by JR Cook - 11 years ago     show comments

This weekend I made a post speculating about a little achievement I found while browsing the feat of strength achievements in StarCraft II titled “Spawning Pool Party”. In the article I was speculating that this would bring back the old “spawned” copies that were used on the original StarCraft cds for the original game. For those unfamiliar with how spawning worked I described it a bit in the article I linked to but it was basically a way to allow your friends to play StarCraft with you even if they didn’t own a copy of the game.

Well, turns out my speculation was pretty much spot on. Today Blizzard has announced that spawning has come to StarCraft II. All you have to do is go download the starter edition of the game and you’ll be able to join your friends in the following ways:

• All Vs. A.I. Modes including team games
• Ranked and Unranked Team Ladder Matches
• All Custom Game Maps
• Complete Arcade Access

All you have to do is join a party with a friend that owns the full version of the game to play.

One of the things that needs to be pointed out there that I think is unfortunate is Starter Edition players will still only be able to play the starter edition race – which at this time is Terran. So this means even though you’ll be able to play with your friends you won’t have access to the Protoss or Zerg race to play. I think that kind of sucks and I hope that Blizzard will lift that limitation in the future, but it’s probably a way for Blizzard to entice you to go ahead and buy the full version of the game so that you get access to all 3 races plus the single player campaign.

EDIT: Blizzard has made it so for a limited time you can play as all 3 races with the starter edition. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t stay limited!

StarCrafts Animation

You can check out more information on Spawning and what you can and can’t do on the official blog post.

Many old-school RTS players remember what it was like to use one game disc to spawn in a second player. Back in the heyday of Warcraft II and the original StarCraft, you could bring a player (who didn’t yet own the game) into your game and play together. We called it Spawning, and we’re pleased to announce that Spawning is now available in StarCraft II.

Nowadays, anyone who hasn’t yet purchased StarCraft II can still play, thanks to the Starter Edition. While Starter Edition players have access to much of the game, there are many features that they previously couldn’t try before upgrading to the full game. Spawning closes that gap. Any player at a lower expansion level who joins a party that includes a player at a higher expansion level is Spawned up, and gets to play using the features and options of the highest expansion level for as long as they’re in a party together.

For example, when a Starter Edition player joins a party with a Wings of Liberty–level player, both are instantly playing Wings of Liberty. When those two players then join a party with a Heart of the Swarm-level player, they all immediately gain access to Heart of the Swarm content, and they keep that access until their party no longer includes any higher-expansion level players.

Community Manager Cloaken has a first look at Spawning for you right here:

To celebrate this new feature, we’ve added a new Achievement and Portrait to the game. To earn them, all you need to do is spawn someone into higher access in-game, or be spawned yourself.

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