When I noticed that Phil Spencer was wearing a StarCraft T-shirt during Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show presentation, for the briefest moment I got excited. I am a naive child. StarCraft 2 is now more than 14 years old, and Blizzard has been largely ignoring its RTS legacy—let’s try to forget about Warcraft 3: Reforged—for a long time. Could that be about to change, I wondered? No. Apparently not.
The T-shirt tease was the setup to a terrible punchline: StarCraft 2 and StarCraft: Remastered are coming to PC Game Pass. So I guess that’s nice for the RTS fans who somehow overlooked two of the genre’s most important games. For the rest of us? Well, it’s a bummer.
To be clear, though, these are absolutely amazing games and they belong in your library. The original StarCraft and StarCraft 2 multiplayer are already free, but StarCraft: Remastered is a worthy update, while the StarCraft 2 campaigns are among the genre’s best, and they’re still absolutely worth experiencing if you missed out.
But by god do we need something new. Before Blizzard got into the live service racket (with the occasional questionable dip into mobile gaming), it was one of the driving forces behind the RTS Golden Age, alongside Westwood Studios. The competition between these titans defined an era of gaming and effectively established the model for the RTS genre.
The genre’s heyday is long behind us now, of course, and while there’s been a resurgence of RTS games, we’re still waiting on the kind of major successes that can propel the genre forward. The Blizzard of today is not the Blizzard that gave us Warcraft and StarCraft, but it does have the resources and ability to attract talent that could give us another genre-defining RTS. If, you know, it tried.
All that said, these games are a welcome addition to PC Game Pass and you should absolutely give them a download when they appear on November 5.
