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Tech

There's a Fan-Made 'StarCraft' MMO, and Blizzard Isn't Going to Shut It Down

Five-year-old fan made project at last hits open beta, with a full release scheduled for next month.

It's been a fascinating year for Blizzard Entertainment as regards player creations using its properties. Earlier this year the celebrated gamemaker ended up looking like a big, bad bully when it forced the closure of the popular World of Warcraft private server Nostalrius Begins, and there was much gnashing of digital teeth.

Flash forward a couple of months, and now we have the open beta release of StarCraft Universe, a massively multiplayer game using assets from StarCraft II. It's got the "third-person action RPG elements of World of Warcraft, the combat mechanics of Diablo, and the starship mechanics of FTL with the StarCraft setting." And wonder of wonders, even after the Nostalrius fiasco, Blizzard's apparently okay with it. It wasn't always this way. The tale of StarCraft Universe goes way back to 2011, when a group of modders headed by Ryan Winzen announced that they'd made a mod for StarCraft II that turned the real-time strategy game into a MMO kind of like that other game of Blizzard's with orcs and purple elves. Appropriately enough, they even called it World of StarCraft. Blizzard bristled, and within hours YouTube pulled Winzen's videos showing his progress. In the uproar, League of Legends developer Riot even offered Winzen to apply for a position at the studio.

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It all kind of blew over, and Blizzard even gave its blessing to the project after Winzen changed the name and learning that Winzen really did intend for his creation to be a mod and not a separately existing game. They invited him out to the studio, and Winzen followed up with a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013 that reached $84,000.

And now it's finally here in open beta form, with the proper release scheduled for next month and with an Indiegogo campaign to raise more money for maintenance (since Winzen can't actually sell the game proper). It looks, ahem, stellar. Just look at that announcement trailer above—it's the kind of thing Blizzard itself could have made, and it proves they've got the right person heading this. If you want to play, you'll need either StarCraft II installed or the free Starter edition and then download it from this link to the Battle.net shell.

You can check out some of the gameplay below: