Blizzard looks to have made good on their promise of closing down the StarCraft 2 beta today, with the Battle.net servers going down just a few minutes ago. It’s almost certainly the end of beta for now, because phase 1 is scheduled to end today. I did still get a fair amount of gameplay in today and recorded some gameplay footage as well, so I’ll have a few things to tide you over until phase 2 starts a few weeks prior to launch.
The next few weeks will be dedicated to getting everything ready for the retail version, which will also entail some form of Battle.net overhaul. My Battle.net overview from yesterday should give you some indication of what they might be working on, but it’ll probably mostly be bug fixes, balance changes and upgrading servers to handle increased loads. I do have to note that the balance is surprisingly good right now, with no race having a clear advantage over any other. This should be a great reassurance for those of you who’ve played WarCraft 3, which wasn’t anywhere near this well balanced at launch.
StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty should appear on store shelves on July 27th and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to push the release date back at this point. There are a number of missing Battle.net features, but otherwise the multiplayer experience stands head-and-shoulder above any recent real-time strategy game, even Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising. It may lack any form of innovation, but the underlying gameplay is so good that it’s not an issue and you just find yourself enjoying this polished traditional RTS experience anyway.
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