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   We feel terribly sorry for those who were hoping that Blizzard would announce a World of Lost Vikings MMO today, but the game confirmed after years and years of very plausible rumours, is StarCraft II. The fans' enduring patience was eventually rewarded in full, as this morning's actual announcement also brought the first sets of screenshots, artworks, wallpapers and, yes, trailers. Two of them even! A cinematic trailer and one showing gameplay footage among various artworks.

   The grand official revelation was made at the 2007 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea, in recognition of the most hardcore community of fans and professional players who made a career out of StarCraft. It's no wonder therefore that the future StarCraft II promises to be the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game, returning with a fast-paced multiplayer over the Battle.net service (in an upgraded version), thoroughly balanced and pitting against each other the same three races we got used to for nearly a decade: Protoss, Terran and Zerg.

   That's not to say the single-player component will be overlooked: far from it! There will of course be a solid campaign for those who would rather enjoy the game offline, but at least for the time being "the blues" aren't in any rush to talk about the story in StarCraft II. However, you might spot some clues in the aforementioned trailers... particularly at the end of one of them...

   Among the novelties revealed today on the freshly opened official website StarCraft2.com are some new Protoss units, and a similarly refreshing treatment will also be applied to the other two races. Even some of the classic units, says Blizzard, are being trained some new abilities, and the gameplay mechanics will be tinkered with accordingly. The most obvious change, however, is the new 3D graphics engine, compatible with DirectX 10 and integrating the Havok physics system, and ready to show some huge armies not only from a unit-count standpoint, but even some of the units will be pretty huge themselves.

   Finally, StarCraft II will be accompanied by the powerful editor currently used by Blizzard, with a launch planned simultaneously for the PC and Mac (no consoles in sight so far). All's well and dandy, but instead of finishing their announcement with at least a vague release date, Blizzard left us hanging with an unfulfilled curiosity, simply inviting us to wait a few more months...

P.S. There's another gameplay trailer coming tomorrow!

UPDATE: "Tomorrow" actually turned into "Monday", but either way, it's here: the new StarCraft II gameplay trailer, showing over 20 minutes of Protoss-centric strategic action! This is the same demo shown at the event is Seoul. [21.05.2007, 17:20]