StarCraft 2 Beta Closing In (Again)?

Talk of StarCraft 2 beta starting has emerged once again; Will Blizzard abandon the plans and delay once more, or is this the real deal?

Blizzard started preparations for a StarCraft 2 beta back in March, last year and these preparations coincided with a couple of beta hoaxes made by impatient fans. The beta was likely planned to start around this time and we had reliable reports of this beta preparation, but it was postponed. The reason was likely Battle.net development.

Shortly after this, Blizzard confirmed “Summer 2009” as start date of the closed beta testing and there was another bout of preparations following that. Unfortunately, with the decision to completely redo Battle.net, StarCraft II was delayed to 2010 and at the time it seemed very likely the beta would be too. By the end of the summer, the beta had officially been pushed over into the next decade.

This third round of beta preparations might be more fruitful, considering the Battle.net team has had plenty of time to prepare Battle.net 2.0. For the last several months, the SC2 team has been almost completely silent, but over the past two weeks there has been a lot of unusual activity. Each of these little nuggets on their own are insignificant, but they create an interesting whole:

We have had lore and gameplay updates on the Mothership unit, new development updates on smaller details such as map details, the investor’s conference call was announced, more language versions were also announced, GDC discussion panel announced, a new Community Manager introduced (including some social banter), the StarCraft II beta support site sneakily updated, pro-gamers signing up to the beta, an avalanche of updates from the Community Managers, both useful and regular forum tidying, as well as that a variety of StarCraft sites have received requests to submit lists of staff for beta keys.

Just counting yesterday and today, we have seen a (fake?) shot of the StarCraft 2 team celebrating the start of beta and more importantly; a very unusual Wednesday maintenance of both the World of Warcraft forums as well as Battle.net. Could the inter-game friends lists of Battle.net be implemented as we speak?

To top this relatively speculating news item off, we have also been in contact with Blizzard, who might or might not have hinted that we have some exciting months ahead…

Make sure you check back for more news as IncGamers most likely will be giving away StarCraft 2 Beta keys around the time the beta starts.