Starcraft 2 – Development

At the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, on May 19, 2007, the development of StarCraft II was announced. Development on the game, initially set back for a year by the temporary reassignment of Blizzard’s resources to World of Warcraft, began in 2003, shortly after Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was released. According to Rob Pardo and Chris Sigurd, development for StarCraft II was put on hold for a year in 2005 due to the assistance required for World of Warcraft.

Wings of Liberty will support the DirectX 9 (Pixel shader 2.0) software and will be totally compatible with DirectX 10 as well.  The development team has not yet decided whether to add exclusive DirectX 10 graphic effects. The Mac version will use OpenGL. The game will also include the Havok physics engine, which offers more realistic environmental elements such as “debris rolling down a ramp”. Rob Pardo said in a June interview that LAN support would not be included in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Their reason was to force players to use Battle.net. This has generated a large amount of protest mainly in the form of online petitions, and calls for boycotting the game.