Starcraft: One of gaming's best RTS games is now free and scheduled for a 4K remaster

There are barely a handful of iconic real-time-strategy (RTS) franchises left in gaming. The most prominent of those has to be Starcraft, and today, Blizzard announced a remaster. Starcraft has been around since 1998, the same year that Half-Life first appeared on the gaming scene. The original game was all impeccable gameplay and low-resolution 2D sprites with an isometric perspective. 19 years on, Blizzard plans to fix one of the only issues with the game, the aforementioned low-res textures.  

They wasn’t much of an issue to begin with, and I’d argue that they have a certain appeal, but a remaster is a welcome move. The remastered edition of the game will be fully compatible with the existing game and in fact, will be playable in multiplayer. All that’s been updated are the textures and supported resolutions. This means that I can now play my favourite RTS of all time (thought it takes joint first place with Age of Empires) in a 16:9 aspect ratio up to a resolution of 4K. The game’s original textures and sprites will be updated, as will the audio, which has been re-recorded. I will admit that some of the remastered sprites look worse than they original did. They’re a bit too crisp for comfort. This is particularly noticeable in the Terran Battlecruiser and the Protoss Carrier. The low-res sprites left a little to the imagination. The updated textures leave nothing. An advantage of the new textures is that now you can zoom in and out by a large extent. Oh, and we left the best news for last. The original Starcraft game will now be available for free.