New Starcraft Patch!

February 4th, 2009

Blizzard still supporting StarCraft 1 in the wake of the sequel, StarCraft 2 beta coming

Blizzard has always had a knack for surprising me. Diablo 2’s expansion made Diablo 2 so much better, the popularity and continual expansion of World of Warcraft, their merger with Activision, and the list goes on. Every time you think you know what those crafty designers are up to, they do something that’s almost completely left field.

The latest surprise is another StarCraft 1 patch. A patch for a game that’s 11 years old. It’s unheard of and I can’t think of any examples other than the updating of Counter-Strike 1.6 server hosts for tournament play. Patch 1.16.1 was released January 22nd, changing some technical aspects rather than balancing changes (for the changelog, see the end of the post).

The reason there were no balancing changes is because StarCraft is widely perceived to be the most balanced RTS ever. Three completely different races, all balanced equally, is part of the StarCraft legacy. That probably explains why over 9 million copies were sold worldwide, and it’s still actively played at competition level in tournaments like the World Cyber Games.

And by the way, January 19th saw an announcement that the StarCraft 2 beta will be released soon. It is unknown whether it is an open or closed beta, or what constitutes ‘soon’. We will keep you posted.
As promised, the most recent changelog:

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- patch 1.16.1

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Featured Changes

In-game Speed Options menu now has a “Enable CPU Throttling” checkbox.
Enabling this option will allow StarCraft to consume fewer CPU cycles. By
default this option is off.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue with the reply feature where any character followed by a “r ”
was being treated as a reply.
Removed an unnecessary delay when processing palette cycling updates.
Lessened the imposed delay in the CPU Throttling feature.