Like others have mentioned, I miss more the cinematics of two country hicks driving a truck and running over a zergling. The ballet stuff in modern blizzard cinematics wears thin.

Even for someone who thinks that Blizzard absolutely ruined the story of Starcraft in Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm -- they turned it into prophecy mumbo jumbo, emphasized the ridiculous Raynor-Kerrigan romance and took out the realism and grittiness that made SC and BW so awesome -- that cutscene was fantastic. Made me feel like a 13 year old again! Definitely preordering now.

(But seriously, I will never forgive Blizz for ruining the story, which was so strong in the original...yet I'm sure the gameplay in the Legacy campaign will be fantastic.)

I wonder if this will revive the community much. I haven't bothered to watch a Starcraft match in a long time.

@sinusoidal: It will for a few months and then it'll go back down again just like with Heart of the Swarm. They had a big push to make SC2 the biggest thing in eSports but by that stage the MOBA damage was already done by LOL and then DOTA 2 drove it home.

I doubt outside of the team who work on it, many people truly care about this release. Heros of the Storm (look, another game called HOTS, what does that tell you?) is likely going to get much more attention at the competitive level from Blizzard themselves than SC2 ever will again.

That said, I'm looking forward to this. I just wish they didn't go and release it against Fallout 4, not because I think either game will get swept away by the other, but because I'm going to have to pick which one to pick up first. I might just go with this because it'll most likely work outside of the box (at least the single player which is all I care about) and it'll be quicker to finish than Fallout 4.

I definitely want to see how they decide to wrap up the story. Overall I've enjoyed the story of Starcraft 2 so far although it definitely has it's silly or disappointing moments for me (felt like the events of Heart of the Swarm more or less undid the end of Wings of Liberty and that kind of sucks). Multiplayer in SC2 just doesn't interest me any more although I still hope they made interesting adjustments for that crowd.

@maluvin: The popular response to the WoL campaign dictated the course of HoTS's storyline, no one wanted normal Kerrigan again. There's a lot of DBZ potential in Legacy of the Void though, hopefully we get more ridiculous cutscenes like this one:

@fredchuckdave: Which is reasonable. I guess if anything I would have liked it if Wings had ended differently without Kerrigan reverting to normal. Either way it was an awkward bit of storytelling (for me at least) but at the end of the day they're still fun and interesting games and I'm definitely looking forward to this one.

Three zealots, two templars and a probe? What idiot put together that task force?

@veektarius: Probes are OP worker rush units man.

WAIT A MINUTE

WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST USE THE WARP PRISM THEY CAME IN ON TO WARP IN UNITS? WHY BUILD A PYLON?

@starvinggamer: The beta missions are awesome by the way, especially the first one. Achievements are a little easy but Brutal is nicely difficult at least in the first mission. There's also a lot of potential for dicking around on lower difficulties.

@fredchuckdave: Well gee thanks o_O my guess is that Blizzard won't ever bother with coming up for a solution and I'll just have to wait until release to play it, if at all.

@starvinggamer: As always if you do get the chance to play it I highly recommend going through once on hard and then on brutal just to get more out of it, think I spent about 4.5-5 hours on the missions today. Also the whole "Save/Reload Puzzle" thing still works as far as Brutal goes, though you'll likely only need it for the first mission; in some ways I find that more gratifying than just beating it from start to finish in one go; figuring out what to do with a shitty situation to clutch it out. Still remember lifting off like 7 CCs and sticking them in front of Kerrigan for All-In to save the last 30 seconds when going for the "Aces High" achievement; beautiful.

Also reminder since the game doesn't mention it anywhere but sentries are shield medics in the campaign; didn't even use them in the first mission on my end; might have made it go smoother.

Jesus Christ, this one's coming in less than two weeks as well? Heck, I really hope I end up liking Fallout 4 a lot and skip this, Tomb Raider and several others...would be fun for once to have a handful games to play after having played only one of 'em for months.

Anyone interested in playing ze Co-op with me? I'm reasonably competent, especially vs AI but anyone with a slight understanding of the game should be sufficient; theoretically.

So, a bit of a serious question. Is this series still popular? I just find it unusual how little hype there seems to be behind the new entry to the series given how keen people were for Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. Also, it seems a tad odd that the game is coming out the same day as Fallout 4, is this a ploy to have it seen on the shelves at the same time as people are looking at Fallout 4/ looking online at reviews and seeing the new StarCraft game being mentioned, or is there are more significant reason behind the release date?

Hopefully this new version will be good, I wouldn't mind jumping back in on StarCraft 2 again but I think I would find the online versus frustrating as the build order stuff and the actions per minute thing just goes beyond my capabilities really.

@johnlocke: There's nothing to really talk about hype-wise. Everyone who was in it for the long haul since WoL likely already has it pre-ordered and is just waiting for the day. I know I am. The prologue missions were alright and set up the story, but there's nothing really discussion worthy there. And no one can really say much about the multiplayer until it gets put through the rigorous testing of the progamers and tournament scenes. People do spend time talking about balance over on teamliquid, but that kind of discussion has never really been big here. Although the new changes do look cool. Most of us are just hoping the story is better than the last two games. If nothing else, the campaign should be fun to play and the cinematics should be exciting to watch.

So to answer your question, it is not as popular as it was when WoL released. There are other esports out there now that people prefer to play for various reasons. It still maintains its solid fanbase, but you won't see many random people suddenly being interested in trying it out just because the new expansion is out.

@johnlocke: It's still fundamentally going to be the same game, people who didn't like SC2 in WoL or HotS won't like it in LotV either. I think that a LOT of people played through the campaign, and/or played the multiplayer for a while a couple years back, but then most of the less hardcore players jumped ship for LoL or DotA 2.

Fact of the matter is, the RTS genre has been largely dead for most people for a couple years now, pretty similar to how it was prior to SC2 coming out. Although back then, SCBW wasn't the only game, people were still playing WC3 and other RTS's. There'll probably be an upsurge as people who played before come back now, but who knows if they'll stay around.

On a more positive note, I'm going to be there day 1 for LotV, playing SC2 actually for the first time since 2010 (went to college shortly after it released and it had garbage internet there so SC2 was unplayable). Anyone want to get some games in with a scrubby bronze player like myself? (kinda expect to be able to rank up quickly as 5 years ago I was not terrible at BW and SC2 but we'll see).