StarCraft II Beta Is Open for Business

Blizzard announced a few days ago that the beta testing session for its upcoming and long-awaited sequel to the famous StarCraft RTS game was due to open its factory doors and welcome us in sometime this month, but wasn't any more specific than that. And with just over a week left of the month, Blizzard didn't take the time to make another announcement concerning the exact date concerning the main event, and decided to cut straight to the chase, opening up the beta servers just yesterday.

The company has started dishing out invitations to anybody that fits its expectations, not only awarding the lucky ones a first-hand impression of the game itself, but also showing the newly redesigned Battle.net. "Gathering concentrated feedback from our players is an important step for us as we head into the final stretch of development for StarCraft II and the new Battle.net service," the CEO and Co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime, said. "We look forward to having our players' help in polishing the overall experience and preparing for launch."

Blizzard has also released the minimum system requirements for the beta that may, or may not apply to the final release. And, at a first glance, they are more than generous for a 2010 release.

PC Minimum Requirements:

Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/Windows 7;
2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor;
1 GB system RAM/1.5 GB for Vista and Windows 7;
128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card;
1024x768 minimum display resolution;
4 GB free hard space;
Broadband connection.

And while RTS games aren't exactly known for their pretentious requirements, especially as far as graphic cards go, the processor required to power all those units needs to be pretty advanced, and a "2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent" is well below that standard. Now, it's true that these are the Minimum Requirements, meaning that they'll barely get you through the game on its lowest level of visual detail, but it's great to see Blizzard not making outrageous hardware demands, and making StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty available to as many gamers as possible.