14 DAY TRIAL // Starcraft II is set to be one of the biggest games of 2008. With the original game still getting regular multiplayer play from a whole lot of people, and with South Korea close to declaring Starcraft a national sport, everyone is keeping an eye out for news regarding the sequel, which Blizzard has in development and should release sometime in the fall.
Reports have surfaced yesterday that a game magazine called Micromania has the full list of hardware requirements for the game, as leaked by someone inside Blizzard. The supposedly official requirements were: Pentium 4 processor, with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce 7/8 Series or Radeon 1000/2000 with at least 256 MB RAM as the minimum required to run the game. Optimal gameplay would require more in the way of hardware, with a Core 2 Duo or an Athlon X2 with 2 GB of RAM and either a GeForce 8000 or a Radeon 2000 series video card with at least 512 MB RAM.
A set of optimal requirements was also provided, mentioning a Core 2 Duo 3 GHz or Athlon X2 processor with 2 GB of Dual Channel RAM and a Geforce 9000 or Radeon 3000 video card. The requirements seemed pretty steep for a real time strategy game that did look polished, but was not spectacular.
However, it looks like it was nothing but a hoax, as Blizzard has declared to Computer and Videogames that: "We have not made an official announcement on the system requirements for StarCraft II at this stage, as they are still being finalized. The magazine in question was printing its own speculation." The only thing Blizzard is saying regarding hardware specifications is that Pixel Shader 2.0 is required by the game.
It would have been nice if, along with that rebuttal, Blizzard had offered at least some information regarding the computer power needed to make their game look good on a PC. After all, some of us might need to do some upgrading and it's best to start out early.