StarCraft Remastered Pricing and Details Announced

If you have fond memories of playing StarCraft back in the day, you are probably interested in the StarCraft Remastered game that is being developed at Blizzard. You may also be wondering just how “remastered” the game will be. Blizzard talked with ArsTechnica about what exactly they are doing with the game.

According to Blizzard Games Producer Pete Stilwell he and his team are trying to “Blend classic with modern.” The team is also on a mandate stipulating “Don’t be Disruptive” which according to Stilwell means “Don’t f*ck it up.” Stilwell says that he and his team plan to preserve the original game systems and mechanics at all costs, so don’t expect any changes to gameplay.

StarCraft Remastered will sell for $14.99 and the game aims to play, feel, and in some areas look just like the 1998 original version of StarCraft. The game will launch on August 14 on PC and Mac. The game aims to be demonstrably better than the original game with a few changes in the mix.

The challenge in delivering the game was that Blizzard had no code and no art assets. The entire art assets used in the remastered game was “eyeballed.” Blizzard did have some of the code it needed, they had been issuing patches for the game for almost two decades. One bright spot was the sound, the team did have backups of the original sound and voice recordings for the game.

In StarCraft Remastered, the sounds will be processed in 44,100Hz format. To preserve the feel of the original the team actually had to make some mistakes in their art such as putting shadows in the wrong place and making lighting different across the board. When the game was originally made things were much less advanced graphically and 3D modeling was in its infancy.

One cool tidbit with StarCraft Remastered is that it will have a “make game look old” button that turns the graphics back to the original on the fly at any point in the game. Players will also be able to toggle a combination of real-time lighting and environmental effects on and off at will. This game should be cool and players who blew lots of time on the original will want to grab it on August 14.