OrangeSwarm

The closed beta for StarCraft II, after having been postponed several times, launched Wednesday. Several thousand players worldwide (according to developer Blizzard) already started testing the RTS game.

One week ago, Blizzard announced that the beta would start this month, but has now confirmed that the beta has launched. Initially, the beta would have started much earlier, but was postponed because the new functionality of Battle.net was not ready. Blizzard opened the sign-up for the beta as early as May 2009, but had to announce in November that the test would not take place until 2010. The developer had previously stated that the game was postponed to 2010, which led to some unrest among shareholders of parent company Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard has also posted the minimum system requirements for the beta of StarCraft II announced on the support pages. The developer of the new RTS stressed that these specs are liable to change and therefore not definitive. The requirements are modest, according to the specs page that Blizzard has made. A 2.2-GHz processor meets the minimum and the beta requires at least 1GB memory and Windows XP SP3 is played. For Windows 7 and Vista is 1.5 GB.

Blizzard also announced that 4GB of free disk space required will be minimal and that the type of video card GeForce 6600GT or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and that it should be a minimum of 128MB memory is available.

On Wednesday Blizzard announced the closed beta started and thousands of players joined the game on the new Battle.net. A Mac version of the beta software is not available at the start, but will come when the beta progresses are available, as is mentioned in the faq.

The best part about all this is that it wont take long for the beta to leak! Which means its likely that we will soon all be playing!

Well for those that didn’t get into the beta, heres the official cinematic trailer so you can still have a look at the game:

Update: Here are some live streams i found from www.1up.com where they recorded a game played in the Starcraft II beta

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3: