While StarCraft 2’s storyline has been officially concluded, it doesn’t look like Blizzard is quite done with the game just yet. The company has announced that in the next major patch for the game, they will be introducing paid, premium maps that players will be able to check out via the Arcade feature in the game.
According to Blizzard’s announcement, “With the launch of StarCraft II patch 4.3.0, we’ll be introducing two new Arcade maps made by prominent community creators with whom we’ve been working over the last year. These two high-quality premium Arcade maps each offer different kinds of experiences—and when you purchase them, a share of the sales will go directly to the developers who made them.”
For those unfamiliar, one of the features of many RTS games back in the day like Red Alert, Command & Conquer, StarCraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, and so on is that they usually came bundled with map editors. This allowed players to create maps that they could then upload online for other players to download and play. Warcraft 3 was particularly successful in this regard where it managed to spawn various custom games, most notable is DotA which led to Valve launching DotA 2.
Blizzard had actually announced their plans for premium maps back in 2009, but it is only now that it is being implemented. It will be interesting to see where this effort leads map creators and players. Could it result in StarCraft 2 seeing a resurgence in players? We guess we’ll have to find out, but in the meantime you can check out the trailers of the upcoming premium maps in the videos above and below.
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