StarCraft II Online Overview

Excited for the launch of StarCraft II? In case you weren't in the beta, which just recently wrapped up after roughly five months of on and off operation , here's a brief overview of what to expect in terms of online structure and content. Please keep in mind this is only for the multiplayer portion of the game, as we're all still waiting to dig into the single-player campaign once the game launches. For more on that aspect, check out our previous StarCraft II coverage. And if you don't know anything about this franchise at all, be sure to check out our StarCraft for Everyone article to get caught up.

In case you haven't been following this game, Blizzard previously announced that the story of StarCraft II is to be split into three parts. The first, called Wings of Liberty, concentrates on the Terran storyline, while subsequent releases will focus on the Protoss and Zerg stories. This upset people initially because the original StarCraft and its Brood War expansion both came with storylines from the perspectives of all three races instead of just one. That being said, you will get to play as all three races in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty's multiplayer component.

While playing on the new version of battle.net you don't pick games from a server list without any prior knowledge of whether you're going to get your head caved in or not by some elite player. Instead, when you start the game up and go to play online, you're first prompted to play some practice matches juts to get your bearings. Once you're through there it's time to play through a number of placement matches against others that'll determine which league you get dumped into. It could be bronze, silver, or gold, or others depending on your skill level, and these separations are meant to keep large groups of players of relatively the same skill level in the same area so, theoretically, you'll be playing against someone of roughly similar talent as yourself.

Within each game type (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4) you can be ranked within your division (a further separation of players within each league). Since this is all automated, it gives you an easy way to check your competitive progress against the community at large while also affording you the opportunity to continue to compete against others for fun. You can also see your friends on your list as they're ranked as well. In team games, you're given different rankings depending on who you're playing with, and all your stats are then tracked and viewable in your profile.

If you don't want to play against humans, you can play team up with real players against AI opponents, or can just make a game with all AI of very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard, and insane difficulty levels. What particularly nice here is you can also play on user generated maps, of which there were already many in the beta. These can include entirely different game modes and mechanics as determined by the active community, such as tower defense games and using hero units, in addition to mode-specific maps. It's something longtime PC gamers are quite used to, but also something newcomers to the genre brought in by the StarCraft name might not necessarily know to look for.

The replay feature is another great addition since games on battle.net are automatically logged in your recently played list and you can save them however you like. The replay functionality is particularly impressive. You can play a match at regular speed or fast forward. Once the entire replay has played through once, you're then free to jump around anywhere in the replay to see something play over. This really helps out with figuring out what went wrong if you lost, or to study other players' behavior, learn from it, and better your own game. You can view the match from any perspective to see your opponents' behavior, and can track a wide range of statistics from resources, to spending, to even actions per minute as a match continues on.

Tied to your profile are quite a few achievements similar to the ones you get in WoW. You get these for winning a certain amount of games in custom, cooperative, and ranked matches, and can unlock special character portraits you can use for your character profile. You can also customize your profile to show off achievements to others who come across your stats while picking through the ladder rankings. There are campaign achievements too, but as of the beta's closing time they weren't viewable. To build a friends list, you can add those you come across in battle.net, add anyone you know their battle.net account name, or scan your facebook friends list for people who are signed up to play.

Those are the basic elements of what to expect from the online interface, so what do you think? Will you be picking this one up on July 27th?