As one of the best real-time strategy games of all time, StarCraft 2 is far from dead, but 2020 marked the end of content development for Legacy of the Void and the base free multiplayer experience. Since then, a few more balance patches have hit, but it’s been a few years since the last major shakeup. Now, Blizzard Entertainment has surprised everyone with a shocking update.
StarCraft 2’s update 5.0.16 is now live through the Public Test Realm, focusing “on extending the early and mid-game experience, allowing players to remain competitive on one to three bases for longer periods” while also improving “overall strategic diversity across all three races”, according to the official patch notes. The Protoss’ Warpgate has been largely redesigned as well, which raises a number of questions when it comes to high-level, late-game plays.
The meta-shaking shocker comes with a severe reduction of the starting workers count, from 12 to eight. Large and small mineral patches have also seen their total resource counts reduced and increased respectively, with vespene geysers being altered too. There’s a decently sized pass to certain units as well, enabling new early and mid-game strategies, and scrapping the Legacy of the Void build orders pro players had perfect for years.
“Welp, there I go relearning all my build orders from scratch,” one user said on Reddit. “Woah, completely revamped Warpgate. That is a fundamental change to Protoss,” another one added before trying to figure out other changes. Overall, the community sentiment seems positive even if not every change in the updates sticks and it’ll take some proper online testing to see how the RTS flows now. Some players are even jokingly calling this patch StarCraft 3.
It’s unclear when this patch will leave the PTR and go into the main branch of SC2, but it’s not the only source of movement surrounding the StarCraft franchise in recent times. Nexon might have teamed up with Blizzard to develop a shooter based on the IP, and a few years ago, we also heard about former Far Cry executive producer Dan Hay working on a StarCraft shooter which may or may not be the same project.
