In brief: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will turn 10 years old next week. To commemorate the occasion, Blizzard is publicly testing an anniversary update that introduces a handful of new features and further irons out some bugs.
Its predecessor, the original StarCraft from 1998, has been labeled as one of the greatest and most important video games ever. Understandably, fans and critics were skeptical when the sequel dropped on July 27, 2010, especially after its rocky start which prompted Blizzard to overhaul the project early on in its development.
Remarkably, Blizzard managed to deliver.
StarCraft II launched to critical acclaim, amassing a favorable score of 93 on Metacritic alongside a user score of 8.3 (for comparison, the first game earned an aggregate score of 88 and a user score of 91). Over the past decade, Blizzard launched three expansion packs - Heart of the Swarm, Legacy of the Void and Nova Covert Ops, all of which added meaningful content to the base game.
In 2017, Blizzard made StarCraft II free for all.
The anniversary update includes the largest number of editor changes ever introduced as well as a new genre called Campaign for Arcade maps, support for transitioning a multiplayer lobby between two maps, new campaign achievements, a commander prestige system and more.
Full details on the update can be found over on Blizzard's website and if you want to learn more about the editor update, be sure to check out this post.