StarCraft II turns 10 years old and gets a new patch

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To celebrate StarCraft II's 10th anniversary, Blizzard has released Patch 5.0 for testing in the PTR.

StarCraft II
StarCraft II (Image credit: Blizzard)

What you need to know

  • StarCraft II is a real-time strategy (RTS) game developed by Blizzard Entertainment.
  • Patch 5.0, currently available in the Public Test Realm (PTR), will eventually be pushed live.
  • The update includes a revamped editor, changes to custom campaigns, new achievements, and prestige talents for co-op commanders.
  • The update also includes a number of big fixes.

StarCraft II, the sequel to the insanely popular original StarCraft, was released July 27, 2010 and is still being played by hundreds of thousands of people today. To celebrate the 10th anniversary, developer Blizzard has injected Patch 5.0 into the PTR for testing. This patch will eventually go live in the full game once any kinks have been ironed out.

The patch notes are quite lengthy (the previous full Patch 4.0 was released November 2017), with some juicy tidbits surrounding the Galaxy Map Editor, campaign achievements, and some new co-op commander prestige talents for anyone replaying levels.

Notably, the editor has been improved to make it easier to use, and a new Arcade genre has been added. From the press release:

A new Arcade map genre will be added to open up the editor for more stories and creative campaigns: Campaign!

  • Creating custom campaigns will be a much smoother experience and will now support map-to-map loading.
  • Many previously offline-only campaigns will now be accessible through the StarCraft II Arcade.
  • Players will also be able to introduce co-op custom campaigns in addition to their single-player experiences.

If you haven't replayed StarCraft II's campaign enough already, new achievements are on the way for every mission, as well as an achievement for collecting all new achievements. As for co-op missions, there's a new prestige system with new talents for co-op commanders. From Blizzard:

Players can now replay the level 1-15 progression for each maxed-out commander up to three times, and earn a new Prestige Talent each time it's completed – opening tons of new gameplay options and strategic decisions.

Along with gameplay additions and improvements, Blizzard has cooked up a number of bug fixes for co-op, versus, and editor modes. You can check out the full official patch notes at Blizzard.

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Cale Hunt
Cale Hunt
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Cale Hunt brings to Windows Central more than eight years of experience writing about laptops, PCs, accessories, games, and beyond. If it runs Windows or in some way complements the hardware, there’s a good chance he knows about it, has written about it, or is already busy testing it.