Is Blizzard Bringing “Spawn” Feature to StarCraft 2?

by JR Cook - 7 years ago

While messing around in StarCraft 2 earlier tonight and looking over my achievements, I noticed something a little peculiar in my Feat of Strength Achievements. Click the image below for a larger version.

You’ll notice an achievement there I have not yet received that is called Spawning Pool Party: Play a game of StarCraft II while in a party containing Spawned players.

Whoa.. spawned players? Where I have I heard this term before in StarCraft? Oh, that’s right – back in the original StarCraft game when you installed the game you could choose to install a “spawned copy” of the game on a machine. This would only allow that computer to play multiplayer via LAN. This was a great way to play during LAN parties (remember those?) back in the day. You basically brought over your disk and installed the spawned copy on all your friends’ machines and you could all play together in StarCraft.

So is Blizzard bringing back the idea of installing a spawn copy for your friends? Well, this is no longer 1998 and we don’t use CDs anymore to install our games – but is this Blizzard’s response toward making StarCraft 2 somewhat Free to Play through some kind of friend referral system? Imagine this – I’m sitting at home wanting to play Heart of the Swarm in multiplayer against the AI and wish my friend would be able to come join me. Problem is, he doesn’t own the game and doesn’t want to buy it just on a whim because I was in the mood to play it. Well, I’m able to send him a referral code for a “spawned” copy and now he’s able to play Multiplayer games when he’s partied with me without having to pay a dime. If he wants to access the single player campaign or even be able to play Multiplayer on the ladder by himself he’ll have to go out and buy the full version.

Now, I’m not sure if that is Blizzard’s plan or not as nothing about this has even been announced yet. But I would imagine that my idea above is very close to what this “Spawning Players” would mean. I would have loved to have had this last week when I ended up buying my buddy a copy of Heart of the Swarm just because I wanted a playing partner in multiplayer last weekend.

So what do you think the achievement is possibly linked to? Am I off base? I’d like to hear what people’s thoughts are in the comments.

EDIT: Something that was pointed out on r/starcraft is the artwork for the achievement is from the popular Carbot Animations series StarCrafts. If you haven’t seen StarCrafts let me introduce you to their first episode and then you should immediately go to their YouTube channel, subscribe, and watch more. The image used in the achievement is the StarCrafts Zealot.

EDIT #2: It appears that something indeed is in the works and we will probably hear about it Tuesday. StarCrafts is making a big announcement this week and I imagine that it is related to this.