At the close of this year’s Blizzcon, the last StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm tournament was to be a battle between era-defining superstars. For those who follow StarCraft, the final was on the level of a Barcelona vs. Manchester United cup final or an Ali-Frazier duel, where the cold math and ironclad rules of the game gave way to a contest of wills and personality.

Last year's Blizzcon champion—Lee "Life" Seung Hyun—once again managed an unlikely tournament run to make it to the final of the year-long championship, reminding people why he is perhaps the most "clutch" player in StarCraft. He's not necessarily the best player, nor the most strategically insightful or creative—and he's rarely a dominant force in the sport. Other players often spend an entire year owning the competitive circuit with brilliant, innovative play.

But if Life can make it into the bracket stage of a major tournament, when the pressure is at its highest and the crowds are at their largest, clearly his skills are greater than the sum of their parts. With a mixture of daring and unnerving insight into his opponents, Life is a force to be reckoned with in tournaments. This year, he had the chance to become the first back-to-back winner in WCS history, a staggering feat given how long a year is in a StarCraft career.

His opponent, sOs, is cut from a similar cloth. He was Life's immediate predecessor as Blizzcon champion, back in 2013, where he broke the crowd's heart with a victory over the ageing StarCraft and Brood War legend, Jaedong. He's got a knack for winning the big tournaments: his $100,000 (£66,000) Blizzcon victory was followed, a few months later, by another $100,000 victory at the Intel Extreme Masters championship in Katowice, Poland.

The most dangerous thing about sOs is that, while he can play the technically demanding, complex "standard" forms of StarCraft, he has absolutely no scruples about doing less well-regarded, screwball strategies that are high-risk and high-reward. He is as happy winning a tournament looking like a world-class superstar as he is looking like a troll on the lowest ranking public StarCraft servers. Nobody is ever sure what they’re going to get from a meeting with sOs.

Finals like this don’t happen often in competitive gaming—it's too unpredictable, too random. Like professional football, a lot of things have to go right outside of pure performance for players to make it to the final, meaning it's often hard to get evenly matched opponents.

Life vs. sOs was something different, though—and it was something that StarCraft sorely needed.

Lessons learned

StarCraft II is entering its third and final era with the release of Legacy of the Void, an expansion that brings (mostly) to a close the saga that began back in 1998. Since StarCraft II came out in 2010, the game has had some significant ups and downs. The first StarCraft II game, Wings of Liberty, combined with the rise of cheap, high-quality streaming services to create a breakthrough moment for e-sports. For a moment, it seemed like StarCraft would be the competitive game to define an era.

This was not to be. StarCraft II was swiftly overtaken in popularity by free-to-play MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2—which was made all the worse by the release of Heart of the Swarm, the first SC2 expansion pack. While there were issues that bothered fans in the original version of StarCraft II, Heart of the Swarm introduced a number of new units that had the effect of making the game boring and frustrating to players and spectators.

From 2013 into early 2015, StarCraft II became a shadow of its former self. Legacy of the Void was on the way, but would anyone still care? Last year, when the game was playable on the show floor of Blizzcon, dozens of PC terminals sat empty, even at the height of the show. There were no lines and no interest from an audience that had moved on to games like Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. StarCraft was a relic from a bygone age of PC gaming. Until the final day of the World Championship Series (WCS) 2014 tournament, the arena was half-empty, the best players in the world competing in front of a listless crowd.

StarCraft II has one final chance to make a good impression, to remind people what was so exciting about it when it emerged on the scene in 2010. Heart of the Swarm was eventually fixed, though perhaps too late to salvage its reputation amongst fans. That was the big question heading into Blizzcon, ahead of the release of Legacy of the Void: was it already too late for StarCraft?