If you’ve ever checked out your pet in Diablo III and thought “it’s a shame that’s not a miniature version of a high-tech flying battleship”, then I’ve received some excellent news. To have fun the 20th anniversary of StarCraft‘s launch, Blizzard are giving out some free bits and bobs for StarCraft: Remastered, StarCraft II, Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone. You play not less than a kind of video games, proper?
I discover one thing undeniably icky in regards to the phrase “cross-franchise celebration”, regardless of having no actual objections to what it entails. Maybe it’s simply that in no matter context it crops up, I can’t assist however recoil on the f-word.
Ok, I’ve un-recoiled – let’s see what we have now right here. Stacraft: Remastered and StarCraft II are receiving retro UI skins, together with some new participant profile portraits for the latter. Those will each develop into out there tomorrow, as will a Sarah Kerrigan Ghost pores and skin for Overwatch’s Widowmaker and a delightfully incongruous Battlecruiser pet for Diablo III.
On March 21st you will get three Kobold and Catacombs card packs for Hearthstone. Then on March 27th, in case your insatiable urge for food for traditional StarCraft participant profile portraits hasn’t been appeased, you will get a few of these for Heroes of the Storm. Finally from March 31st, in case you can monitor down one of many StarCraft pets that exist already in WoW and salute it, you’ll get a kind of fancy “Feat of Strength” achievements. You can get the entire different rewards simply by booting up the related recreation.
You’ll even have to attend till March 31st for a documentury known as “StarCraft is Life: A Celebration”, during which “some of StarCraft’s biggest fans look back on their favorite memories from the past 20 years.”
Perhaps of extra curiosity than the freebies is the flurry of articles that Blizzard have featured as a part of their anniversary celebrations. There are interviews with esports types and developers, however the headline that caught my eye was “Checking in with the DeepMind StarCraft II team“. DeepMind is Google’s ongoing try to construct a man-made common intelligence – an AI that may train itself to perform nearly any advanced process. DeepMind made headlines final yr when their “Alpha Go” AI beat famend Go champion Lee Sedol, although researcher Oriol Vinyals is much less assured about DeepMind’s possibilities towards prime StarCraft gamers.
“What I like about our strategy is that, if all of it works out, the agent has discovered a really giant number of ways and counters that couldn’t presumably be programmed, in the identical approach you couldn’t program an excellent Go participant.
In phrases of beating the easiest — I don’t know. That’s to be seen. I can not predict whether or not we can beat them or not.”
I reckon he’s simply being modest.
